Using Social Media to Build and Promote Your Blog

I'm attending a panel right now about using social media to build an audience for your blog. It features Matt Browner Hamlin, the Online Director for the Mark Begich Senate Campaign (fomerly of the Dodd campaign and Students for a Free Tibet), Jason Rosenbaum of the Sentinel, Josh Nelson and Cheryl Contee.

Jason and Josh just are discussing best practices for getting content noticed on social news sites like Digg, Reddit, Buzzflash and Stumbleupon and they made an important point. It's very hard to get noticed by A-list bloggers or to break through the clutter on Daily Kos to get on the Recommended list or promoted to the front page. If you don't have solid connections to those bloggers already, trying to get them to link to you is not a great strategy to get noticed and build traffic (even if the audience of those blogs might seem like the most low-hanging fruit). While it may seem daunting to try to break into these social news communities, it can be a more efficient and successful strategy than trying to break through in the A-List blogs.

Other useful tips for using these site:

• Live or die by the headline. Most people try to convey their point and get people to click through to their article. That's a mistake. If you don't get on the front page, you are not going to get a lot of hits. So your goal in writing a headline should be to convince the reader to give you a vote.
• Be good community members. Don't just spam the site, but contribute other interesting articles not written by you.
• Engage the commenters. Just like on Daily Kos, you have to engage the community to build traffic and votes. And on sites like Digg, the number of comments can impact the algorithm and play a role in getting you on the front page.
• Have a small pool of allies - readers or cobloggers - to help jump-start your article with a few votes. It takes no time and on smaller sites like Buzzflash it can quickly help you get to the front page.