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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My last article talked about some reasons why company should start blogging. This time, I want to share my opinion about another topic — it’s still related to my previous one. This time, I will write something a little bit technical, and — of course — it’s related to blogging activities.

If someone (or even a company) wants to start blogging (after having the concept), the very first questions to answer is: “What’s the best platform?”. The simple answer should be: “Use a blog engine as its platform. Period.” But, sometime, some companies go to an opposite direction. They created their own platform, getting someone make a custom content management, etc. For what reason? Because “it’s just cool to have our own application”? Think again! Personally, if it’s related to — again! — blog, it’s useless to build blogging application from zero, especially today. Why?

Read the rest of this entry →

Blog is about opinion. Blog is also about information. And, if we’re talking about blog, we talk about information flow and publishing mechanism. We’re also talking about communication, marketing and business.

I will not talking about how blog can change people’s life. But, I want to propose some reasons for companies which haven’t started blogging. Okey, here are some reasons why you (company) should start blogging:

• You need to publish yourself, right? As a company, you want people know about you — on the Internet. People want to know about what happens to your company. If you have a good news, you want to publish it to the universe. Blog can do this. If we want to publish to other media like newspaper, news portal… they probably do not want to hear your news. Using your own publishing system, you can tell stories your way.
• It’s CHEAP. You do not have to spend millions of dollar only for having online publishing tool. Of course, every company has its own decision on how to spend money, but most of them probably have the same consideration: spend less, get more. We can have a blog set in few minutes.
• It’s easy. Some companies probably wonder: how can a non-geek can publish such stories? How can they have their contents well-organized?
• It has THE technologies. What technologies offered by blog as a publishing system?
  • Search engine optimization. Try to search about your company or products. You will find many blogs in the search results. Do you pay them to publish news about you. Probably. But, what if they published unexpected news?
  • Content management system. You can organize your content in an easy way by categories, date of post, keywords, etc.
  • Social networking. Blog is designed to be a tool for communication. It’s about “delivering contents”.

Those are some reasons to start a blog. If there are companies which think that blog is useless, I am so curious about their reasons.

Thomas Arie Setiawan is currently living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and run a blog called Orangescale.NET. Together with some friends, he runs a small web design service called Orangescale Studio.

Just blog-walking and found BloggerJobs.biz. Its tagline: “The Inside Track to a Blogging Career - The Job Hunt Begins Here!”

This is a useful blogging job directory, either blogger, publisher or advertiser could use this site to promote and network each other.

However you should pay to get feature in this site.