A blog directory and blogging community for Indians.

I received an intimation from Linkedin that said someone wanted me to accept his invitation to join his linkedin network. As usual, I first clicked on his (Vijay) profile, came to know about his blog directory for Indians.

I took a quick glance at blogbee.in and was very much impressed with the site. I accepted his invitation and sent a message to him that I liked his site and would try to promote it in my blog. So, here I am fulfilling my promise.

The Blog Bee (still in Beta) is more than a directory of blogs. The site looks pretty good and submission of blog, verifying it are easy.

What you can do in Blog Bee.

* Submit your blog under various category
* Submit your blog post URL
* Pickup friends from members
* Invite your friends
* Participate in the forum
* Your submitted blog posts can be automatically posted in your Facebook and Twitter
* You can tweet others' post and Facebook 'like' it.
* Search blogs by city and by category
* Suggest a category

My observation
*The FAQ is found her 'Guest posts' tab.
* When I searched for blogs under 'fashion' category my blog was not shown as listed.(I submitted under 'Fashion' category though I was also able to suggest 'Beauty and Makeup' category while doing the submission.
* The site's home page shows a slide show. It doesn't stop after the three slides and starts again. It is a bit annoying.
* There are only 23 members as on date. Since the site is young, it is understandable. Considering its usefulness, members should actively contribute towards it promotion.
* The site is a bit slow in loading.
* While updating the profile, the site is making the address fields compulsory which would not be filled up by all. Consequently, I was not able to say anything 'About me'.

Please join Blog Bee and spread the word. If you have time, share this blog post URL in your social media sites such Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest etc.

How to find blogs of your interest?

Often, my blogging trainees question me who I stay updated all the time in blogosphere. I tell them I read several numbers of blogs daily by subscribing their ESS feed. 

How to find such blogs in the first place? After all, there 

are millions of blogs on all kinds of niche. It would be a herculean task to filter-right?

With so many blogs currently available online it can be difficult to determine which blogs are worth reading and which are not.  Yes, this is definitely difficult. You can eliminate blogs of poor quality only by trial and error. There are no other ways.

Through this blog post, I will share with you my knowledge on finding and selecting blogs to read through search engines, blog directories, Google alerts, Yahoo! Answers and so on.

Using Search Engines to Find Blogs

Search engines are one of the most dependable resources for bloggers to find useful blogs. An Internet user who is looking for a blog on a particular subject can start the process of finding these blogs by entering relevant keywords or phrases into a popular search engine and carefully reviewing the results provided for this search. 

Blog Search Engines:

There are search engines exclusively for blogs.

·         Blogsearch.google.com

·         Technoratity.com

One simple way the Internet user can use search engines to find blogs relating to a particular subject is to include the word blog with the keywords or phrases entered into the search engine. This will help to filter the search results and may push blogs towards the front of search results. However, Internet users are better off searching for collections of blogs and then searching within these collections for ones of interest.

Finding Blogs on Message Boards

Many Internet users rely on message boards to find interesting and informative blogs. This is because many message board participants who have a blog often find ways to make others aware of this blog. This may either be through the process of incorporating a link to the blog in the message board user’s signature or, when appropriate, supplying the link to the blog directly in the message body of a post on the message board. 

Although many bloggers may take advantage of the opportunity to promote their own blog through message boards, those who are interested in finding new blogs will likely not have time to review all of these blogs. Therefore, it is wise for these Internet users to be somewhat discriminating about the blogs they choose to visit. One way to do this is to only visit blogs of regular forum posters who offer valuable information to the conversations on the message board. 

The Internet user may also wish to avoid blogs which appear to be posted as spam. This is important because these blogs are not only likely poor quality but also visiting these blogs only encourages the blog owner to continue to spam message boards with his link. 

Blogging Communities:

I have found some of the best blogs that I read regularly in several blogging communities.

·         Blogcatalog.com

·         Bloggers.com

·         Blogfrog.com

Making Use of Yahoo! Answers.

