Forums specific to your blog topic

Since blogs can be on anything, blog forums aren't necessarily the best place to find a loyal readers. It can be a start, but most folks on blogger forums will likely not be highly interested in your particular topic.

To find people who may be interested in your particular subjects of your blog, you may want to try forums that match your blog's subject. For example, there are forums on politics, web development, dieting, motherhood, writing, etc. By joining these forums and participating with your signature, you are providing a mini ad to your blog. Always be sure to leave posts that provide value to the subject. Otherwise, it'll look like you're just spamming the forum.

Many forums have an introduction section where you can introduce yourself when you join. This is an easy way to start posting. The best intros are those that will provoke a response. The more replies to your thread, the more visibility it gets. So be sure to review previous intros to see which ones were most successful. Once you've been a part of the forum for awhile, the intro section can also be a good place to greet newcomers. Posting a welcome message gets your signature to those who are joining.

Blogrolling vs Link Exchanges

blog rolling is a popular blog tool that manages your list of links to other blogs. Instead of manually adding in new links to your sidebar, blogrolling allows you to add links with a click of a button that you can attach to your browser menu. What happens when you click the button is that it records the link to your account's list. This list is kept on blogrolling's servers. At your blog, you just attach a unique reference to blogrolling. This unique reference identifies you. Blogrolling then returns the list of links to your blog.

This blogrolling feature is a great idea, but it does have a fundamental flaw. The blogrolling feature is implemented using javascript. The reference that you paste on your sidebar refers to javascript code that blogrolling outputs for your blog. The problem with this is that Google doesn't interpret code inside javascript. Thus, being listed in someone's blogrolling list won't help your Google pagerank. It may give you a few more visitors from the other blogs, but it won't help you with Google.

So my recommendation is to keep to the manual method, and add links directly to your sidebar. Ask others to do the same.

Some recommendations for using blog explosion

If you join Blog explosion, I recommend that you add a poll to your sidebar for blog explosion surfers that asks surfers to let you know if they're visiting through blog explosion. Why? It's a good way to see how many blog explosion surfers are reading your blog. Also, you may want to ask if them to comment also. So you might want to have a post that asks this. Leave a link on your sidebar to the permalink to this post. That way, it'll be visible from your front page.

Even if you don't plan on surfing to gain credits, it's worthwhile to join blog explosion just for its directory. The directory is better than most. It provides many interesting stats including number of visitors to your blog, number who bookmarked your blog through blog explosions "blogmark" feature, and the average rating given by those who visited through blog explosion. But like most blog directories, don't expect much traffic by just listing your blog there.

Link Exchanges

Exchanging links with other bloggers has some advantages. First, you'll likely gain an occasional reader from the blogger who you are exchanging links with. Second, you'll get some traffic from readers of the other blog. Third and most importantly, you will improve your blog's page rank with Google. The more "real" links that exist on the web that point to your website, the higher the page rank in Google's search index. That means your site will be higher in the search results and will receive more visitors from Google.

Beware not to get involved with link farms which are intended to artificially increase the links back to your site. If everybody did this, the Google's usefulness would plummit. So Google is aware of these kinds of things and will not award your site. In fact, it's likely to punish your site with a lower page ranking.

Blogger Forum has a section for those who want to request link exchanges. This is a great place to start making exchanges.

Blog Forums Around the Web

In addition to BloggerForum there are other blogger forums which can be useful to promote your blog and receive feedback. The other ones aren't as popular as bloggerforum, but they can be useful. Here's a list of them:

• blogger forum - The blog forum leader and my favorite


• forum4bloggers - It's not nearly as active as bloggerforum, however, it does have some dedicated moderators. Also, they do advertise on Adsense so they are serious. If you know of any good blogs (other than yourself) they have a forum where you can post a recommendation. It's an easy way to post (which will give visibility to your signature with your blog.)


• blogger talk - Another small blog forum. Don't know much about this


• blog discussion - A new and small blog forum that's aligned with a new blog directory called blog catalog

New Way to Get more Traffic to your Blog

BlogExplosion is a great new way to get more traffic to your blog. Its principle is simple. Each time you visit a site through BlogExplosions, someone will visit your site. The more you surf, the more traffic you'll get. This is the best blog directory that I've seen.

Why not give it a try? Also, they have a referral system that helps you get even more traffic. So if you join through here, I'll get a little more traffic and will be very grateful :-) Also, this site is brand new. Be the first ones to join, and your chances at getting lots of referrals (and traffic) are great.

Click here to join BlogExplosion. Thanks!


Details about BlogExplosion:

Two weeks ago I found this great new blog resource called BlogExplosion. In most blog directories you submit your site and wait for traffic. But how much traffic do you get? If you're like most, you'll find you'll get hardly any traffic from directories. Most people are only interested in submitting their own sites, not visiting other sites.

But with BlogExplosion, you can guarantee receiving traffic. After you submit your site, you then can surf other blog sites. Each time you visit a blog site through blogexplosion, you'll gain credits which guarantee others will visit your site when they surf through blogexplosions. The more you surf the more traffic you'll get to your site.

There's been several previous sites that attempted this kind of system. One site that I had tried was clickthru.com. The interface was terrible. It was slow and confusing. I never did get any traffic from this. Also, there's a question about how useful visits through such a system is. Will the traffic really be visits from people who are really interested in your site. Or are they just visiting to get their own traffic?

I believe BlogExplosion is different. It has a fast and simple interface. The traffic you get from it will be those from other bloggers. There is more of a community where bloggers support other bloggers.

Also, BlogExplosion has many features to guarantee useful traffic. First, they have a system where you have to stay at a site for at least 30 seconds. Their system has checks to ensure that a human is surfing, not some automatic surfing software. Also, they have a nice bookmark feature where you can bookmark a site that you find interesting.