BlogCatalog community mass buzz

Very often I am asked to advise new webmasters on how to increase their blog traffic. Well, today I am going to focus on telling you about social networking communities for blogs. More especially a blogging community over at BlogCatalog. Ofcourse there are many other ways of promoting your blog and I will mention a few that have worked for me.

A mass blog post buzz experiment over at BlogCatalog took place today. This genius idea was thought up by a community member, Monwea of iwebis.com. BlogCatalog has a fast growing web community and the folks over there are friendly. Unlike other social networking sites, I have managed to spark new friendships with members of BlogCatalog. This is one of the ways that social networking sites enable you to not only get your blog noticed but also cultivate friendships with other bloggers of similar interests as yours.

So what are the benefits of introducing yourself and your blog to BlogCatalog? I will explain what the benefits have been for me.

• The first obvious reason is the fact that you can exchange ideas with fellow bloggers with similar interests
• The next reason is that you can liaise with bloggers who have been blogging longer than you and they can give you invaluable advice
• You can get traffic to your site by exchanging links with members
• It is fun to get to know other community members, search and browse other blogs and see what bloggers are up to
• The site design is pretty easy to navigate and lets you enjoy your surfing experience while on the site

My BlogCatalog profile is lifuchi aka Lifuchi Kalechi, my online alias. Makes me feel like I'm being mysterious like the whole 007 Bond thing :)

There are several other ways that you can drive traffic to your site besides joining social networking sites. These are some of the methods I use:

• Visit forums relating to your topic and leave comments with your signature. The trick is you should include a link back to your site in your signature
• Visit other blogs or sites with similar topics to yours and send a note to the webmaster and tell them you will use their post or rather, ask them. Most of the time they are more than willing to help you out with exchanging links
• Join link exchange programs inorder to have some links to your site. You should be careful who you exchange links with. Do not just accept any link even irrelevant links. Keep in mind if you link to a bad site like an MFA site, it's your credibility that will be at stake
• Write articles and submit them to blog carnivals or article sites like Ezinearticles and ArticleCity.
• Use social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us.

So start getting traffic to your site by promoting and making yourself visible. Visit great online social networking communities like BlogCatalog and use the other methods I've mentioned and see your traffic begin to rise.

Hope this post was of help to you.