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This is a guest post by Kevin Geary from This is Broken Blog, a blog exposing important things in our daily lives that are broken and need to be fixed. It’s entertainment and education. Come visit us to see more of what’s broken (and even submit your own ideas).
For every great blog promotion strategy, there are five that suck. Really suck. They suck so bad that using them can get you blacklisted by real bloggers, ignored by annoyed readers, unfollowed on Twitter, and possibly placed on the terrorist watch list.
Being successful is not just about doing the right things. Avoiding the wrong things is just as important. Nobody wants to take two steps forward and three steps back; especially in blogging where success is few and far between, often takes a long time to become successful, and has a gigantic Dip.
If you’re to have any chance at success, you need to protect your blog from yourself. Protect it from your lust for quick success, your desire to become a ProBlogger in six months, and your general blogging ignorance (if you’re new).
10 Blog Promotion Strategies to Avoid at all Costs
1. Leaving “great post” comments on other blogs.
One of the best ways to get readers to your blog early on is to leave comments on other blogs. Of course, there’s a right and wrong way to go about this. Here is an example of a good and bad comment, using ProBlogger’s comment section as an example.
Patrick O’Keefe recently wrote a guest post on ProBlogger titled “Enhance and Grow Your Online Community Through Appreciation“. Here are two comments from that post:
Shane wrote:
Very good post, thank you for writing it.
Baker Wrote:
I saw this first hand, but really I stumbled into it unintentionally. I put up a bumbling video of myself thanking everyone for allowing me to have over 6400+ visits in my first full month blogging. The video wasn’t great quality or presentation, but people realized it was very genuine and I received several comments and e-mails. Again, I wasn’t out to really benefit like this, but I realized a side benefit from my regular reader’s really connecting with the video. Thanks again for 31DBBB, it helped me so much in having a great start!
Shane, you’re comment is broken. Obviously, you got one of the top 3 spots (which drives a lot of traffic on a successful blog like ProBlogger). But where’s the sincerity? Where’s the realness? It’s a fake comment meant to do one thing, drive traffic. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and it’s a big no no.
Baker did it right.
When you leave comments on other blogs, remember these three things: sincere, relevant, and valuable.
2. Emailing random blog authors and asking them to link to one of your posts.
I made this mistake early in my blogging career. Needless to say, I got a lot of hate mail in return.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. If your first impression is a spam-looking (no matter how good your intentions are) email to a random blog author trying to get them to link to your posts, you’re not going to make any friends.
Instead, find a way to add value to their blog and engage them with that in mind. They call it “link love” for a reason. Very few time-tested bloggers have sex on the first date. Build relationships slowly over time and you’re in like Flynn.
3. Asking random blog authors for a link exchange.
This goes along with number 2. Usually new bloggers will write to other bloggers and try to get them to place a link to their site in their blogroll in exchange for a link back. It’s a good way to build pagerank and get recognition, especially if you’re in the blogroll of a highly trafficked site.
But what’s a blogroll for? It’s to help readers find other quality sites on the same topic. Insincere link swapping devalues the goal of a blogroll.
Again, build that relationship. Add value. You get rewarded for being genuine, not for being hyperfocused on getting traffic.
4. Making Twitter all about you and your blog.
Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Darren recognized that early and started TwiTip, a site that gives you tips on using Twitter effectively. Unfortunately, as Twitter gets more mainstream it’s going to lose value. That’s just the nature of free networking and exposure.
Twitter is my third highest source of traffic and I don’t have all that many followers. What I do have is important followers. Relevant followers. And I only follow relevant people who I actually care to hear from. That’s what Twitter was designed for. That’s what makes Twitter effective.
The people who are breaking Twitter (yes, it’s being torn down in terms of value as we speak) are the ones who use it to promote only themselves and only their blog. They’ll throw a retweet out there every once in a while and join in on a #followfriday session, but that’s about it. Their main goal is to drive traffic without adding any value. And who can blame them? It’s free and easy.
Let me give you a tip. Free and easy asks for abuse. Abuse is a great short term strategy. So is eating donuts for energy. But what happens when you get a big sugar spike? Crash. If you abuse Twitter and Facebook and others you’re going to crash as soon as people catch on to your antics. Shamless self-promotion on Twitter and social networking sites is a horrible long term strategy.
5. Joining forums simply for promotion.
See point number 4.
