Social Networking for Bloggers
Social networking is decidedly hot right now. I won’t even try to debate that. What is not so hot these days are catch-all social networking sites, like MySpace. As social networking evolves and picks up more and more devotees, people have started looking for niche communities that cater to specific interests.
Find Your Niche
As a blogger, I have to admit that the new community SocialSpark is the social networking community where I have been spending most of my free internet time. And believe me; I don’t have all that much free time, so I have to be fairly judicious in my choices.
SocialSpark is without a doubt fine-tuned to meet the needs of bloggers and the people who love them. Bloggers can create a personal profile and separate profiles for each of their blogs. In fact, here’s the link to the profile page for Suncoast Scribe. You can give props (essentially like voting) to the blogs you love. You can keep a friends list to help you keep track of your favorite bloggers.
Advertisers Love Bloggers
The site also addresses the tried and true fact that advertisers love bloggers and the people who read blogs. Therefore, advertisers can create profiles, reach out to individual bloggers, and even create advertising campaigns. In this manner, the bloggers get a better feel for what the advertisers are all about and the advertisers are able to learn more about the bloggers who are out there willing to review products and services.
I love that SocialSpark gives me a transparent way to display my blogs’ daily statistics. I know that information about my traffic and the demographics about my readers are important to advertisers, and even to other bloggers and readers.
NoFollow is Hot
Best of all, SocialSpark offers a marketplace where advertisers can enlist bloggers to help promote their websites and products by creating genuine buzz. And, all paid blogging jobs use the “nofollow” tag, period. It’s a search engine friendly process of generating valid opinion articles. In fact, take a look at the links I have used in this article (for which I was compensated) and you will see that I have used the nofollow attribute.
There are now thousands of social networks that cater to a whole variety of subjects. These smaller, focused sites allow users to connect with like-minded people and give advertisers targeted demographics. Niche social networks are also good for marketers who have a product or service they want to promote that relates to a particular interest. A good place to find such sites is a search engine that caters specifically to social networks such as http://findasocialnetwork.com