Yahoo! Answers is an excellent source to ask for anything. Highly knowledgeable members would be eager to provide answers which are invariably very good.  

Get your blogs the right exposure.

I spent half of yesterday searching for ways to promote my blogs. I got lucky as I compiled about a dozen new avenues to propagate my blogs. It was a revelation to me. There are more web sites that are buried in the vast web that can be used by every blogger to promote their blogs, build a strong readership and gain useful insight on what is happening in the blogosphere.

I will blog about my findings one by one. Here is the first website for your blog promotion.

http://bloginteract.com/

It allows bloggers and freelance writers and journalists to meet online virtually and submit their favorite stories, photos, videos, and more.

I would call Blog Interact as a bloggers community to engage and interact with other bloggers from all parts of the world.

Oh yes, it is a perfect niche social bookmarking site targeted at bloggers.

Another bloggers community at Blog Farm.

The Blog Farm is a recently started community of bloggers that offer several ways to generate instant blog traffic.

How it works
* Add your blogs and confirm ownership by placing a badge on your blog.



* Find and add other bloggers as your friends. This will facilitate reciprocal visits instantly.

* Find blogs by category, read, leave a comment. You are assured of similar courtesy.

* When you visit others' blogs, you can cross-post articles of interest. An assured way to syndicate your blog posts.

* There is a forum that I found to be very active. The first thread itself offers to add your blogs for which you want followers.

* The forums has more uses to gain knowledge and ask questions.

The site is a bit slow; you need patience to explore it. Overal, it is an excellent platform for blogging communities to increase visitors to their blogs, syndicate their blog posts and generate regular viewership.

Instant blog traffic through new bloggers community.

I found out an excellent bloggers community at bloggers.com (it is not blogger.com) In the wake of impending closure of Yahoo! owned mybloglog.com, this comes as a great alternative to blogger to build network and increase blog traffic.

I would say bloggers.com has more networking features than mybloglog.com

Features of bloggers.com
You can add all of your blogs in your dashboard. The system publishes a thumbnail of your blog automatically. You need to place a small badge of them in your blog as a verification method.

You can browse the blogs by several parameters including your native town and add them as your friends, visit their blog and follow them, vote for them, etc.

They will also come to know who voted them, who followed their blogs and this naturally gets you a visit to your blog.

Remember to click on "talks' tab which is further arranged in several categories. Read the discussions, participate and this again directs visitors to your blog.

The blog directory itself is organized in various categories to add your blog and browse through others' blogs. This paves way for fresh blog content ideas for bloggers.

There is a personal messaging facility too to interact with friend bloggers.

Whenever I log in, I could not come out for another hour. There are responsive blogger and some great blogs that I never found in any other blog directory.

Remember, it is a bloggers community. It is not just enough to add your blogs and exit, hoping others will visit your blogs. You must visit as many blogs as you can based on your interest of course. Add bloggers as friends, vote for them, participate in talks and you are guaranteed for a long haul of blog promotion.

A free online blogging community.

I was introduced to Ben Ogden (virtually) and that led me to find out about Thoughts.com, a free online blogging community.

A blogging community is a place for blogger to interact. I love these community of bloggers. Such places have been a great source of learning and also an excellent source to build up readership for my blogs.
Thoughts.com also gives you a free blog with unlimited bandwidth. Bloggers can create blog, upload audios and videos and photos.

There is also a forum which has taken off at full speed. The forum is huge with plenty of topics that are diverse. It has about 96,000 members but only 10% are active.

Bogging communities are very useful avenues for blog promotion and blog traffic.

Incidentally, Ben Ogden is the founder and CEO of thoughts.com.

Blogging communities.

One of the blogging communities like Mybloglog.com and Blogcatalog.com is Bumpzee.com. It is definitely not as popular as the other two and I could point out a couple of reasons for that.

1. I always have trouble logging in there. Their system keeps saying that my login details are incorrect. And I know they are correct.

