Tiffany Washko

This is Day 6 of the Become a Better Blogger Challenge. The mission for today is:

Day 6. Start making friends on a social media service like Digg or StumbleUpon. These services are a great place to network, because you’ll be establishing relationships with people who have the potential to send hundreds of visitors to your articles. If you vote up their content, you may be able to call in a favor later on by asking them to vote up posts you’ve written.

This one I do need to work on. I regularly submit my own posts to Stumbleupon and a few other social network sites but I haven’t really worked to gain “friends” there. I have been fortunate that some random people have started following me as friends though. I noticed recently that within a few days of posting about recycling household stuff for the garden that it was Stumbled and reviewed about 8 times. You really can’t underestimate the power of Stumbleupon. Last year one of web pages about using no shampoo on your hair got Stumbled by one gal who had lots of friends (who then reviewed and Stumbled) and my traffic skyrocketed up to an extra 4 to 5 hundred people a day. It stayed that way for a month and then petered out within 2 months. It was an awesome ride.

Mom Masterminds….one of the most awesome mentoring and networking groups ever…has a Blog Boost program where you can ask the other members to visit one of your blog posts and submit it to social networking sites for you. That is a big perk.

So my mission for this week is to start making “friends” on social networking sites…let’s call this mission a mission in progress.

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Let’s say that you just blogged. You wrote a great post with lots of valuable information that is sure to be helpful to all your readers…it was well written, it was timely , it incorporated one or more affiliate links that made sense, and it was commlimented with an attractive graphic or picture. In short…your post rocked!

But know what? Do you just sit back and hope that the keyword research you did and the market interest in the topic will help skyrocket your post to the top of search results bringing you lots of traffic and affiliate sales? Well hopefully all of that will happen but why wait? Start using the web 2.0 phenomanon to bring in immediate traffic and sales: Digg it, Hugg it, Reddit, Stumble It, ect. Submit it to the social bookmarking sites that are relevent to your site and this is easy to do if you have added a social bookmarking plugin to your blog like Sociable or Share This.

Also, find several blog carnivals that are appropriate for the post and submit it to them. This is a great way to get incoming links and new blog readers.

Happy Blogging!

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Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, social bookmarking, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon

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Squidoo is a web 2.0 site and it has certain social networking elements built into it. Each lens can be ranked from 1 to 5 stars so if you create a good lens then visitors can push it to the top of the ranks by giving you 5 stars. The higher your rank the easier it is for Squidoo visitors to find you. My most heavily trafficed lense was ranked at as the number #2 lens for the food and cooking category and number 250 overall among thousands of lenses.

Other users can also lensroll your lens to appear on the right sidebar of their lens page if they are so inclined.

You can do your best to make sure your lenses rank well via Squidoo searches by making sure they are properly tagged.

Lens have guestbook capabilities and it is helpful to find other lenses that you like and leave comments, giving you permanent links to your own lenses. This also helps to build community. Many times if you leave comments then those lens owners will return the favor and give your lens a favorable lens rank…adding to the cycle of traffic.

Squidoo also has a community form called SquidU. This forumm is a great place to network, meet other lensmasters, and even request that your lens be blessed by a SquidAngel. You will know if you have been blessed because a little angel will appear on your lense and your rank and thus traffic are greatly increased when you receive this honor. So it is great goal to build a truly excellent lense worthy of blessing.

You can also drive traffic to your lenses by linking to one or more of them OR your profile page which lists the lenses you have….on your other sites, blogs, and newsletters if you have them. You can also place a link in your signature line for community forums, discussion groups, and emails.

Your lenses can be added to various social book marking sites like Digg, HUGG, reddit, and stumbleupon. There is even a new one specifically for Squidoo lenses called lenseroll.

Do article marketing whereby you write and distribute article on various subjects to the free reprint article directories and put the link to your Squidoo page or pages in the by line. Whenever someone publishes your articles they will also be publishing those links.

So you can pretty much market a Squidoo page the same ways would promote a regular web site or blog.

So are you ready to Squidoo? Use this link to get started and after you make $15.00 Squidoo will give us both and extra $5.00!

Want to know more about Squidoo? Get the best Squidoo resource out there…Social Networking On Squidoo. I’ve read it…its awesome…if you want to Squidoo then you need it!

Technorati Tags: squidoo, social networking, web 2.0, lens, blog, article marketing

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