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As you may have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with various third-party services on this blog. Most are to help increase it’s traffic and visibility.
The best places to find these services are actually on other blogs, and you’ve probably seen a few as you’ve surfed. In the interest of completeness, I’m listing the ones I currently use here.
So if you want more traffic to your blog, you might want to try some of these:
This is a service from Yahoo and it’s designed as a networking system for bloggers.
Once you add your profile you can join various communities, add contacts, and follow other people and their blogs.
You’ll also get to add the cool widget you can see in the side menu, which tracks your visitors and adds their avatars to your site.
(There is another big blog social network, called Blog Catalog, that seems to have similar features to My Blog Log. I’m not too familiar with that, but I have registered, so time will tell which is most useful. Reading discussions around the web it seems My Blog Log can be spammy, so I may yet change…)
This is not a blog service per se and I’m very much a newbie at it, but Twitter is a kind of micro-blogging system designed with text-messaging mobile phone users in mind.
However, with the pretty cool Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress you can add your Twitter “Tweets” to your blog, automatically create a tweet whenever you post to your blog, and do the opposite - create a post for each tweet or a digest of the days tweets.
At present, I’m really using this as a quick headline system where I can post instant updates, but if you’re serious about it you can create contacts, follow people, run conversations, and use it from your mobile phone.
This is a straight traffic exchange, that uses screenshots of your blog to advertise it. Show their ads (it’s the double-height ad to the right) and yours will get shown on others sites.
If you’re familiar with toplists you’ll know how they work. They were all the rage a few years back 
You earn credits every time you are voted for, and you can also earn credits every time you get a pageview.
Go ahead, click the “vote” button to the right. I’ll appreciate it!
There’s another blog/voting site that is pretty popular called FuelMyBlog.com.
This is a very, very (very) simple idea. Post your blog, and it goes to the top of the list. Eventually it will get pushed down the list as new blogs are added, but you can post again.
Told you it was simple…
This is really a traffic exchange, a “manual surf” site where you earn credits by viewing sites. The worth of sites like this is debatable, but it does generate a hit to your site, but not really a reader.
However this kind of traffic has it’s uses, especially if you’re running other counted ads on the same site
This works with your feed and posts articles you write to the Zimbio database. For your best articles, you can also post them to the relevant “wikizine”.
Zimbio also has a few other neat features, such as run polls, give and receive “kudos”, and even create your own magazine cover!
Entrecard had a big launch, and it bills itself as an electronic version of the business card. Basically - in reality it’s a 125×125 banner exchange with a twist
Add your card, and when you visit sites that are entrecard enabled, you can “drop” your card there. Doing so earns you credits, and with credits you can buy advertising space on other blogs. There are some extremely popular blogs involved in this, and of course the credit cost is higher with those.
You can also do things like send credits, buy services with your credits, review sites, etc.
To start you off, feel free to drop your card at this blog. The entrecard is to the left You’ll also get a link to your site from the widget below.
Tip: Join the Entrecard Dropsurf and you’ll be able to surf entrecard blogs and drop yours with ease! As a bonus the sites listed here will also link to yours via the recent drops widget.
Tip 2: If you want to create a quick banner, try free125cards.com
Tip 3: Use the Entrecard toolbar to surf 10 sites at once and to place ads on others.
This uses a widget that displays headlines from your feed, along with headlines from other partner blogs. You earn credits from displaying the widget, and in return your headlines are shown across other sites.
So yes, it’s another exchange, but it looks clean and tidy and can even add useful content to your site.,
Don’t forget the big social networks - Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and the new Yahoo Buzz. They’re not blog services as such, but they can generate insane amounts of traffic.
And finally, even though this post is detailing blog traffic services, general traffic tips also apply: Write in forums, comment on blogs, but above all create useful content for your own blog. Google will like that, and you’ll even find yourself getting “long tail” traffic from keywords you haven’t even intentionally targetted.
Do you know of any more, or use any other services? If so, please add them to the comments.
Tags: blog advertising, blog promotion, blog traffic, blogrush, blogupp, entrecard, internet marketing, mybloglog, promotion, Traffic, twitter
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