2. Their response to bugs is not forthcoming at all. Or, may I have overlooked it? I doubt so.

3. Their website is certainly slow in loading.

Though I don't find anything wrong with the users of Bumpzee.com, somehow I feel they are not as enthusiastic as the members of the other two mentioned above. It is true that many members of may use all the three but it is just my feeling.

Any feedback on this? Do you know of any other active blogging communities?

BlogCatalog goes social and absolutely viral.

If only you spend more time in Blog Catalog, you will realize its immense potential to the promotion of all your blogs.

They keep coming out with enhancements that enables its users to make use of all the features in an enjoyable way. For example, I liked their 'groups' from the launch date and visiting them once in a way. I should visit more frequently.

Then their 'discussions' section is also participated actively giving me a chance to learn hundreds of things.

Now here is their latest announcement:
"In the next couple of days, BlogCatalog is launching a social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others.

That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too. This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral".

I feel with this feature, Blog Catalog compels the attention of bloggers and making it as the unbeatable leader in Bloggers' Community.

Do you know the 9 rules?

Knowing the 9 rules is easy but you need follow these 9 rules as long as you don't join it.

After reading a few of my blog posts, one veteran internet marketer from U.K. emailed me and complimented on my blogging knowledge. I considered it as a very good compliment coming from an Englishman.

He recommended that I visit 9rules.com and start reading the articles there since he found them as excellent.

Si, I obediently visited and browsed a few articles on writing and women. I can't say that I am very much impressed since the style of writing did not make me linger to fully read one article. It must be that I have other blogging assignments that are on the back of my mind.

Well, 9rules.com is said to contain well written articles on a great array of topics. Visit the site if you have time or inclination to read contributions from others.

191 blogging communities to join.

This is definitely a day of accidents. Since morning, I have been landing on several sites accidentally and all of them are very useful to us and all of them are new too.

Here is the first (casualty)find:

"BlogSoc.com is bloggers society site. It is made by bloggers for bloggers and main reason why it was created is to promote interesting blogs and bloggers themselves. If You want to promote Your blog and meet with society, it is right place to be."

It works like this:
We the member bloggers are allowed to create our own community (they call it society) and we also can browse the communities created by other, join and contribute.

For example, I found these three societies:
Million Dollar Dreams
easyclick4cash
My first million dollars

But I am afraid there is nothing in these. It seems, every member who registers there, create a society to show cause their blog.

The blogmaster says, "now BlogSoc.com members have great opportunity to earn shares in our society earnings and in future cash out real money."- I think it won't be much.

Join now, become member of our society! http://www.blogsoc.com/

As of now, there are 191 different societies totally.

Interactive groups at Blog catalog.

When I received an email notification from Blog Catalalog announcing the launch of groups like Google and Yahoo groups, I did not hesitate a second to browse various groups and join as many as 15 groups that interested me.

Link exchange group, Technorati favorite group, blogging tips and ideas group, widget group are some of the groups that I joined.

I am sure this will increase the visitors to my blogs and also I can learn many things about blogging. There is even a seperate group for WP blogging platform.

Many groups have already contain several hundred members. I think blog catalog is slowly overtaking mybloglog.com in popularity.

Connect with bloggers.

I did not expect to write about another blogging community only two days after I wrote on the same topic, inviting information from my blog readers on blogging communities.

Well, here it is The Good Blogs-the latest website that I joined to promote my blogs. It is a place for all of us to get connected with other bloggers worldwide, park our blog urls, interact with fellow bloggers and what not!

I am a highly optimistic lady, expecting new visitors to my blog every five minutes. I simply love to get connected. I know I have nothing to sell from blogs, I only share my knowledge and would like very much to gain knowledge from my dear blogging friends in this Universe.

Their interface is beautiful and more functional. But their widget is not all that useful like mybloglog.com's widget.

