Post Theme: Blog Overhaul
Finally, I’m able to complete my first blogging theme. Sorry it has taken a rather long time to complete this final post in the series, but as I mentioned a few days ago, OIOpublisher has kept me busy recently.
Tapping into the Social Web:
There are an ever-growing number of social networks out there, especially in the world of blogging. I’m not talking about your MySpace or FaceBook networks though, but the applications out there that help to connect bloggers and potential readers. I’ve been reluctant to use many networks myself to be honest, so it is time I started doing so! Let’s start by having a look at some of the contenders that might be vying for a place within your blog’s real-estate:
1.) MyBlogLog - a popular widget that lets you and your readers see who has been reading your blog lately. You can then click on a reader’s avatar to get more information about them, their own sites, and any communities they belong to.
2.) BlogCatalog - a social blog directory that also has similar functionality to mybloglog, letting you show a widget that displays your recent readers of your own blog.
3.) EntreCard - a relative newcomer, that allows you to drop your “web business card” at other blogs that contain their widget, allowing you to get some free ad space, as well as network with other bloggers behind the scenes.
4.) StumbleUpon - lets you channel surf the web, to find interesting sites. You build your profile by rating other sites you visit, which means that the higher a page is rated, the more targeted traffic will be sent to it.
5.) Mixx - like the popular Digg.com, a social voting site that can help drive traffic your way if your stories get voted highly enough. The big plus point with Mixx is the group features, which can help target the traffic more effectively.
6.) Sphinn / BloggingZoom - 2 more social voting widgets, that focus on internet marketing and blogging respecitvely. A good example of niche sites that can help you bring in more targeted traffic.
7.) Del.ico.us - an example of a social bookmarking site, which lets you organise your favorite sites by category, and share them with others.
8.) OIOpublisher - ha, you didn’t think I wasn’t going to mention my own creation did you? The idea here is to let bloggers have conversations via their own blogs, to help build traffic and readership base.
What are your criteria?
Now some people will tell you to just stick in as many of these apps and widgets as you can, because “every bit of traffic helps”, especially when you are a new blogger, or don’t get much traffic. I would say that’s not a good way to look at it, because it’s no good having hundreds of hits every day if they all leave because your blog looks cluttered or unusable, or because most will leave after a single page view.
To take the example to its most extreme, you could use autosurf traffic exchanges to drive thousands of “people” to your site, but you will most likely not get a single quality or targeted visitor. So don’t just think quantity when looking at social utilities, think targeted!
For myself, I think I would mainly like to focus on targeted traffic, but not just that, traffic that only comes because they are interested in finding out more about the site. Not traffic that comes to perform an action, then goes away. I mention this because of concepts like EntreCard, where most of the traffic seems to come from other users wanting to come and drop their own cards for more exposure.
What Should I Use then?
Well it goes without saying that I’ll be using OIOpublisher in the future. I’ve already used it here in fact, and when we did a small experiment to combine it with StumbleUpon, we had some rather good results in terms of traffic flow.
But focusing on the others now, I will definitely be adding both StumbleUpon and social bookmarking buttons to my posts. Allowing users to bookmark posts is definitely something of benefit to all.
I won’t be trying out MyBlogLog, because of its reputation as being rather spammy. BlogCatalog may hold a little more promise however, so I may be tempted to signup to it in the next few days. And despite what I said about EntreCard earlier, I would like to at least give it a trial run, to see how it performs.
As for the social voting sites, Sphinn doesn’t interest me so much as it is geared towards “internet marketing”, although I shall be giving BloggingZoom a trial run. The same goes for Mixx, which beats out Digg simply because I don’t particularly see any benefit in Digg Traffic, other than crippling the server! It is not very targeted, and I shouldn’t forget the fact that I’m probably not popular enough to get dugg onto the front page anyway. 
The Final List:
I’ll be adding StumbleUpon, Social Bookmarks, Mixx and BloggingZoom buttons to my posts. I’ll also be trying out EntreCard, and possibly BlogCatalog. And of course I need to start using the OIOpublisher conversation feature a little more!
Be sure to check back over the next few days as I get round to adding the social apps on my blog. I’ll try to make sure they are tastefully presented too, I don’t like blog clutter!
Have I missed anything out? Do you have any other viewpoints? Please share them below!