Get your blog out there! 3 Sites To Help You Increase Traffic To Your Blog

If you’ve just started your own blog or even if you’ve had one for a while but are always on the lookout to incrase your readers then take a few minutes to read this post. Included below are 3 sites that will help build readership  by making your blog more visible and more accessible by people reading (and other bloggers quoting) on the internet.

 

#1. Technorati

Technorati is one of the original and definietly one of the most respected blog catalogs available on the web. By adding your blog to their listings, Technorati will routinely “ping” your blog to look for new posts. Then, it’ll take those posts and make them available to all of its readers giving full credit to you and your blog.  Already there are over 112 million blogs in Technorati’s index!

Technorati also offers a few neat features including the ability for people to become “fans” of your blog as well as a ranking system called “Authority.” The Authority of your blog is determined by how many individual blogs (not just many posts on the same blog) link to yours. The idea is that the most popular blogs will be the ones that most people link to or quote from. Technorati also offers Top 100 blog lists and other ways to see how well you stack up to other bloggers.

 

#2. Blog Catalog

Blog Catalog is exactly what it says: An online directory of blogs. While that doesn’t sound terribly exciting off the top this site is definitely worth a look. They are quite large, with over 18 billion messages in their message forum and countless blogs listed and updated daily, there is a ton of stuff happening at Blog Catalog.

An interesting feature available on Blog Catalog is the widget you are able to place on your own blog that links your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and YouTube (among others) accounts and place the updates you do on those sites directly on your blog. For an example of this, take a look to the right side of this blog where you’ll see a red square titled “Latest Updates.”

There are other widgets available too, including one that shows you other Blog Catalog users who have recently read your blog. This service really helps to promote the social aspect of blogging.

 

#3. Zimbio

Zimbio is a relative newcomer to the blog indexing lineup. An interesting feature that sets Zimbio apart from the other services are “Wikizenes”, which are a sort of dynamic magazine that include articles from similar blogs. There are thousands of Wikizenes available to read on the site and you are more than welcome to create your own for everyone else to read as well.

As an example, someone has created a Wikizene on Gordon Ramsay.

 

And Finally…

Last but not least, don’t forget to submit your blog (and your blog posts) to my social search engine and social bookmarking service: Jack of All Links.

I hope this helps you in your quest to promote your blog. I know that it’s helped me immensely with this blog as now all 3 of these services are pinging my blog daily. I’d appreciate any feedback you have, including additional services that are similar to these. If I receive enough I may post a follow-up. Thanks!

Add Jack of All Links to Social Bookmarking Reloaded

If you use the WordPress plugin Social Bookmarking Reloaded then you can benefit from the addition of the Jack of All Links social search engine icon on your pages. For the uninitiated, check out the previous article I wrote about the service. Otherwise, follow these instructions to add Jack of All Links support to Social Bookmarking Reloaded:

 

1. Update your sites.xml file.

Add these lines to the bottom of your “sites.xml” file just before the </social_sites> tag. The file “sites.xml” is located in the “./wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded” directory.

<site>
 <name>Jack of All Links</name>
 <url>http://www.jackofalllinks.com/action/submit?url={link}</url>
 <img>jackofalllinks_mini.png</img>
 <key>jackofalllinks</key>
</site>

 

2. Grab the Jack of All Links mini icon.

Download this image to your Social Bookmarking Reloaded directory (“./wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded”).

 

 

3. Enjoy!

After you do these two simple steps, logging into your blog’s administration panel will give you the ability to select Jack of All Links as one of the icons to show in your “Bookmark to:” bottom bar on each of your posts. For an example, look at the “Bookmark to:” bar on this post!

Increase your website traffic with Jack of All Links – Social Search

If you’re looking for a good way to increase traffic to your website, increase your website’s search engine rankings, and increase your website’s Google PageRank then you need to take a look at Jack of All Links.

Jack of All Links is a social search engine developed earlier this year by me that allows webmasters and content producers to publicize their work and sites in a dynamic web directory (also known as a social search engine.) It’s very simple: You create your website, blog post, news article, or blog, copy the address URL and paste it in Jack of All Links. Then, your site will be listed immediately in our web directory, which is then searched and voted upon by our users.

The system has enjoyed success with almost zero marketing thus far and after some new features (messaging, bookmarking, among others) are launched this summer, it should really begin to pick up even more.

The idea originated while I was working on NetBoardz, which was a free forum hosting service I ran between December 2006 and January 2008. NetBoardz had a lot of users, but unless money waas going into advertising through programs like Yahoo Marketing and Google Adsense, the influx of new users would stop. Instead, I looked for free ways to create publicity for NetBoardz.

There were a number of options, but the one that stuck out was the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). It seemed like such a good idea but done so poorly. With their service, you submit your site to a moderator, who is a member of the general public or may not even exist (as there are many more sites submitted and categories than people moderating) and who may actually be your competitor, and then hope that he or she adds your site to the listing.

Google and other search engines use dmoz.org extensively to create their search results, so it’s not entirely useless. But, at the time I was used to the instant feedback, Web 2.0 world. I wanted to know immediately if my site had been listed. After waiting more than 6 weeks, I finally found that my site had not been accepted.

“Why does this take so long?”, “Why can’t it be automatic and moderated by the community?”, “Why can’t I submit more than one page on my site to the service?” were questions I was asking. Finally I decided to begin developing the underlying architecture of my own web directory.

When you submit a site to Jack of All Links, it immediately appears in search results on the service as well as in the ever-changing Top 20 Links Leaderboard. In fact, Jack of All Links is aimed at not only becoming a large directory of sites put forth by the content creators or publishers, but in fact a full-fledged search engine that people will come to use daily, as all of the search results are rated and commented on by actual users. This is true, Web 2.0 user collaboration.

When you submit your site to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, or the Open Directory Project, they ask that you only submit the original address URL, and not each page. Then, they scan your site for each of your pages and determine the search engine keywords automatically. With Jack of All Links, you can submit as many pages as you want (it is recommended to submit everything your site has to offer – more pages = more opportunity for showing up at the top of search results), you can write your own description and keywords for each page, and those pages are voted on by the community. Indeed, Jack of All Links puts the power of controlling the listings in our search engine back in your hands as the content producer.

An added benefit of all of this is that the Search Engine Optimization for Jack of All Links is very strong, so as we increase in popularity, so do you. All of our search results and top links are displayed and scanned by major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others. Your links on Jack of All Links will show up in the Google search results, which will also bring you more traffic!

If you’d like to sign up at Jack of All Links and increase your site’s traffic today, registration is completely free. Register now.