Are you a blogger? Are you a blogger that monetizes your website with Google AdSense or other services? Have you tried submitting a blog article to digg, reddit, Propeller (updated link), Plime and other social news networks? Were your results negative in almost every way? If you haven't tried one of these services, do you plan to?

There's a nasty group of individuals at each of them who seem to think that it's their solemn duty to vote your submission down. Some will even harass you about it. Some of these individuals belong to another group, a group that votes each other's submissions up, no matter how lame they are.

These hidden agendas are invisible to the casual observer. Having been on both sides of the fence, so to speak, I'm here to tell you that ALL of these services have the same serious problem. The service owners can't or won't police their top users. Sure, you'll hear about it on digg once in awhile, but it's mostly just clueless pandering to the general public.

The site nazis aren't all to blame, however. I can see where a lot of them are coming from. There are bloggers that are nothing more than spammers that continue to strafe these sites with useless, rehashed, and stolen material, all in the name of the mighty buck. You've seen them, I've seen them, we've all seen them. We hate them as much as the site nazis do. They make the "real" bloggers look bad and the real bloggers tend to get lumped in with them.

Real bloggers are not immune to making mistakes that make them look like spammers. One of the mistakes is what the folks at reddit call "linkjacking". There's nothing wrong with writing a blog post and including a picture, a video, or text in fair use amounts. The mistake is in submitting such a post to one or more of the social news sites. Raise your hand if you're guilty. My hand is raised.

What I wrote in the post, Advice for Bloggers Posting to Plime, applies to all of the sites in question. You can follow my advice, or you can ignore it, but not all of MY posts get voted down and I have NEVER been banned from any of them.

The biggest problem that legitimate bloggers face is the initial reaction from the site nazis. New bloggers or old, you feel like you're being singled out. Some of you take it personally. If you've already been attacked by the killer mutant social news site nazis, and have come away with a bad taste in your mouth, I have the solution to your problem. I can't publish it here, in the open, because the site nazis will spot it and will subsequently single you out every time they see you. The solution is legitimate, but the site nazis won't see it that way.

You need to send me email. Use the contact form for the initial communication and you'll get my direct email address after that. I need to know what you submitted (give me exact URLs), where you submitted it, and what kind of reaction you received. I also need all of the user names you've used in the past and the user names you use now. I need this information to weed out the sploggers (spam bloggers and nope, I didn't coin it). I'm not going to help sploggers in any way, shape, or form.

Before I close out this article, I'm going to take the time to define a splogger versus a blogger:

Blogger: Writes original material.
Splogger: Steals original material. Stealing is such a harsh word. Infringes on copyrights is more appropriate.

Blogger: Uses advertising conservatively.
Splogger: Splashes advertising abundantly.

Blogger: Writes more than two paragraphs in an article.
Splogger: Writes less than three paragraphs in an article, and usually the writing is taken from somewhere else.

Blogger: Self-promotes some of the time or promotes someone else.
Splogger: Self-promotes all of the time and never promotes anyone else.

Blogger: Participates in the social news site discussions.
Splogger: Submits and runs.

Blogger: Submits one or two articles a day, at the most.
Splogger: Submits several in bursts, just like spam email.

I could go on, but you can see the difference already.

Edit: I don't want to give the wrong impression about Plime, although it's lumped in with the rest at the beginning. It's a relatively new site and doesn't have the site nazis… yet.