Forums are a great way to drive traffic to your site if you do it right. Don’t be a broken forum user. Put a tasteful link to your site in your signature and then make it your mission to interact the way the forum was designed. Be on the forum for the benefit of others and to further your own education, not to promote your blog. If you add value (see the trend), you’ll get the traffic.
6. Submitting all your posts to social media sites.
Are you a social media spammer? Do you have 70 social media buttons below your posts? Do you submit every post to most of them? It’s cheesy. Again, things that are free and easy get abused. It’s your job not to abuse them. Write great content and you’ll get recognized in time. If you force it, you’ll get recognized as the spammer you are and you can kiss success bye bye.
Instead, join the three most relevant social media sites and work to build value. Promote 10 times as much of other people’s material as you do your own. And don’t forget: sincere, relevant, and valuable.
7. Writing for search engines.
I want you to achieve the top spot on Google. Really, I do. But as a reader, I’m hungry for good content that’s sincere, smooth, and easily ingestible. Your keyword soup gives me the runs, in like, I run far away very fast.
If you write for the search engines and not for your readers, you’re going to get the top spot in Google. You’re going to get a lot of traffic and your adsense revenue is going to be great. But you’ll never have a great blog. You’ll never have a dedicated tribe of readers. You’ll never be a respected resource.
Search engine spiders aren’t going to give you good word of mouth. Neither are the strangers that find you on google who visit you once, hate your content, and leave.
Good content can and should be keyword dense. The trick is to do it without making my head spin. Copyblogger will teach you how it’s done.
8. Loading your site up with badges to all the social media communities you joined overnight.
Have you ever been to a blog that has a sidebar full of social media and social networking profile links? They’re on just about everything. On top of that, they throw in a big mybloglog widget and an entrecard widget.
You can be a jack of all social media sites, but you’ll end up being a master of none. Besides that, it’s just a bunch of clutter to your readers. Google beat out Yahoo because Google was simple and Yahoo was hectic. Do you want your readers to focus on the content or to focus on everything BUT the content?
Zen Habits is the master of simple. You have no choice but to read his content because there’s nothing else to do. And look at his subscriber count. Take a hint. There’s no way you can add value to a hundred social media profiles. Be selective and go for clean.
9. Copying someone else’s style or idea.
The easiest way to look creative is to not be creative at all. There’s enough creative out there that you can just copy and paste and people will probably never be the wiser.
And I’m not talking about lifting content from other blogs. That should be an obvious no-no. What I’m talking about is finding a successful blog and copying their overall style and even parts of their design. If I look like them, I’ll have their success. No, you won’t. You can never be more original than the original. Think about how that affects readers…
If they like the original, they’ll stick with the original. If they don’t like the original, they’re not going to go for a copy cat. You lose both ways. When you copy what your competitors are doing, you ensure that you’ll never pick up any market share.
If you want to be the best, you have to stand out. Figure out what everyone in your niche is doing and do the opposite.
10. Using search engine auto-submitters.
Have you seen these things? Get your site indexed on 50000000000000 search engines instantly!
This isn’t particularly bad, it’s just a waste of time and money. It’s not necessary. The only search enginge you need to target is Google and getting your site indexed is free and easy.
Use Google’s Webmaster Tools, get a sitemap plugin, write great titles and great content, and get “link love” by building relationships and adding value to other people’s projects. That’s all you have to do to own Google search. Throw the gimmicks out the window and focus on sincere, relevant, and valuable.
I know there are more broken strategies out there. I had fun talking about the top 10. Now I want you to expose more of them in the comments section. Let’s see how many we can come up with. Go.
Another bad commenting strategy is to attempt to tie everything back to your blog.
“That was a fantastic post on the War of the Roses. I had similar thoughts on building shelving units here at http://www.irrelevant.com/wasteoftime“
I think taking without giving back is a broken strategy. There are those who are happy when they are noticed, but do not go out and notice others. Sometimes, it’s all about the karma…
When it comes to a place like Facebook, where it’s about friendships (for me, anyway), where do you think the line should be drawn? I do a lot of interacting with my friends and such, but I also will link to my latest blog entry on my wall. Would you think it’s better to only do this once a week or so, not every entry? I tend to blog just once a day anyway. I’m not sure where the right balance comes in.
I left Twitter because so much of it was “see my blog, see my blog!” It was harder for me to interact there.
I have to agree that I find it annoying when I get a “Shane” comment because it doesn’t feel real. Uh, especially when it doesn’t seem to pertain at all to what I’ve posted. ;)
@Miranda,
Yeah, basically anything that has to do with sitting in your easy chair and making it big, right? Too many people do it and then they whine about how they’re not going anywhere.
