Are you willing to increase the popularity of your blog though you have already tried all of the conventional methods? Then you might be interested in knowing more about a service called MyBlogLog and how you can leverage it to drive traffic to your blog.

Here, on Robin Good's MasterNewMedia other editors have recently written about the importance of building and joining web-based communities focused on a specific interest in order to gain visibility and authority on the Web.

MyBlogLog is a powerful social networking service that allows you to group your readers into a community and is an extremely important tool for getting a blog off the ground and for incrementing the exposure of your site.

Why? Because thanks to the structure of MyBlogLog, the readers of a blog appear on the home page of the site they are visiting and get their name and avatar displayed in a widget. Through MyBlogLog, readers get to know each other and at the same time they provide the site owner with a range of useful information regarding the websites they usually visit and their personal interests.

Thanks to MyBlogLog every reader, in fact, has her own profile and can join multiple readers communities built around any website; in the same time, every online publisher can create a profile on MyBlogLog and use it as a mean to promote her own blog by interacting with other readers.

In this article I show you how to set up your MyBlogLog while giving you some tips to make it become an efficient promotion tool and traffic generator for your website.

Here are the details:

Seven tips to leverage MyBlogLog to increase your site visibility

MyBlogLog sign-up procedure is very easy and intuitive. I will not guide you through the process of opening an account; however, here is a list of operations that I suggest you to do once you will start using your account on MyBlogLog.

1. Create a good profile

   Create a profile that contains your personal information as well as your blog information. You will have to be as detailed as possible. Make sure you provide appropriate and working contact information as it is always good to give an easy way to others to contact you if they want to. Remember to pay great attention to the tags you add to your site: the community of readers will be able to find your site easily if you pick the appropriate ones.






2. Check out competitor blogs

   Another good tip is to search MyBlogLog for competitor blogs or other blogs that may attract the same readership that you have. Once you find a good amount of them create a list for your own record, since it might be very useful. You could not only use those blogs as sources of inspiration but also as models to look at when trying to understand which are the trendiest topics and how they appeal readers.






3. Make friends

   Once you have a list of blogs that may contain your ideal readers you should "befriend" those MyBlogLog users that are subscribed to those blogs and could potentially be interested in reading your blog. The right way to do this is certainly not the one of spamming anyone with private messages but the one of leaving a relevant comment on their personal profiles or on their website community profiles. From what I have seen and read about, a good portion of these will "befriend" you back and visit your blog - which should increase your traffic and readership.






4. Choose the right avatar

   With the widespread use of the MyBlogLog community widget on high profile websites (such as TechCrunch, ProBlogger, LifeHacker and BoingBoing), there are a few ways to take advantage of the free visibility granted by appearing on the recent reader list.

   A corporate logo or a personal image when you have something more impactful than a typical logotype can be used to promote your "brand" and to start a humble, microscopic, but nonetheless real personal visibility campaign on the blog sites you are currently viewing.






5. Join readers communities

   One of the huge benefits of MyBlogLog is the connected communities feature. On the MyBlogLog user homepage, the links to “Hot in My Communities,” and “New Neighbors from My Communities” are extremely visible but many have yet not discovered what these features are all about. If you are willing to be an active MyBlogLog contributor, using these tools can give a boost to your brand awareness across several different community pages, as by showing your presence in several different communities you can increase the chances of your content being exposed to new and interested potential readers. Increased exposure and visibility is also possible as with MyBlogLog everyone is able to view what their readers have checked out in other communities. If a blogger realizes that some of his current readers were interested in a particular article, she might be more inclined to link that specific article. The more communities you are connected to, the more likely your articles will be seen by other bloggers - which will result in both backlinks and good targeted traffic.






6. Get statistics

   MyBlogLog provides users with the possibility to visualize statistics which provide good insight into where readers came from, what they viewed and what they clicked on. You can find out which kind of article appeals more the readership as well as what doesn’t work. This integrated tool can be more useful than what many traffic statistics services offer and can give you a detailed outlook at what readers do when they come to visit your site.






7. Build new blogging relationships

   As long as different blog audiences are complementary there is a possibility to inherit and in turn share some regular readers with other relevant blogs. As a matter of fact on the MyBlogLog stats page, it is also easy to see to which other popular communities your readers hang out at. Obviously, this is then another great way to uncover new and interesting blog communities and potential partners. You might think about contacting two more related blogs that many of your readers are already members of, and to propose to them to work synergistically with you to collectively increase traffic, content quality and community buidling resources.

Learn more about MyBlogLog

System requirements: MyBlogLog can be installed on any blogging platform.

Cost: free to use.

Reviews of MyBlogLog available in the Blogosphere

Here is a list of interesting reviews of MyBlogLog:

• MyBlogLog: Bringing a Face to Your Community on The Zero Boss


• Cool Tool Review - MyBlogLog on Essential Keystrokes


• MyBlogLog Case Study: Product progression and the widget on Startup Review


• MyBlogLog Review on Blue Fur


• A review of MyBlogLog on Technical Itch

Conclusions

Leveraging social communities such as MyBlogLog can be an effective way to increase your ability to engage and leverage your readers own network and communities to your own benefit.

Via MyBlogLog you can not only enhance your readers ability to discover each other’s tastes, contacts and relative communities, but you yourself are provided with analytical tools useful to analyze their preferences and needs.

By providing your readers with extra visibility, exposure and a sense of community and ownership, you may very well provide a benefit to all parties involved: you, your readers, and the loose network of communities that is invisibly linked to you.

MyBlogLog is right now a positive enhancer of most any web site or blog desiring to increase its ability to build community and to give extra prominence and visibility to its own stakeholders.

Easy to use, free, simple to install on just about any type of site, MyBlogLog has most anything playing iin its favour, and the high rate of adoption among high ranking blog sites shows that MyBlogLog and its community promotion approach are right on target and are here to stay.

Learn more on how to promote your blog and engage your readership

• Online Marketing Strategies: Ten Ways To Promote Your Business With Social Media
• Embeddable Chat Room Allows You To Directly Engage Your Site Readers And Your Instant Messenger Contacts At Once: Meebo Rooms
• Research, Promote And Monetize Your Online Writing: A Blogger's Guide To Twitter
• Online Video Marketing: Ten Ways You Can Use YouTube To Promote Your Online Content
• How To Increase Credibility And Online Visibility Through Free Sharing Of Rich And Relevant Content
• Smart Online Marketing Promotion Tactics Via Content Creation, Syndication And Aggregation: A Good Conversation With Sharon Housley

Originally written by Livia Iacolare for Robin Good's Master New Media, and first published as: "Community Building: How To Give Exposure And Visibility To Your Readers While Building Your Own Community - MyBlogLog"