Archive for: Ning

50 Ways to Promote Your Blog

Over at QuickOnlineTips they have put together a great list of the top 50 ways to promote your blog. All of these ways are purely online and they will provide a solid foundation for your blog.

Blog Promotion Basics

1. Make blogging easier and navigational.
2. Have good looking and attractive web design, so that people revisit your blog.
3. Patience is the key.
4. Self Motivation is required.
5. Have controversial articles and interesting discussions.
6. Have positive attitude and don’t frustrate yourself.
7. Be sure on your context, which belong to your niche.
8. Do some thing to your blog everyday, and traffic is seen. The more you do, the more you get.
9. Help out people with blogs similar to your level.
10. Be consistent and scheduled. Most importantly plan you every move.

Content is King

1. Write more and more unique posts.
2. Have more than 150+ resources and articles.
3. Guide people about something, teach them something new.
4. After you article is indexed by search engines, submit it to various article directories like ezinearticles.com
5. Write about Big shots and their controversy.
6. Interview big cool bloggers in your niche, and share about their views and ideas.
7. Look out for popular content that’s gaining traffic, and write about it in a humorous way.
8. Give a press release about unique news, if you have any.
9. Pay others to write good articles for you.
10. Be the first commenter on the posts of popular blogs, but let it be worth.

Viral and Social Networks

1. Create a Fan page on facebook. Also create a facebook app for your blog.
2. Customize the landing page of facebook.
3. Start an open group on Yahoo and invite people or have a widget on your blog.
4. Buy the accounts of popular YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
5. Start Stumbleupon promotional ads campaign
6. Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
7. Have a facebook share and retweet button for every other post.
8. Have a squidoo page, as it will get indexed faster in search engines.
9. Include hash(#) tags in your tweets.
10. Twitter – Follow relevant, popular, and interesting people. And some will follow you back.

Bloggers and People

1. Tell you neighbourhood, family and friends about your blog.
2. Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
3. Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
4. Send out a Press release.
5. Signup for various communities and be active in relevant Ning.com communities.
6. Write some content as a linkbait.
7. If your post is relevant to other blogging sites, then try interlinking posts, so as to get deep inbound links.
8. Signup for every other social network you can.
9. Start a podcast and submit it to various podcast directories.
10. Talk to professional bloggers about your post and ask them to review it.

Viral Marketing

1. This one’s my favorite, (Funky) Forward a SMS saying “Forward this mssg to atleast 49 people, to get RC of 49 for full TT instantly” with a link of your blog address. And, its viral.
2. Install All In One SEO Pack for WordPress blogs.
3. Create a theme, that includes a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
4. If you are a developer, create a wordpress plugin and release it for free with a link to your blog within the admin area.
5. Sponsor some tweets and be an active stumbler to know what stumblers like.
6. Use blog search from Google to find fresh blog posts and then leave comments.
7. Write a guest post for a popular blog. You may not always get published, but when you do you observe a spike in Google analytics.
8. Use Thesis for better optimization and plugins.
9. Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting smartly.
10. Join a social blog network.

Social Media Demographics

Flowtown have put together another great infographic which shows the basic demographic backgrounds of each social media site. All sites are broken down by gender, income, education and age.

Social Networking Site for Collectors

While social networks are great at connecting people and bringing them together for various aspects, sometimes a nice site is what you’re looking for. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and such just don’t server your needs, and perhaps you’ve tried the Ning communities to no avail.

For those of you out there that are collectors of various things such as stamps, bottle caps, dolls, coins, or just about anything else, Colnect is for you. This social networks brings togethers collectors from around the world to buy, sell, trade, and share stories and locations with people. This niche specific network is amazingly popular, so if you’re a collector and missing that special, cornerstone piece to your collection, perhaps this network can help you complete your empire!

Book Worms Unite with BookSprouts

Never before have we as a global community ever felt so connected as we have in the past ten years. We have grown from gatherings, town hall meetings, forums and message boards, internet chat rooms, to social networks. I host a podcast over at Tech in Twenty, and we’ve discussed the growth in popularity for social networks and how niche interests have played a huge part of that growth.

We have all heard of the popular social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, etc. But there are a lot of networks out there that cater to a more specific market, no matter if you’re into music, television, knitting, dating, marbles, or candles, there is a group for you. BookSprouts is the newly developed social site for book clubs. The site is a amongst a few competitors that claim to be a space for readers, but BookSprout is different in that the actual design is easy to navigate at the layout is welcoming to new users with little confusion. Every step for you is laid out so that users can get started immediately without getting lost in the site.

I had time to explore the site and came across the same problem the write of the TechCrunch article did. Only two of the books I listed had actual groups connected to them. This was rather limiting since those books were not considered favorites of mine, so it left me little desire to join that discussion. While I won’t blame this entirely on BookSprout, this is a user generated community, unless someone starts a group for the book, I have little time to manage one on my own.

I like how the site is free of ads. Though one might question the ability of the site to sustain itself, other social sites like Ning are free of advertisements and function perfectly well without all the advertising. The ability to purchase what other users are reading straight from the site is nice with an easily accessible Amazon link, but might be too limiting considering that there might be other places offering the book cheaper. For that you might want to check out my post on Booksprice.

Here is a video that details what Booksprice offers and what they’ve done for their users. Pick a couple of books, sign-up, and enjoy!

Newsflash! Twitter Group for Dads Exists!

Image via CrunchBase

In response to a comment from my post on TwitterMoms.com, Michel did an excellent job on bringing to the light the oft forgotten efforts of the father.

Too often fathers in movies, cartoons, and other media formats are depicted as oafish, bumbling males that know very little about caring for kids, but somehow miraculously come out on top in the end. While I won’t make an excuse for every male, there are some fathers out there stay-at-home, single, and otherwise who do an amazing job fathering children, and go through just as many hardships in child rearing, just different experiences.

There is a Ning group for Twitter Dads, and a Twitter account to follow for fathers looking at connecting with other dads to share ideas, experiences, and techniques for child rearing. @TwitterDads is a worthwhile follow for any dad in the midst of childcare, and the Ning group is slowly gaining some steam.