“Do you have 70 social media buttons below your posts? Do you submit every post to most of them?” – Regretfully, I was guilty of this very thing when I first started a little over a year ago. Since then, though, I have come to realize, through both experience and educational blogs like yours, that “less is more” with regards to recognition and content sharing.
I submit only the most highly relevant posts to outside networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc), and leave the rest up to my actual, credible audience to decide what gets floated around. And so far, I am quite pleased with the results.
Not coming off as “spam” or blatant solicitation is a key factor in establishing a trustworthy presence to current and potential audience members. Letting my actual readers decide what is “good enough” to get passed around is also a nice way to figure out what sorts of posts or content the audience prefers, as well.
So, in short, “Very good post, thank you for writing it.”
Just kidding. :)
Great post :-)
No, seriously, this is an excellent post! Most bloggers that are just starting out do not understand the importance of doing things right, instead of doing things just for the sake of it!
People don’t realize that if another blogger or social media user thinks that you are doing things just to divert traffic, it would be really difficult to change that view later. So, its best to do things right from the beginning!
Very good pointers, and all in all, a great post.
This is what I loved the most – “Abuse is a great short term strategy”. So true!!
I agree with the concept that there are no short cuts at the table of success. It’s so interesting to me that blogging and social media are so obviously similar to off line relationship development.
We wouldn’t think of doing things like 1-10 to people in person but yet it’s so easily done by so many people on line because they are looking for the “short cut to success.”
Blogging & social media will either promote you or expose you and far to many people get exposed.
Connect with like minded people, provide value unconditionally and the rewards will come back to you. Even if it’s through another medium you didn’t expect.
You’ve hit it on the head about “Bad Blog Karma.” I actually touch base on this a lot about the development of human relationships via social media & blogging and real world experiences.
Thank you for the actual “how to’s” of bad blog karma!
You’ve mentioned, on several occasions, that social media badges and buttons are bad. I tend to disagree. On my web-site they serve two purposes. First it allows me, myself, easily add bookmarks to my own posts – those the largest and the most interesting, promoting them. But more importantly, it allows the visitor to bookmark my post. They are convenient tool for the visitor and are important to have.
As for abusing social media badges (tip 8), I must say that this arguments works for just everything. It doesn’t matter what you abuse. This can be anything from flash menus, overuse of red color to ads. Any type of such abuse will scare the visitor away. It is important to know when to stop with such things, no matter what it is.
One thing I have tried is offering to swap pieces for other related blogs. They write for mine, so I get more content for my blog. They take my articles and publish them on their blog, getting me more exposure. The reverse are true for the people I swap with:
Examples of a guest post on my blog:
http://blog.curvine.com/wordpress/2009/04/24/guest-post-build-it-and-they-will-come-%e2%80%93-naught/
Example of a post I had published on another blog:
http://www.mainstreetmediasavvy.com/make-sense-of-diy-publicity-results-with-google-analytics-part-1
@ Angela,
What you’re doing is fine. I can tell you’re sincere about what you’re doing because you’re worried about it. As long as you keep that sincerity, you’re good to go.
I would recommend that you get back on Twitter and try again. You’re getting the “me me me” tweets because you’re following the wrong people. Don’t ignore Twitter because some people abuse it, it’s too powerful a tool.
When in doubt, add value. If you don’t think your actions are adding value, stop what you’re doing and go back to the drawing board.
Guilty as charged!
I am sure I’ve done the “great post” thing before… sincerely speaking.
The great thing is overtime bloggers can overcome this type of error ;0
you’ve raisied some valid points here-
@businessethos
Uh oh. I just added one of those dang social media widgets about an hour ago….but it’ll be down in about 2 seconds!
I never saw if from that perspective. Excellent point. Now off to make that edit!
It will be interesting to see how many of these comments are sincere ;)
I’m glad to know that I am not doing any of the 10 ways NOT to promote a blog.
Blogging is all about being personal and sharing value. If you do those two things you will eventually succeed.
I liked number 4: about Twitter.. That’s the quickest way to get me to unfollow someone.
I also really liked number 9. So true.
Great post!
I will “starred” this post in my GReader. Not because of me, I’ve already learned this lessons, but for the many new bloggers that every week show up in my niche. I;ve noticed them copying content, asking for link swaps with almost no content in their places, misusing twitter… almost everything.
