Susan Suarez

MyBlogLog is another great community to get involved in besides my favorite StumbleUpon.

In a way MyBlogLog is a type of social networking like MySpace, but bringing readers to blogs.This blog has been up for about 6 weeks and already has about 239 members. While my traffic from MyBlogLog is nowhere close to the amount of traffic from StumbleUpon, it can provide some decent traffic with relevant contacts.

How To Increase Popularity With MyBlogLog?

The great thing about a member’s home page is that recent visitors who viewed your page are tracked. Clicking on a visitor’s avatar takes you to their profile. It’s a great way to connect with readers and network with authors that have similar blogs.

Using a memorable avatar/photo for your profile is very important to get a return visit. For my picture, I use a cartoon of a woman on a computer (same as my heading) but using a real picture of yourself also works pretty well. You want to be memorable.

Getting Into Hot Communities

During this blog’s first week on MyBlogLog (July 2007), it was placed on Hot Communities for 3 days in a row. Hot Communities seems to be based on a growth calculation and Top 50 Communities is based on the amount of new members by total population every 24 hours.

Hot Member

Being a Hot Member can drive considerable amount of traffic to your profile. If you want to be a hot member, try submitting yourself for consideration to Robyn to be handpicked. Profiles are chosen by stats and have an interesting story or page.

MyBlogLog Statistics

I have Google Analytics on my sites but I also run MyBlogLog stats to get a daily quick check up on my stats. It’s also a great way to find out Where Readers Came From, What Readers Viewed and What Readers Clicked. If you want to see more stats or want to them real-time, you’ll have to be a paid member.

Tagging

Tagging will help members find blogs on desired subjects, so it works to your benefit to attach the correct tags to your page and tag fellow members, helping others get the recognition they deserve and usually they’ll return the favor.

Also, it’s an advantage for popular members who are tagged as Hot Members regularly. MyBlogLog will do a feature on those members.

To Use or Not Use the Widget?

Adding the MyBlogLog Reader widget can be beneficial if you want to add networking convenience for your readers. You can easily discover who’s reading your blog and send them a message or join their community. It can definitely help build a strong reader base and the widget will validate your blogs worth, especially if a big-time blogger shows up on your site. Readers will thing you have something important to offer!

The Cons of MyBlogLog?

Even though MyBlogLog can provide some good traffic, it does have a few cons.

1. It can be easy to spot the marketers and SEMs – usually they are using pictures of “hot chicks”
2. Comments are becoming useless. A lot of those community comments are becoming spam-like and close to 75% of the comments I receive are spam. If you have a spammer, use MyBlogLog Tags to tag them with SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer). The spammer can delete the tag, but the tag will be registered internally. If moderators see a member routinely tagged SchMOe, that member “will be dealt with”.
3. Sometimes you don’t want someone to know you visited a site because you’ll land on it and realize it’s the “wrong” kind of site (if you know what I mean) and you’ll be shown as one of the most recent readers on that page! How embarrassing.

Overall

MyBlogLog will bring in a some traffic, but not a whole lot – it all depends on how involved you are with communities within your niche. It rather reinforces relationships between bloggers.

Susan’s Community