One of the many questions I see popping up from time to time asks how to optimize your blog for either social traffic or search engine traffic or a combination of both. The "or" part of the question is easily solved. The "combination" part of the question is a little more difficult to answer.

Why would you want to differentiate between the two or combine the two in the first place? It all depends on which kind of traffic interests you the most. Are you trying to gain a large and loyal readership or are you trying to make money with your blog? Are you trying to do both at the same time?

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Brett of the Best of Brett blog invited to me to read and take part in his "The Real Reasons to Social Networking Writing Project". He's treating it like a meme, but I won't. Memes normally require you to tag other people to do the same and I won't do that. If you read his article and decide to treat it like a meme, so be it.

Brett is planning to use the information he gathers to write an e-book, a guide with marketing strategies to effectively use the social networks. In his article he asks, "So do you feel social networks are actually useful and how do you use them?" That's a pretty broad question which begs a pretty broad answer.

I belong to several social networks: StumbleUpon, Digg, Propeller (formerly Netscape), MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BUMPzee and more that I can't remember offhand. What purposes do they serve for me specifically? Contacts. I've been sucked into discussions on some of them in the past and refrain from doing so nowadays because it takes me away from the things that I really want to do. In my opinion, the value of the contacts is worth more than the value of the discussions.

I browse the social networks on occasion, but not every day for every one of them. Who has that kind of time? Anyway, browsing them shows me what everyone is talking about and gives me ideas on what I should be writing about. I also pick up useful news items as well as tidbits that I can put to use immediately. I can't even begin to tell you what I've picked up just by browsing.

I get invited to participate in discussion groups fairly frequently. I usually join the groups and get involved only when I have the time. (With my computer and DSL problems of late, I'm lucky to get online at all sometimes.)

I've told you what I use social networks for, so what do YOU use them for?

(This is a guest author article.)

I've been on the internet for nearly 6-7 years, participated in a dozen online forums/communities and left several of them and my advice to people who don't like a particular community: leave. Stop visiting that website, delete your bookmark for that site, remove the RSS feed from your feedreader and resist the temptation to return to that community website. If you do, chances are you'll be active there again on a regular basis and become frustrated with whatever provoked you in the first place. It's not worth fighting for something that really is outside your control. Avoid emotional attachment as much as possible.

So here are my tips:

• Completely remove all traces of that website from your computer – bookmarks, RSS/Atom feeds, history and so on. Turn off e-mail notifications from that particular website or if that's not possible, remove your e-mail ID from that website (or turn it into something nonsensical).
• Don't post farewell messages. It attracts flaming and sarcasm and you'll be tempted to respond again to those messages thus creating a chain reaction. Also by leaving quietly, you keep yourself in the good books of that community.
• Try to find another online community which interests you or just stop using the Internet so much. There is a life outside.
• Don't get addicted to social networking websites. It's fun once in a while, but they offer nothing more than a glorified contact list. Your real friends will always contact you by e-mail.

The internet is a useful place to get information, but there are also addictive websites out there. Avoid the temptation to waste hours (or days) of your life on online communities that don't serve any useful purpose for you.

I'm sure you've seen articles on different blogs about how to increase your traffic and, if your blog is monetized, how to make more money off that traffic. Some of them will recommend that you have your blog submitted to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other social networks. Heck, I may have mentioned it once or twice myself.

It's okay if your blog gets submitted to these places. It's going to happen whether you ask for it or not. If you write something that one of your readers (whether that reader is another blogger or not) thinks is "digg worthy", it will get submitted to Digg. The same goes for the other services. It's also okay to use traffic programs. There's a simple caveat to all of it. It's only temporary.

For the past few weeks, you may have noticed that I have avoided writing anything that would be considered "digg worthy". One of the obvious reasons is that I was temporarily on a host that had severely limited bandwidth. The other reason is that I like to be able to connect to my blog in order to do things, which I can't do while the "digg effect" is going on. I also like it when my regular readers are able to connect and do their thing.

Organic blog growth is what I define as gaining traffic naturally. I'm talking about "word of mouth" or "word of blog" advertising. This is what I have been concentrating on and it has pretty much stabilized my traffic growth. I'm getting between 100 and 200 visits a day on any given day, up from 20 to 40 before February. My traffic comes from other blogs, search engines, and places that the analytics can't identify. I still get some traffic from Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, but it's normal search traffic from their services. I also still get traffic from Plime, even though I haven't logged in there more than once or twice in the last month.

I belong to some of the popular social networks and I visit and comment once in awhile, but not frequently. I also visit a lot of blogs. I mean a LOT of blogs. I don't always comment — I comment when I think I can add to the discussion. You want to know something? Because a lot of bloggers belong to the same social networks I do, they get to see my picture on their little widgets. Curiosity on their part becomes traffic on my part. My blog drive-bys and the pingbacks (and the obvious links on Technorati) drive traffic back to my blog as well. I can consider all of these things part of organic blog growth because they're going to happen whether I try really hard or not.

Organic blog growth does not mean going HOG WILD. If you look at the numbers in my archives widget, you can't help but notice that I've been posting more and more as each month goes by. That's HOG WILD. There's no reason in the world that I, or anyone else, needs to post that much. Once a day is more than enough. The secret is quality content, not frequent content. Postings need to be at regular intervals, but even one per day is not required. Having just said all that, my frequent postings are part of my own habits and not something I would recommend to anyone else.

Am I trying to make a point here? No, not really. I'm just dishing out food for thought.