Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Share your blog posts everywhere

By combining some simple and handy services, you can post short notifications of your blog posts on 1, 2 or over a dozen sites like FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more.

Wouldn't it be great every time you wrote a blog post to have it a link posted to it with a summary on all the sites you've joined? It's easy! It works like this:

Blog post > Connecting services > Post + link appears on your chosen sites.

Now, you could go to most of the sites you want the link to appear on and register your blog there. But Twitter and some others, for example, don't offer the feature of posting summaries of your blog posts for you.

Simple services to make it easy for you

Here are my favorite services for making this simple: TwitterFeed and Ping.fm. TwitterFeed will "read" and summarize your blog posts, then pass it to Ping to be sent to all the sites you want the summary of your blog posts to appear on.

So you'll need to create an account at TwitterFeed and Ping.fm, if you haven't already. Warning: TwitterFeed requires you to use an OpenID. Read this about OpenID, and then figure out if you already have an OpenID by reading this.

Information that you'll need:

  1. The feed address of your blog, to provide to TwitterFeed. If you have a WordPress blog, just add "/feed/" (without the quotes) after the ".com" in your blog address. If, for example, your blog is myblog.wordpress.com, your feed address is myblog.wordpress.com/feed/. For a blogger blog, you would usually just add "/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" (without the quotes) after the .com in your blog address. Try it! If it doesn't work, read this about rss URLs for blogger blogs.
  2. Login information for TwitterFeed and Ping.fm.
  3. Login information for whatever sites you want your blog posts to be sent to.
What to do:
  1. Log into Ping.fm and choose the site you want the link and summary of your blog posts to appear on.
  2. Log into TwitterFeed and click the "Create a new feed" link, then choose Ping.fm to send your posts to. It should look something like this.
  3. Click the link "Ping.fm Application Key" it will take you to Ping.fm to get the key you need to finish filling out the form. Copy it and paste it into the TwitterFeed form
  4. Click "get available methods" and choose "blog" from the drop-down menu that appears
  5. Finish by clicking the "Create" button on the TwitterFeed page.
Now TwitterFeed will read your blog and give it to Ping to post on whatever sites you setup in Ping to receive your posts!


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Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Top dofollow social bookmarking sites by Page Rank and Alexa rank

All of this information is available in many places online. As always, abuse and spam will get you nowhere in SEO!

If you're doing nothing more than just posting things all over the place all you're doing is spamming. But if you are doing a lot of other things right and you want to experiment by increasing the number of search-engine recognized appropriate inbound links to your content without adding a lot to your workload, try some of the listings below.

If you'd like to learn more about link building in social media, do follow or not, read How Social Media can help improve Organic Search Rankings.

PR Alexa Site
9 9,508 SlashDot
8 293 Digg
8 554 Squidoo
8 1,746 Propeller
8 50,162 Mister-Wong
7 784 Mixx
7 22,374 Furl
6 10,362 JumpTags
6 63,724 FeedMeLinks
6 116,527 FeedMarker
6 119,921 Bibsonomy
6 119,991 Spurl
6 140,909 BackFlip
5 2,851 Lycos IQ
5 7,148 GiveALink
5 25,242 SpotBack
5 29,938 CoRank
5 42,285 Searchles
5 50,023 BlogMarks
5 69,059 MyVMarks
5 108,472 BookMarkTracker
5 126,563 LinkaGoGo
5 133,798 Connectedy
5 168,321 BuddyMarks
5 201,602 MyLinkVault
5 275,738 IGooi
4 30,895 ShoutWire
4 38,314 Oyax
4 43,871 BMAccess
4 49,048 BUMPzee
4 52,303 MyPip
4 55,952 Tagza
4 64,624 NetRocket
4 70,500 SyncOne
4 112,857 Ez4U
3 52,877 Yattle
3 65,232 PlugIM
3 85,696 Dizzed
2 63,894 Tedigo
2 64,427 Ka-Boom-It

Blogs that doFollow

I've always felt that if you're writing about something you care about, and participating helpfully in conversations on other blogs that care about the same thing, the natural growth of links back to your content is a good thing.

Spamming doesn't work here. Most of these blogs won't even let you in the door unless you can prove you have a real contribution to make. They moderate like crazy. Look for blogs you would read and contribute to regardless of follow policy.

Semi-automated bookmarking services online
These have been used/tested by Web Success Diva during their social bookmarking activities. I don't use these myself.
  • Post Toaster:  60 social bookmarking and social news sites.  It’s a little quirky when you first start using it, but does help speed up your social bookmarking once you get the hang of it.  It’s one of the few that semi-automates the most sites.
  • Socializer:  50 sites.  Functions much like Post Toaster.
  • OnlyWire:  30+ sites, but has a much more friendly user interface.  You can sign-up for all your accounts in one easy  place, and it’s one of the few that actually automates pretty much the entire process.  Great for those new to social bookmarking.
  • Social Marker: 40+ sites, with a friendly user interface.
Realize that links to your content that are ignored by people are also pretty much ignored by search engines. And that links that sprout up in large numbers suddenly from what are obviously automated services are often especially ignored.


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