Anytime you give, and it doesn't matter what the object of the giving is, you almost always receive something in return. Objects in this context include:

• Link love (oh, how some people hate that phrase). Linking to blogs that have content related to your own or content that you've written about.
• Charity. Giving to everyone from family to people you don't even know.
• Favors. "Digging" and "Stumbling" without being asked to do so.

Link love (or blog appreciation as I like to call it now) results in two things: 1) Pingbacks and trackbacks to your own blog, and 2) Visitors to the blogs that you link to will sometimes see your ping and visit your blog as a direct result. There's a good chance the author(s) of a particular blog will visit your blog as well.

Charity comes in all shapes and sizes and doesn't necessarily mean money. You can give your time, your labor, your knowledge, and (of course) money. When you give any of these things away, it's human nature to reciprocate with something and that something is usually worth far more to you than what you gave in the first place.

Favors are also a form of giving, as long as you don't ask for anything in return. Digging and stumbling for blogs can be used as favors. If you don't know what I'm talking about because you're new to all this, just visit Digg and StumbleUpon and get involved.

As far as I'm concerned, giving means nothing if I always tell people that I'm doing it at the time. I don't need my ego stroked and I don't require anything in return, ever. It amazes me how I almost always receive something in return, regardless of how anonymous I choose to be.

Anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis knows that I link to almost every blog I visit, in one way or another, at one time or another. It doesn't matter if I agree with their written words or not. If I took the time to read or even just look at something, it had to be worth it or I wouldn't have gone there in the first place. I attribute this as one of the things that continues to propel my rankings in an upward direction.

I'm not bragging, because I have a fixed income, that I support two families here — both families are related to me through my wife. I would love to get more involved in other charitable projects, but my income (at this time) and my banking situation doesn't give me that flexibility. Members of both families know how I feel and still aggressively attempt to do things for me that they know I can't do or don't like to do.

I have a lot of "digg friends" now as well as a lot of "stumble friends". I digg almost every submission made by my friends on Digg and I have my StumbleUpon toolbar set to stumble pages for "Friends". I'm sure other people do the same thing. How else can I explain the sudden bursts of traffic that I get?

These are just some examples of the effects of giving that I've experienced. What kind of effects have you experienced as the result of giving?

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.