1. What steps do you take after posting to your blog?
2. How do you promote your blog posts?
3. Do you submit it to social networking sites? Which ones? (Feel free to link to your profile or page in your comments)
4. Do you hit the bookmarking sites? Which ones? (Feel free to link to your profile or page in your comments)
5. Do you start commenting on other blogs? What are you looking for when choosing which blogs? Friends, CommentLuv, Sez-Who, Top Commentators widget, Do-Follow, Page Rank?
6. Do you Digg it? Tweet it? Stumble It?
7. Do you shoot your friends an email?
8. Do you log into a chat room to discuss it?
9. Do you post it on forums?
10. Do you send the link to your list?

Ok, I think you get the idea. Please list every and any form of blog post promotion method you use. Don’t worry if it’s already been mentioned, list it again. That will add more weight to the tactic. Explain why you take these steps if you like.

That leads me to wonder about our online blogs. Do we hurt our brand when we publish a personal blog? What about allowing too much personality to show in our posts and comments? If you are like John Chow then I guess the question doesn’t apply because you are your brand but it is something to consider for the rest of us.

My personal views can be considered extreme, arrogant, self-righteous, opinionated and a whole bunch of other adjectives. I used to run a blog ThatsRightISaidIt.com (now off line) and those posts were designed to get people going. Some of that controversial attitude spills into my personal blog posts. I would never apologize for my opinions but I wonder if it’s bad for business. What do you think?

I just decided to add a new page to share the list with everyone. If you want to see where I go online here’s a long list of my favorites. I just started so I am missing a bunch but I will add more soon.

NOTE: This is in no way a directory or a link swap page. It’s not a list of the who’s who or a listing of gurus to please. It’s simply blogs (and eventually forums) that I like to frequent.

Am I missing anyone? Comment below and remind me.

Almost immediately we Internet Marketers could see the marketing potential of Blogs and other methods of social networking. Start a Blog, write posts directly related to your market’s interest, optimize it for the search engines and insert a few advertisements. Pure gold to any marketer with any vision or common sense at all. That’s even without considering other benefits like RSS subscriptions and the fact search engines seem to index Blog content like it was going out of style.

So why do so many Internet Marketers pass up some of the easiest and quickest benefits when it comes to blogging? Those benefits I’m referring to are those you get from commenting on other marketer’s blogs. I think it’s because we let ourselves become hyper focused on promotions and our own site’s content we forget to stop and look around. It’s true, many marketers are simply too self-centered to notice others not in a JV or affiliate relationship with them but I think most of us just get tunnel vision. That short sightedness can cost a lot. Let’s take a quick look at what many are missing;

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Here’s one that gets everyone’s attention. If you actually read and participate on other marketer’s Blogs and that post gets indexed and ranked you have a potential back link. We all know what these one-way links can mean, especially if coming from a site considered to have weight in the view of the search engine. Unfortunately many, or even most, Blogs are now using the “No-Follow” tag. This prevents the spiders from following the link to your site. There is a ‘No Follow Free‘ movement out there so more and more Blogs, including every one of mine, are passing some of their link juice to commenters.

Indirect Traffic
Indirect traffic from other marketer’s blogs, especially the more popular ones, can really add up. This is a huge benefit that many marketers overlook – targeted traffic. We’re in an era of interactivity with the popularity of Social Media or Web 2.0 and we need to re-think that strong traditional business belief that the competition is the enemy. If your site’s competition is generating traffic you now have the opportunity to share in that wealth by participating a little. Read the post, form an opinion and make an appropriate, intelligent and impressive comment and watch what happens. Soon you’ll start receiving traffic from those impressive comments because people will want to know more about you. That’s how you create another stream of readers, subscribers, commenters and hopefully a few buyers.

Credibility As An Expert
Commenting on other marketer’s Blogs can quickly translate into credibility as an expert in your niche, or in this case an Internet Marketer. If you impress people with your comments and they keep seeing your comments over and over you will gain their respect and become viewed as an expert. What do you think being considered an expert will do to your conversion rate?

Building Relationships
Here’s something many fail to understand about why social marketing is so effective. Most online business owners are looking at Web 2.0 as a new way of doing business. It’s really just a new way to utilize a tradition business requirement that’s been around since the beginning of time – building relationships. This is a requirement, not a marketing tactic or part of a business plan but an absolute requirement if you plan to stay in business for any time at all and it’s always going to be a requirement. That’s why classics like ‘How to Win Friends & Influence People‘ by Dale Carnegie will always be popular. Written in 1931, it’s as true and relevant today as it ever was. Social networking just opened up the flood gates of relationship potential and we’re seeing history in the making. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

The Bottom Line
Blogs provide a wonderful degree of interactivity and if you’re going to invest the time to read someone’s post take an extra few minutes to give your feedback and comment on the piece. The benefits can be enormous and the time required minimal. Blog comment benefits are one of the easiest and quickest ways to generating traffic, page rank, friends and respect. Are you taking advantage of it?

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