Just writing content for your site or blog is not enough. Most successful bloggers suggest that even if you may not be the best of writers, you can be very successful as a blogger if you publicise your blog correctly!

You can become a successful blogger if you can reach out to all those who like the topics you write upon. Thus reaching out to your target audience is of utmost importance. This is where these 'Social Bookmarking' sites come into picture.

As the name suggests, these sites/apps allow you to bookmark anything you come across. It is based on the principle that if you like some particular site, let others know about it. Thus if your content is good, yuo can expect a lot of people to come to your site. These social bookmarking sites are like the word of mouth. If people like it, it is sure to spread fast. If they don't, it doesn't matter. You as a publisher don't lose anything!!

There are many of these sites on the net. A search at wikipedia gives out the top social bookmarking sites as:


StumbleUpon
My personal favorite is the one that gave me a lot of hits (so many that I ran out of bandwidth by the 13 of this month!!!) -- StumbleUpon

As the name suggests, people can pin down topics that they have just stumbled upon. You can get going in these easy steps:
Step1: Register yourself at www.stumbleupon.com
Step2: Download the stumbleupon toolbar meant for either firefox or Internet Explorer (Sorry, opera not allowed!)
Step3: Select from a list of categories, those that you like and would like to read content about.
Step4: Edit your profile. Add an avatar etc.. (optional)
Step5: Done!

The stumbleUpon toolbar has a ‘stumble’ button. Press it and you get a random page from among your favorite categories. These pages are ones that have been submitted by others in some category that you like. Then you have the thumbsUp and thumbsDown buttons. If you like some content give it a thumbsup. Hate it, give it a thumbsDown and you will never be shown similar content again! You could also write contents/reviews of that particular page.

Similarly if you are browsing the web and you like a particular page, you can stumbleIt yourself. Tell everyone what category it belongs to and let the masses decide for themselves if they like it or not.

I had written a post of comics by Calvin n Hobbes and submitted it to SU. These past 10 days have given me 40,000 hits from stumbleUpon. Quite alarming considering the fact that I used to have just about 3K hits a month earlier to Dec 07!!!

Do check it out!!!

Ah... Sound very great...
Some question here...

What is your benefit from getting so many hit?
Did you attached some kind of advertisement in your blog?

Does StumbleUpon support html coding on their site?

Yes. Almost everyone has some kinda ads on their blogs. Moreover if people like your site they will surely subscribe to your feeds/bookmark your site and keep comming regularly. It is the only publicity you'll ever need!! If your site displays relevant ads, you can get paid for it and make loads of money too.

I have google, TTZ Media and BidViser ads on my site which is currently down as I have run out of bandwidth this month!!



You could 'stumble' any page you like. You could even have a blank page displaying just 'hello world' and stumble it. But then if people don't like it, it wil slowly die down.

Hopw that answers your question wgn_white.

Out of the two most major social netowrking websites, I'd choose Facebook over Myspace. Just more organized. A little bit.

Pagee is just too slow. A page takes about a minute to load for me. Is it Pagii? Oh well.
StumbleUpon: W00t. I love this site.
Del.ico.us: Not much of an impact.
digg.com: Good for finding things when you're bored, though I'd recommend i-am-bored.com
Multiply: Actually pretty good. If I decided to make a website where'd I share files, I'd choose this.
Last.fm: After the novelty of finding "neighbors" wear off, it's not that fun.

Favorite? None, I generally dislike going on to social networking/bookmarking websites.

Ill take Facebook, because of all the external apps, and there are not many predators on Facebook?
Or are they just more obscure than MySpace?
I like all the apps that other facebookers designed.

I've never tried facebook!!
This may sound very strange to most people but in India, nobody's really heard about facebook!!
All Indians are going ga-ga over Orkut and people don't wanna change over to something new!
I'll be trying it out now.

I also like Digg. Digg is useful if you are someone with loads of time and want to check out articles on the net. StumbleUpon is really useful if you want to let people know about your posts. You can really reach people that are interested in similar topics!

Honestly I haven't tried most of the remaining lot.