This is their widget:
















They say that every time a reader visits your blog, you will be promoting other bloggers in a block like the one you see above. Similarly, you will be promoted by other members through their TheGoodBlogs block on their pages.

This is fruther elaborated on their next page which says something about channels and slots to select the content. This is rather confusing to me. I must acknowledge the fact that I don't understand it. That is why I have removed the widget from my blog after keeping it there for two days.

Image courtesy:Thegoodblogs.com

More visitors through blogging communiies.

In my side bar, you might have noticed two widgets provided by mybloglog.com and blogwoods.com showing the recent visitors to this blog.

Both the above websites are blogging communities where bloggers register their blogs and join different communities that are related to their blog topics.

Then bloggers place the custom widget in their blogs' side bar. When co-members of the same community visit your blog because they are interested in your blog, they are shown as one of the recent visitors to your blog in the widget.

If you click on the image of the visitor, you are taken to their profile page and it is up to you visit their blog, interact further to exchange links and views.

This is the most authentic way of traffic and link building. The contribution by mybloglog.com in this sphere is phenomenal.

Blogcatalog.com is a similar service provider.

There is one more blogging community that I came across today and it is Bumpzee.
It also works the same way like mybloglog.com but with a different interface and one major difference.

In bumpzee, you add your blog in the appropriate existing community (category) or start your own that fits your blog topic. Your submitted blog has to be approved the owner of the community.

I also like fuelmyblog.com. I read several blogs there; I am quite impressed by their top quality and content. The interface is like blogwoods.com but when your mouse moves over the images of the bloggers, you will see what their blog is about with proper links to take further action.

Bloggers cannot afford to overlook these traffic avenues. It is also great way of building friendship, share knowledge and support each other.

If you know more such blogging communities, please make a comment.
Thank you for reading.

Earn points and convert it to cash.

When was the last time I took a break off blogging, I don't remember.

But of late, I have been getting loads of email from my blog readers to ask for some finer details about blog content and blog networking. Well, I like myself when I am useful to somebody.

Have you heard about Gather.com?

It is a community of bloggers who are looking to generate extra traffic and also interested in reading others' blogs. Whenever you make a blog post there, you earn some points which can be converted to goods or cash.

I joined and tried to upload a few posts and found it very easy to do. Today, I got two new visitors to my blog because I used Gather.com to promote my blogs.

I know my readers are intelligent and are quite at navigating social networking websites, so I won't go in to more details about Gather.com

Just use it and share it.

Spicy Age- a new blogging community.

I am simply not bothered if you call me crazy but I simply community blogging and I will never get tired of it.

Spicy age is the new one on the cyber space.
Spicypage lets you post, comment on, vote on, share your favorite sites or blogs with your friends and others like you. Discover and bookmark the new and the best sites & blogs out there, and connect with people of the same interests as you.

The concept of Spicypage is extremely simple and straight forward: In their words, "We want the user to tell us what the best site/blog is out there. We want to know users' experiences with the sites, their likes and dislikes. After all, the best site/blog might not be the one with the most visitors"

Founded in September of 2006, Spicypage is the social online community where anyone shares, talks about what websites or blogs they discover on the net. It is a friendly community that allows everyone to find easier ways to spread the notable sites or blogs when stumbled upon them.

Network with over 2 million members.

A blogger who is resolute in building up traffic to his blogs will never say 'NO' to any new method to increase visitors.

This can be evident from the popularity of myspace and its likes.

Tagworld:

Based in Santa Monica, TagWorld is an online ecosystem that provides the most comprehensive and tightly integrated set of publishing, communication and networking features to support and enable the social web

TagWorld is helping build the Social Web by providing a unified set of easy-to-use, web-based services that will let users create and engage in a more meaningful, social experience. The Social Web empowers people's ability to engage in self-expression and communicate and share information with whomever they choose.

Community members can meet new people, build a website, discover new music, video chat, maintain a blog etc.

The company was founded in July 2005 and is privately held.