Promoting your WordPress blog using social media sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

August 3rd, 2008

Do you feel like you are posting great things on your blog – but very few people are aware of the wonderful content and you would like to rapidly expand your readership/audience? Then perhaps you should consider leveraging social media sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Sphinn, etc.

In theory these social media sites allow anyone to post interesting articles/websites which users then vote on. The articles with the most votes are posted prominently on these social media site’s homepages, which can potentially expose your blog to thousands of new visitors.

In practice however, getting votes on these social media sites is a deep science and art – writing great content is a necessary but hardly sufficient first step to getting many votes. In general these social media sites reward their most active users. For example in Digg, it’s recommended that you first befriend other users by digging their submissions, so that they will reciprocate and also digg your submissions. The most successful users also make a great number of submissions to drive the small percentage of submissions that get voted to the top.

If you decide to try promoting your blog using social media, make it easy for your readers to vote for your post by adding voting buttons to your blog:

There are many articles on the Internet that propose strategies for getting votes on these social media sites.