So here’s the thing. I was doing a random search for my name on Google and guess what I got..!

So, that was my photo, my identity in a social site – Delver – that I never signed up for. And as you can see from the screenshot, to get in I just have to ‘claim’ my profile – as easy as that sounds.

From the looks of it, i can be pretty sure that they scraped off my identity from my public profile at Digg. You know – because there’s a direct link to my Digg profile there.

Anyway, just think for a second. A person Googling his/her name randomly has a pretty good chance of checking the search result out and then ‘claiming’ their profiles on this social site. Wouldn’t you? This might not be the only place this tactic had been used to get more user signups, but it’s surely done in a massive scale. And as a result, thousands of people who wouldn’t have joined otherwise have found their place in this site.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in an over-exhausted niche like this, a simple idea that had been a product of ‘thinking outside the box’ had put Delver on a very visible spot in the large web 2.0 map. I’ll have to give it up for them.., for that.

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Well, the easiest answer to this question would be – “It depends on you needs”.

For the average person just wanting to maintain a personal journal and not take the whole “blogging for money thing” really seriously and who just want to leave out the technical jargon of the equation, I’d say blog communities would be a better choice.

Thoughts.com is one of those considerably large blog communities that are noteworthy here. Thoughts.com offers many features that wouldn’t necessarily be found on a free blog community, including unlimited bandwidth. Uploading photos to your own photo album, sharing community hosted videos, having your own podcast, conducting online polls with your friends, connecting with other community members on a forum, and most importantly, connecting with friends with similar interests is all inclusive in your free membership.

So, for a person with “not much” technical know-how trying to implement a membership site with forums and all that to connect with friends, do podcasts and etc can be fairly hard. Fortunately, networks like thoughts.com make it fairly easy for them.

And also, joining a blog community can be a fairly easy way of connecting with like minded individuals in comparison to other blog platforms, thanks for features like intra-community groups.

Although a blog community like thoughts.com offers all these features, sometimes it’s likely that the lack of flexibility may drive the visitors to individual blog platforms. But as I said, if you just want to have a “personal journal” kind of thing and want to test the waters of a potential time consuming hobby, then yeah, you will find thoughts.com very appealing.

Take their tour or Create Blog now.

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So now, let’s take a look at where and how the aggression pays off.

MyBlogLog

Since my account had become inaccessible in BlogCatalog for no apparent reason, I’ve concentrated my efforts fully on Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog. And can’t say it hadn’t WOW!ed me. Backlinks are great. And the traffic? Awesome!

The simple but effective method here is to use the “Friender” service and add as many friends as you can, and at the same time, register all your social networking accounts with MyBlogLog. After doing so, every time you do something on other sites, MyBlogLog will update your friend’s social feed. For an instance, if you post on your blog or Twitter something, it will say “This user posted this on his/her blog” or “This user twittered: something”, in all of your friends’ social feeds.

If you have 300 friends, then it’s like having 300 (give or take a few) potential subscribers to your blog, twitter followers and social media friends, on MyBlogLog and beyond.

Twitter

I’ve seen many people following a zillion of other people hoping that they would return the favor on Twitter. But the fact of the matter is that most of them won’t. But there are effective ways of significantly increasing your odds of being followed. And this is one such method.

You know, companies like IZEA or campaigns like ObamaCampaign follow a mass number of people on Twitter, hoping that they would follow back. Sometimes they do, and sometimes, they don’t. But if someone indeed followed IZEA on Twitter, just because IZEA started following them at the first place, then there’s a high chance that, that particular user believes in reciprocal following.

So, this is the secret. If you’re a blogger in the MMO niche, and you want to maximize your exposure through Twitter, you can follow a good number of people following IZEA, (IZEA is the company behind PayPerPost and SocialSpark) and you will be getting a good number of followers interested in what you’re blogging about. If you’re a political blogger, do the same with ObamaCampaign and you’ll get some good targeted followers.

So, feel free to experiment and let me know how it goes.

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