Every time I see a new blog in my street, I will send them this link.
Have a great day,
A very interesting post, and you (well, the problogger site at least) know I’ve done a few of these things in the beginning of my blog (I’m in my third month of blogging now and learning fast), Yes it was easy traffic but it wasn’t honest traffic. the 31DBBB challenge ended and my visitor numbers dropped significantly.
But now they are on a slow rise again, I’ve found the places that will bring me traffic and am making an honest contribution there. Twitter remains an easy way but there’s nothing better (to me) than getting thanks from others who I retweet.
No more shameless selfpromotion, in time, readers will find your blog and as long as you’re honest and write things people want to read they will find you. I’d take 100 honest pageviews over 1000 views through some shameless selfpromotion scam any time.
I like your reference to Zenhabits in particular. One of the early inspirations for me to start blogging. In the end it’s all about content and Leo has got that one down to an art form. Simplicity is the way to go I think. There will always be people who like the crowded blogs with lots of images and things happening all over the place (Reminds me of the “Magazine” assignment.) but most of the serious blogs I follow show a simplifying trend.
As a long time forum member over at macrumors, it’s extremely irritating when people join and in their first post start linking back to articles they wrote that only apply in the loosest sense.
It amazes me how so many people still don’t get social media. Even big companies use it the wrong way – to market their stuff.
Rather than use it as a way to connect with others, and build a stronger relationship, which drives traffic way better than simply talking about your stuff all the time, they continue to spam others.
Is it any wonder why the majority of Twitter users don’t have any more than 100 or so followers?
Can we add bad grammar/spelling to this list? For example, using “you’re” instead of “your”? Sorry, snarky…but it drives me crazy.
In “mommy blogger” land, what drives me crazy is every other post being a paid post or review. If you are blogging to make money, fine, but I probably am not going to read it. Something heartfelt and useful is what will make me come back.
I have gotten comments on my blog that include a link to a product/service that doesn’t even pertain to my topic. The more amazing part of that is that they did it twice with two separate names on two separate posts.
All that does is frustrate people…why bother.
Thanks Darren! As a relative new-comer to blogging these have actually put me at ease. Others have told me to contact other blogs for help, but I have been wary of doing so as I would rather take the time and gain users through quality content and not just links. Sure, I may get 100 visitors instead of 20, but are they really going to read my posts? Probably not.
I guess that being shy has prevented me from becoming a self-promotional prick. I have been standing firm with the whole providing “consistent and quality content” will drive visitors who will then become REPEAT visitors as new posts appear.
Hmm. I was rather nervous to read this post at first but once I got into it I found that I’m not really breaking any of those. I have a few badges but mostly mine are for feedburner, google reader, those kinds of things. I really only use twitter as an extension of my blog. I do have a FB account too but I really don’t use it or promote it much. There are some GREAT tips here and I will make sure I don’t break any “rules”. :) Thanks! Very helpful as usual.
Great post. Its better to just do things right the first time around; rather have to clean up the mess you make. Thanks!
Kevin, I really enjoyed your entry, especially as I am just getting started in the blogosphere. I am actually a student interning for a company where I am their Community Manager, and I was wondering if you can provide some tips on how to balance between being personable and not going too far, especially when you are not necessarily blogging or Tweeting for yourself but for your company. I think it is an issue that few people have adressed so far and would be interested to hear what you have to say about it.
One of the difficulties, for example, has been the desire not to push the corporate agenda too much, but I was still hired to push it! Thanks for any advice and I look forward to reading your blog.
Thank you for these tips. I’ve had a year of active blogging, and after spending time to build the relationships you suggest, I find it a rewarding way to spend my time.
I appreciate all the points you outline here, and will work even harder in my second year to implement them.
Kate
In regards to blog posting, I don’t see why people have to write long drawn out comments just to make it look like they’re not trying to get backlinks. It’s just a well known fact that most people comment on other people’s blog for this reason. Sometimes, I really can’t stand all the b.s. ‘rules’ with social blogging!
As for Twitter…well, majority of people don’t follow others because they are really interested in what they have to say, it’s just become another way for people to spam each other! I’m trying to like Twitter but so far, it’s become just another site to submit blog feeds to.
This is an excellent post! I’ve made a couple of these mistakes, but thankfully not too many. It’s great to know I’m doing a few things right.Most of the above information I came across in bits and pieces, here and there. I’m glad I found you (via Twitter) because now I don’t have to wander around on the internet. I can start right here.
