There are a lot of Social Media Tools available that can help you succeed in your online business. Let’s have a quick overview of a few tools that can help you increase exposure on your blog.
You Need A Blog!
If you’re not blogging yet, blogging is a great way to promote a product. If it’s not the main location of your product sales page, blogging is a great way to work for your off page SEO efforts. Your off page sales efforts could even directly create new sales for you! A well placed banner ad can be very effective!
You can buy a domain and host a blog on its own for anything from $10-$60 a month. You can also use free blogs to help you promote other sites. WordPress, Blogger and UWCBlog.com are fantastic for building links.
Once you have a blog (or three!) that you want to promote, here are several Social Media Tools to help you increase your online exposure:
1. BlogCatalog
2. MyBlogLog
3. Technorati
4. Pingomatic
5. AddThis
BlogCatalog
BlogCatalog is free site you can join that allows you to join a directory of bloggers. You place a BlogCatalog widget in your blog’s sidebar and you’ll get a place in their blog directory based on your category. Members who visit one another have their clickable avatar displayed on blogs they visit which could help you get more visitors to your site.
You can also rate other peoples’ blogs and have your own blog rated. Public and private shouts also make for some networking opportunities.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is a similar idea to BlogCatalog with a similar widget that shows avatars. MyBlogLog offers site statistics which can be a great way for you to figure out where your traffic is coming from, what keywords people used to find you, and where people clicked to when they got to your page.
You can also use another MyBlogLog widget on your site as decoration but that also lists your other sites and latest articles. This can help you get traffic from one of your blogs to another one.
Technorati
Technorati is another blog directory. Popular blogs can make it to the front page and people can ‘favourite’ a blog which adds to its clout in the Technorati cloud. Blogs are assigned a ranking based on popularity and users can log in to see what’s happening on their favourite blogs.
Pingomatic
Pingomatic is a website you can visit when you’ve updated a new blog entry so that you can notify services that there’s something new to read. There is a long list of services you can notify who will get a ‘ping’.
AddThis
AddThis is a free site tool that you install which will allow your site visitors to bookmark your blog posts on popular social bookmarking sites. This could bring you more traffic and improve the SEO of your website. People might add your site to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon or others and add tags and categories to your posts.
In Conclusion
Blogging can definitely be a great way to gain exposure, improve SEO, and even make some more sales. These are just a few of the many free Social Media Tools available to help you.
