Thermal

So do I, and although only time will tell if my methods work, I’ve done a fair bit of reading over the last month, and there’s a lot we can do to help each other.

The following are all free, easy to do and a good way to help other bloggers & to help yourself. Please note I’m not suggesting link exchange for the sake of it – but if you genuinely like a blog, here’s how you can help publicise it, and hopefully someone will do the same for you.

Technorati: These guys are currently tracking over 62 million blogs-yours may be one of them. Sign up & claim your blog-this will enable you to view some interesting stats about your blog, such as who is linking to you & what they’re saying. You can also find other people’s blogs you like and ‘Favorite’ them. Do that, they can then check you out & maybe ‘favorite’ your blog.

StumbleUpon: A little toolbar that can be added to Internet Explorer or Firefox. Sign up for a free account, check some boxes on your interests and click stumble. This will then take you to random sites & give you the chance to rate them with a simple Thumbs Up/Down. StumbleUpon then learns your preferences & refines it’s suggestions. A great way to visit sites you’d never find in 100 years of searching, and a good source of blog material. Stumble your favourite blogs & get them more traffic, and someone may stumble yours!

Bestest Blog of All-Time: A quite stunning effort by one blogger, Bobby Griffin, to enable veryone to get some traffic to their site. More than a simple link exchange, his addition of the ‘Random Blog Button’ moves this up to being like StumbleUpon but for blogs. I have only done the free link exchange for now, and have already received dozens of hits via the random button. I intend to donate (totally optional) in the new year which should increase the chances of more hits. Essential.

del.icio.us: You’ve probably seen add to del.icio.us tags on many sites & wondered what they are. Well, in short, it’s a way of storing your bookmarks of all your favourite sites online, so you can access them from any computer. But, the kicker is that these bookmarks can be made public & searchable. So, other people with a similar interest in one of your bookmarks can find your list, and then follow another link away, or even ‘favourite you’ so they can view your future bookmarks. An excellent way to promote the sites you like.

eXlinks.net: I don’t even know what this is yet. According to the buzz & Digg it’s aiming to be a new concept in traffic exchange/social networking/bookmarking/link exchange. It’s not even in beta yet, but if you’re quick you can click on the link below and sign up which will get your blog entered into the beta when released. A head start on everyone else?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.