Hello ,
I have seen a post were it was just full of links to different post in that blog .I do not think so it was blog reference post , but every single word was linked to some other article .
Yes you can drive traffic to your pages , but cannot just let every word be inter linked .What do you think , am i right or not
Regards
Sudeep
I agree with the blog post comment. If you are going to leave a comment make sure it adds and compliments to the blog post.
I genuinely appreciated this article. I am new to online marketing and I have read all the tips and things an online marketer should do and I wonder how long it takes for somethings to come about. I sincerely want to offer to people value but it seems hard to do so when so many are abusing the system. How can a individuals create traffic for themselves when, because of abuse, so many just brush off links and suggestions as “selling tactics”? I have something of value to offer but it is certainly proving challenging because of what appears to me to be abuse…just as was mentioned here. I welcome any suggestions from others. Thanks for allowing me leave a comment.
As a newbie in blogging, I want to increase my feedburner subscribers. I tried to get people’s email address especially gmail accounts and entered them into my blog’s feedburner subscriber form. But it didn’t help me in increasing my subscribers stats. Thanks for writing this post. This is a great eye-opener for me.
It still astonishes me that people would waste their time and comment on a Blog with only one sentence. It’s like, what are you trying to do? It actually looks more like Spam than anything else. It gets annoying for people who read the comments to try and even get more out of the article.
And for the people that do not think that you need to add to an article with your comments, stay away from this promotion. You’ll only begin to annoy people.
That was a great post, thank you for writing it
OK, OK, I just couldn’t resist….seriously Darren, this is my first visit to your blog. I followed a link from Facebook and I’m glad I did. There are so many great points here.
I am no expert on this but I think those who are offenders of the blogging “rules” don’t realize how transparent they are….many times to the point of embarassament! I especially agree with your take on the keyword soup issue, and the violation of copying content/style! Hate that – and I HAVE seen it!
Being new to blogging, there are tons of articles on what to do, but rarely any on what NOT to do. Great post and thanks for the direction.
I agree with Taco John, unless it is useful. If I remember an article (whether it be mine or not) I like to link it back. But only if it is relevant. This gives interested readers another perspective on a similar topic.
Great post Kevin!
Every forum I have signed up for I have noticed the relentless self promotion occuring, it was a short stay with those forums when I saw such activities.
Maybe people violate these blogging sins because they just do not trust that their work will produce the results. People are always looking for the quick fix or a short cut. Its probably more of a mental thing for the constant offenders more than anything else.
Great post, thank you for writing it.
OK, OK, I just couldn’t resist…..seriously Darren, this is the first time I have visited your blog. I followed a link from Facebook and I’m glad I did.
You make so many valuable points here. I am no expert but I think the offenders of the blogging “rules” have no idea how transparent they are, many times to the point of embarassment! I especially agree with your comments on keyword soup, and on the point of copying content/style…and I HAVE seen it done!
I just wrote a post about how to specifically write for Search Engines (7) lol. But amateur bloggers surely will like it.
Nice selection – though I must say that some are very obvious. For example, I would never try emailing random blog authors and ask them to link to my posts. It amounts to ‘ bad manners’. And it decreases credibility.
What is difficult though, is to avoid getting too keyword focussed. For instance, a title like ‘How Not to Promote Your Blog: Top 10 Broken Blog Promotion Strategies’ is likely to get more traffic than a simple ‘How Not to Promote Your Blog’. Adding ‘Top 10’, ‘7 ways’ shoots the post in search engine rankings.
One has to strike a balance between ‘readability’ and ‘searchability’.
Here here! It’s about time someone said these are bogus. The number one rule of marketing is make relationships – with your readers, your Twitteer followers, your fellow bloggers. That is the #1 way to win at this social media game.
Wow, Kevin, Thanks for the mention in the article. With as many mistakes as I’ve made it’s awesome to see someone catch one of my bright moments! :-)
The truth is I’m really just a genuine fan. It’s easy to be sincere, relevant, and valuable when you are really passionate about the topics you comment. When I find myself stretching to comment on something I’m not really passionate about, I head for the big red X in the top right corner!
Thanks again!
@Asswass Dont get me wrong but sometimes intentionally or unintentionally bloggers like us promote such activites !
And regarding point 1 there are times when people write comments just for the sake of doing so without having any knowledge of the post which is being talked about !
