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.

After a brief and informative argument with some entrenched users at Plime about blogging, self-promotion and rehashing (and plagiarism), I determined that they weren't really against bloggers at all. Even bloggers that self-promote. What they're really against is something I totally agree with them on: Posting solely to attract traffic and make money with Google Adsense (and other advertisers) without participating in any other way.While I'm very new to Plime, I enjoy reading, commenting and voting there much more than digg, reddit or any other social news sites. The users there don't vote you down just because they don't like what you post unless all you ever post is the stuff I mentioned above. If you're guilty, be prepared to be down-voted on a regular basis, if not blocked or banned altogether.

The advice I'm giving you here applies to Plime to be sure, but it also applies to the rest of the social news sites:

• Your content must be original and informative. The exception is when the original material is no longer easily found by standard searches. Still, you're much better off pointing to the original website instead of your own blog.
• Your content needs to be more than two paragraphs long. When there's more advertising in your blog post than there is content, it's really not worthy of submission. Why don't you save those words for another posting so that when you do submit, you have a lot more material?
• Do not submit plagiarized content or content copied directly from another blog, with or without attribution. Submit the original blog post instead, if it's that good. Plagiarizing and copying can get you in serious trouble, and your status on Plime will be the least of your problems.

Just so you know, I'm not picking on bloggers (I'm a blogger!). Rather, I'm picking on everyone who doesn't do what they should because other, non-bloggers are also guilty. They're just not as visible as we are and don't stand out so much.

I recommend you read Social Bookmarking Traffic Results. The part really stands out and applies to all of us is that social bookmarking to generate traffic does work as long as you are providing genuine, useful, good quality material. If you post self promotional spam no one will read it and it will disappear into the ether where all spam belongs.

Even if you follow all of my advice, you're still going to run into those users who hate blogs, for whatever reason, and absolutely abhor self-promoting bloggers. They are the minority, I assure you. In fact, I'm posting this on Plime and I'm absolutely positive I'll get flak over it. It will be a miracle if I do not. I'll add the link on Plime to this post, after it's posted, so that you can follow along in the comments.

The Plime link is here: http://www.plime.com/l/12122/1/

Yes, I have indeed read Should rehash news blogs that don't link their news source be allowed on Plime and the forum comments following it.

I am not debating your issues with blogs that purport to report the news without revealing their sources. I agree with you on that. I do not agree with you on this:

"An ad-covered blog has what amounts to non-content (i.e. a few short paragraphs of text that doesn't say anything that interesting at all and were obviously only posted here to earn the poster traffic/ad revenue)."

How do you determine what's interesting for everyone else? Where do you think you are, Slashdot? Also, what do you consider ad-covered? Have any of you ever heard of Adblock or Adblock Plus?

This sentence, "I think personal character should prevent people linking to their own stuff.", is obviously made by a person with no experience in professional writing. When an author writes a book, who do you think the first one to promote it is? The author, of course. How else is it going to be published?

Search engines can take weeks to properly index any website, even longer for new blogs. There's no shame in getting their information out in front of as many eyes as possible. If the information is poor, user moderation will take care of it quickly. Whether their purpose for linking the information is for self-gain is irrelevant. Are you trying to tell me that you don't gain anything from participating on Plime? If you are, you're lying.

Some of you seem to think that Plime is a news aggregator. It is not. It's a social website of which news is only one facet. Opinion pieces will and should be linked, along with other types of content. This is why Plime was designed with user moderation in mind.

While you have a right to your opinions about any of this is not debatable. Your opinions, however, do not give you the right to determine what's suitable for Plime. Whether you know it or not, blogging IS replacing traditional news services and it's happening rather quickly. The fact that blog owners, authors, and supporters are putting advertising on their websites should have absolutely no bearing on whether a posting is a suitable topic.

I feel insulted by the action of a mere one or two users. My post, Do You Like Spam?, concerning email forwards is indeed more relevant today than it was five years ago. More than 80 percent of email is spam (statistics have already been published elsewhere). The spammers get email addresses from people who do NOT know the facts that I provided. I'm sorry that I could not stretch the post to make it look like there was more substance.