"Freedom? Freedom? That is a worship word. Yang worship. You will not speak it." Okay, okay, ignore the obvious geek reference to "The Omega Glory" episode of the original Star Trek, a cult TV series that ended in 1969. Yes, I'm old enough to have watched it the first time it was aired. So sue me.
Are you one of the many bloggers that never takes advantage of tools that are freely made available to you, in order to promote your blog articles? If you are, feel free to slap yourself around.
"BloggingZoom", which hasn't been around for very long, was designed with you in mind. Yes, you! While other social websites frown on self-submissions (and may even ban you), the founders of BloggingZoom encourage it. Who's the better judge of an article you wrote, you or someone else? Who makes the determination that your article is "zoom-worthy"?
Every time I go to BloggingZoom, I see pretty much the same bloggers submitting their articles (duh, including me). The amount of people using this free service is minuscule compared to the amount of bloggers there are out there. Why are you allowing us to hog all the glory?
By using BloggingZoom, you not only gain visitors (some will convert to regular visitors), but every single post submitted will appear on search engines and point back to the original post. That's a free backlink, baby! Anyone who doesn't want free backlinks, raise your hand. Ha! I thought so.
Do you want to make your blog more popular? Use this free service to your advantage. You know you want to, so just do it!
Before I get into the details of why, please read the instructions.
It's quite simple really. You may be here for another reason or you may be here specifically for this reason. Either way it doesn't matter. Leave a comment for this post with the page you would like to have stumbled and I'll do it as soon as I possibly can. I will normally write a StumbleUpon review for pages that I stumble this way, unless there's already a ton of reviews for it and I have nothing that I can add. It's rare, but it happens. You are NOT required to do anything in reciprocation. Nothing at all!
(I will also stumble your page if you send it to me through the StumbleUpon toolbar or send me a message.)
Please note that I will NOT stumble a sponsored post (I do not want to be responsible for someone flagging your post as spam) or any page that I find personally offensive.
(I'll be placing the link to this article on the right sidebar this afternoon. Read below to find out why.)
***
And now for the why:
When I woke up this morning, I had an epiphany. To understand it, you have to know what I did in the past few months. I originally wrote two articles, Comment for a Digg and Comment for a Stumble, near the end of the May. The stumble article was definitely more popular. The popularity of it waned during June but not because of the article itself. I was bedridden and had difficulty keeping up. My regular readers knew about it because I wrote about it periodically.
A few days ago, I pulled the links from my sidebar that made it easy to find the articles in question and I wrote about it in Links to Comment for a Digg or a Stumble Removed from the Sidebar. That was partly in response to other articles I read about reciprocal obligations or perceived obligations. I wrote that using the StumbleUpon toolbar was more effective and had written pretty much the same thing in the previous StumbleUpon – A Blog Author’s Best Friend (For Now).
The revelation that struck me is that I was completely wrong in my recent actions. There are "stumble clubs" (of which one I belong to but rarely visit) that do the same thing except that the members are obligated to stumble everyone else in the club in reciprocation for having their page stumbled. It can be time-consuming and you can end up stumbling things you don't agree with, just for the sake of fulfilling your obligation.
Commenting here for a stumble incurs no obligation. If you feel obligated in some way, you can go ahead and do whatever you want — you can stumble one of my pages, add me to your Technorati favorites, add me to your feed reader, or link to my blog or a blog article in some way. The key is: You are not obligated to do so!
Leaving a comment for a stumble does two things. First, it provides me with a link to a page I might never go to otherwise and second, it provides a link to other readers that may be interested in your page. You can't do that with the StumbleUpon toolbar. If you have time on your hands, I recommend that you do something like this on your own blog (if you have one). I call this social networking without the networking infrastructure. It's more flexible and doesn't require a middleman to administer it.
Similar to my recent Comment for a Digg offer, here's another one that's equally as powerful.
Leave a comment here with a link to a story you want stumbled and/or reviewed, stumbled at StumbleUpon, or a story you’ve stumbled upon and want to promote. Not only do you get a valid link back to your blog or other kind of website when you put your URL in the comment form (because I use a “dofollow” plugin), but I will personally look at your story and stumble and/or review it. Of course, I reserve the right to not stumble something that I personally find offensive or consider as nothing more than spam. I’m pretty easy, though, so that should rarely happen.
Be sure to tell me whether or not to add a review. I can do that too!
Note: There's a link to this post in the upper right sidebar, above the other link widgets, so that you can find this post easily when you return.
I thought about this for a while and came to the conclusion, why not? Here's how simple it is.
Leave a comment here with a link to a story you want submitted to Digg, one that you've already submitted to Digg, or a story you've "dugg" for someone else and want to promote. Not only do you get a valid link back to your blog or other kind of website when you put your URL in the comment form (because I use a "dofollow" plugin), but I will personally look at your story, submit and/or digg it. Of course, I reserve the right to not digg something that I personally find offensive or consider as nothing more than spam. I'm pretty easy, though, so that should rarely happen.
You can verify that I've dugg your link by looking for RTCA on the "Who Dugg or Blogged It" tab of the Digg post.
I will be doing something similar with StumbleUpon tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.
Note:There's a link to this post in the upper right sidebar, above the other link widgets, so that you can find this post easily when you return.
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:
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/
RSS Feeds: