BloggingLine - Blogging Tips & Resources

Being a blogger or a freelance writer or even a social media consultant, you have to know few basic things about social media. There are rules for almost everything in this world. There is a limit for everything in life and social media is not exception. Social media sites can be very good and get your big results, if you use it in the right way. Else, you will see your blog/site banned from it.

When I say social media, digg lovers will think of digg, stumbleupon fans will think about stumbleupon and so on. But whichever is your favorite site, you have to follow certain rules to get the complete value from it.

1. Don’t Promote Your Content Alone

Social media sites are to put the best content in front of people who are interested in the respective niche. You should not promote every single blog post you write in your blog yourself. When someone else submits, it is fine. There is a difference between you praising yourself to others and your friend praising you in front of others. That’s the case here. You can submit one or two at times but not always. Have a ratio. For every 15 submits, you can submit your content. This is the way I use.

2. Give and Receive

Social media is all about giving and receiving. You cannot receive all the time and stay successful without giving anything to the users. If you have a friend from whom you get a ‘thumbs up’ at stumbleupon, you have to help him when he is asking for it. Of course, if the site he or she asks vote for is spammy, you cannot help them with social media. Get new friends and offer help to them. You can also get help from them when you are in need. You cannot succeed in social media without the help from friends.

3. Be Active

The winning secret in social media is being active and participating regularly. I do have to credit my friends for telling me this when I started with social media sites. You got to be active and regularly contributing to the community to succeed. You can get thousands of fans in social media sites only if you are already established and known to a lot of people. Being active isn’t tough. You should spend certain amount of time every day with social media. I try to use social media sites for at least one hour a day. Though I miss it at times, I always try my level best to stick on to it.

These are basic rules and once you follow these and act wisely, you will start to know more about the sites as days go by. You might be the next super user at digg or a power user at mixx. Also don’t forget to read the individual site’s policy or your site might get banned without you knowing it. After all social media is for everyone and you can easily succeed in it with little efforts. Concentrate on one at a time when you are learning and user the ones you have mastered for a little lesser time.

Good luck with social media sites. Hoping to see your post hit the front page of social sites with ease.

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If you have more than one blog, each with different readers, you probably want to have each blog’s readers read the other blogs. There’s a possibility that these readers who love your first blog would also love to read your other blogs. You can introduce them by doing cross promotion with each blog.

Now how can we do that? There’s several ways, and all of them are practically easy.

1. Link in post: If you have 2 blogs that cover different topics, sometimes you could post a certain topic that could be related with each blog. For example: your first blog is about personal life, and the second blog is about gadget review. You could post your daily activity in the first blog, while mentioning the gadget you use in that activity. Give the gadget’s info link to your second blog. Then in the second blog, you can write review of that gadget, while mentioning examples of how this gadget can be used. The examples are linked to your first blog.
2. Blogroll: Blogroll is a list of blog links that usually blogger put on the sidebar. This blogroll practically explains to readers what do this blogger read ever day. You can put your other blogs on the top parts of your blogroll, making sure that readers see it first. Provide a title tag to these blog links, so readers would understand what this blog is about before they click it.
3. RSS Widget: If you are using the recent version of WordPress, there’s a widget called RSS widget. With this, you could display recent’s posts of your other blogs. In the first blog, you can display recent posts of your second blog. If you’re using other blog platforms, you can also use a ready made RSS widget provided by Widgetbox. Create a new widget and choose blog/feed as your widget. With Widgetbox, your recent’s blog post can be displayed almost anywhere, not limited to your blog. You can display this widget in your socio graph profile, such as: MySpace, Facebook, or Friendster.

Image source: Getty Images