Hey Kevin, thank you for this…I think you have confirmed what I have been thinking in the back of my head for a few weeks now. I am (gulp) one of those people that joined every social network out there overnight when I first started my blog, thinking it’s what was supposed to be done. But, the only one I really use are Twitter, Facebook & if you consider it a network..Blog Catalog. Yet, I have been using Ping.fm to submit my new blog posts to all of them at once.
I am like you, in that I despise fake comments that are all about just getting a backlink, and I don’t won’t even follow people that spam the crap out of the networks I belong to without adding any other value. But I just realized when I use Ping to send out my blog post to networks that I never go to and form relationships on, I have become that person I despise! Bleh…
So, thanks…I know what I need to do. Good job on getting cutting straight to the chase!
I understand why emailing more successful bloggers for a link would be annoying. What do you think about emailing successful bloggers to get them to answer some questions for a short interview to put on your site?
What would be the non-annoying way to approach this?
wow! I can see some of the same mistakes I made, when I first started. The same mistakes, I now hate when I see others trying to do the same thing.
Mistakes like asking other bloggers to a link exchange on their blog roll. How dumb could I have been, in thinking that was a good idea. But, that was 3 years ago, and now I am a bit smarter, but still learning. I still make promotional mistakes, but believe I am getting better. For example, am I misusing twitter and facebook in my promotion of my blog. I’m not sure, but that is a question I keep asking myself everyday. So maybe I am doing something right there. Thanks for the post. I will be rereading it several times, to make sure I learn all I can from it.
@Bizmind,
Yeah, definitely not the way to go about it. Lol.
@ Coree,
No problem, I’m glad you found it useful. The auto ping is fine if it’s to a place you frequent often and consistently add value to. People WANT to know about your new stuff as long as that’s not all they are told about.
I dont see any harm in joining blog networks ( i my self have joined 5 of them ) provided you remain active in all of those.
Its all about promoting your blog to the extent that it does not look spam !
The social media realm is, in large part, a self-policing community, and figuring out what works (and where) is a process of trial and error. If you dive in to Twitter and start hemorrhaging followers faster than you can RT, then you learn you need to try something different. If you join a forum and notice that every post other than yours garners enthusiastic discussion from the community, then you learn you need to try something different. There is no wrong way to learn how to do social media right; intentionally doing it wrong is what gets you banned, blocked, and blacklisted.
After reading this post, it’s great to know that many of them may not apply to me, which tells me that I promote my blog in non-broken ways. That’s good to know. One of the items mentioned in your post about sending everything to many social media websites is something that I used to do but learned that it wastes a lot of time and is not very effective because every website is different and all blog posts may not be relevant to readers on sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc.
In reference to your request that commenters “expose more” broken blog promotion strategies, these are what I can come up with at the moment:
1. Emailing random bloggers asking them to subscribe to your blog.
(This is just as bad as asking for random links, one of the items mentioned in this Problogger post).
2. Leaving links in your comments on other blogs.
(Many bloggers have already written about this, so I always wonder why it hasn’t really sunk in to some bloggers who still do this. Many blogs have those separate “website” or “URL” forms that will produce a link, so there is no reason to add them in your comments as well. It looks spammy).
Given the bevy of content that exists out there, it is nice to come across something so concise and well written. I believe appropriately commenting is giving recognition where recognition is deserved. All the other “link love” is icing on the cake.
One of my qualms with the evolution of Social Media and Web 2.0 is this opportunitistic approach people seem to be taking. In that, “I will post your link, if you post mine.” Can you really only do something for something in return? I suppose to maintain the status quo, but why not just link to a post simply because it affected you in some way?
Same goes for twitter and facebook. You follow, I follow. You friend, I’ll confirm. It’s a give and take that is slowly getting out of hand and diluting the social media landscape.
I really appreciate you writing this piece. I look forward to passing the knowledge along to fellow bloggers and revisiting it when I seem to have lost site of what my purpose in the blogosphere/twitterverse really is. Cheers!
A person friended me on facebook (he was a friend of an friend) so I accepted his friend request.
Little did I know, every “what are you doing now post” was about his blog, his blog, his blog, and “how about all you people give me a shout out this morning?”
I found it incredibly annoying and, to be honest, really narcassistic. I refused to even look at his blog because of it.
I actually unfriended him today.
I have a link to my blog on my facebook, but I never promote it… my friends will read my blog if they feel like it and I’m not going to shove it in their face.