In my previous post Easy Ways to Promote Your Blog & Drive Traffic – Part 1 we explored Search Engine Optimization SEO, Blog Communities, Blog Directories, Stats and Site Checkers and Feed Directories. It’s my personal belief and experience that you should at least dabble in each of the categories I am providing in this mini-series in order to position yourself to connect with other bloggers, to have your blog indexed and to drive traffic to your blog.

Let’s start the second part of our list with pinging websites.

6. Pinging Sites

Pinging is important if you wish to grab the top positions on the search engines with your content. It’s an easy way to let alert search engines that you have new content on your blog and invite them to check it out. You should ping every single piece you publish whether it is an article, press release, video, etc.

Pinging sites I use are: Pingomatic.com, PingMyBlog.com, pingdevice.com, bulkping.com

7. Social Media Sites

One of the things I learned too late in the game was when registering accounts on various social media sites like Twitter.com, Facebook.com and YouTube.com – use your blog name as your username in order to get your blog indexed quickly.

Be sure to share your new blog posts on all social media sites. Ask for comments and retweets, and be sure to return the favor. More comments might actually mean higher Google ranking.

8. Social Bookmarking

Share your content with readers online by submitting your newly published blog posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Delicious.com, and StumbleUpon.com.

One of my newest favs is OnlyWire. OnlyWire is a service that allows you to submit your new blog posts to multiple social bookmarking sites across the web at a touch of a button.

Tip: Use appropriate keywords and tags for your bookmarks.

Do you have personal favorite methods you used to promote your blog or drive traffic? Please share those in the comments section below.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.

When I first began reading blogs, adding simple bookmarks to my favorites was sufficient in getting me back to items I wanted to be to read but didn’t have time.

As time passes, great blogs emerge and as I connect with more amazing writers, I found bookmarks and favorites just aren’t enough.

There are three items I now use. Depending on how much time I have, whether the blog is consistent in content I wish to read regularly and the value a mutual connection might make for both myself and the writer determines which options I use.

Google Reader is of course my choice for RSS subscription – at the moment I am subscribed to 146 blogs. I typically try to spend a lazy weekend day catching up on my reader collection – although I do pop over at least once a day to see if there are any major attention grabbing headlines I just can’t go a couple of days without reading.

Read it Later – a Firefox extension that allows me to save articles that inspire me or provide me with ideas for future blog topics. On the days I struggle with writers block, I simply click my Read it Later bookmark ribbon to drop down a plethora of motivation and ideas.

Delicious – The world’s leading social bookmarking service. I’ve known and seen it used by so many of my favorite bloggers and tried it years ago. Just recently I revisited the service and realized it was time I get a “stick-to-it” attitude. My biggest problem was not having a super easy way of actually adding those bookmarks. Then I found Shareaholic – an add-on for Firefox that places a convenient button at the top of my screen, right next to my URL address bar. When I happen on an article I want to share with friends, I simply click the button, select Delicious and consider it shared!

If you have a Delicious profile – let’s connect!

My Comment Commitment: If you leave a comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit. This is my way of saying thank you!

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.

In case you hadn’t noticed, most mainstream websites and blogs are making full use of social bookmark buttons on their sites (the image on the right comes from CNN). While social buttons are not a guarantee to hit the front page of Digg they do offer some help to chose wanting to share your articles.

This makes it possible to bookmark your articles directly from your site.

If you are not using social buttons on your site yet I suggest that you give it a try. There is a site called iFeedReader that automatically generates the buttons. All that is required is to select the bookmark services that you want to include, provide details about your blogging platform and the site will generate a code that you can copy and paste right to your blog.

You’ll want to avoid including all the available social bookmarks, because well, that would just seem spammy.

I’d recommend you select 2 or 3 of them and place them in such a way that won’t disturb readers that are not concerned with social bookmarking.

Another option would be to use TweetIt WordPress Plugin. That’s what I use here and while the author of the plugin is no longer providing updates – the service seems to work well for now.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.