community
One way we all form acquaintances and friendships both offline and online is through small talk. By participating in small talk others have an opportunity to discover our personality types, attitudes, interests and sense of humor. Therefore, it’s not surprising that a very effective way of making “friends” in the blogosphere is to use a blogger forum for promoting yourself and your blogs by posting into discussion threads on blogger forums. It’s also an opportunity for those who are seeking contact and the camaraderie it creates to publicize their “friendship” on the forum, that carries over into other social networks too.
New Friends and Neighbors
Posting blogging questions to blogger forums provides an opportunity for a broad diversity of forum members to enter discussion, provide answers, and simultaneously provides you with opportunities to post friendly, charming, and/or funny replies that encourage members to become your friend and subscribe to your blog.
Most bloggers forums have forum sections dedicated to asking and answering blogging related questions and in these blogger forums new bloggers can learn and experienced bloggers can share their expertise thereby creating relationships. The added bonus of posting to blogger forums an opportunity to use signature links such as this one:
onecoolsite
this time ~ this space
Related posts found in this blog:
Selecting a bloggers forum
Blog Directories for Backlinks and Traffic
Backlinks from blog directories: What is their actual value?
Pingback: Submitting Your Blog to Directories: A Primer « one cool site: blogging tips
Comments on blogs are another way to self promoting :)
What all bloggers are focused on is creating a blog centered community. Commenting on other blogs in the same niche as your own is the most effective way to promote your blog. As well as creating relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, leaving comments means that your username will be linked to your blog which encourages readers of the blogs you left comments on to click through to your blog.
This is a very important post. I had to find out on my own, when I first started blogging, the importance of sharing your blog with others on forums. Since then, I have met many talented individuals, including you. On a personal note, glad to see you are well.
Hello Maria,
Thank you for the blog visit. I’m glad to hear that you found the information in this post to be useful. I have published a second post titled Selecting a Bloggers Forum that I believe contains more information that may be of interest to you as well.
Yes, I am well and happy too and I hope that you are in the same state. I’m finding that I now have some extra time I can devote to blogging, my contract work, and to socializing with my friends and family.
I think you’ve done a great job pointing out how much more there is to blogging and connecting to other bloggers than the – let’s face it – unreadable mess that Blog Catalog has become.
Feel free to edit out my opinion if you feel like it, but that’s what it is.
I agree that despite the spiel that Blog Catalog is a member driven community of bloggers, the fact remains that many of the most frequent posters to the forum are not bloggers, who produce content on a regular basis. IMO the BC forum is not a particularly good one when it comes to sharing information pertaining to blogging, simply because the majority of members who use it are idle adults seeking social contact, who desire to chat about almost anything other than blogging.
Although the BC membership boasts some 200,000 who have submitted blogs for inclusion in the Directory there is no requirement for updating blogs once they are approved. Consequently, it’s not usual to find blogs listed which have thumbshots that show the generic Go Daddy page because they’ve long been abandoned. It’s also not unusual to observe that among the “chattiest” of the minority of BC members, who post to the forum at all, are those who rarely update their blogs and who prefer to post to threads on farting, sex, and other banal conversational topics, rather than those that pertain to blogging.
What I find most remarkable is that some of those who do post frequently state they are seeking to increase traffic to their blogs. This conveys the impression that they believe chatting with virtually the same members every day on banal non blogging related topics will accomplish that. What more can I say? IMO the Blog Catalog forum is a primarily a social forum, not a blogging forum.
What a bunch of highly useful resources. There’s more to blogging than BC. Thanks!
Thank you. Provided the readers click all the links in the post they will receive a overview of various blogger forums. I’ve now published Selecting a Bloggers Forum which contains a more encompassing list of blogger forums, more information about them and my review notes as well.
@jflower36
Thank you for the comment and praise. I appreciate it. :)
Thanks for the tips. Your info about blog catalog is better than BC’s help section!
@Trevor
You are right on. Focus on using the search facilities to locate related blogs, visit, leave meaningful comments, visit more, leave more comments, review blogs and build relationships. Usually, but not always, when we review blogs for BC the recipient blogger will reciprocate. Here’s a tip for you. When I review a blog for BC I also review it for stumbleupon and then I drop the BC member a shout to let them know I have done so. Sometimes they reciprocate.
Great information. I’ve been actively trying to improve my position within the “personal finance” category within the BC directory with a fair amount of success. One of the biggest helps for me, from what I can see, are POSITIVE blog reviews! The more I get, the higher I see to climb. It’s been great!
@roentarre
Thanks for the support. It’s good to know that you approve of my contributions to the BC community. :)
This is very useful. It took me 2 weeks to figure this one out. Great to see you coming up with the manual
This is one of the best descriptions that I have seen on the discussion boards at Blog Catalog. I really enjoy the friendships and acquaintances I have made there.