There are many options to get your blog the visibility you’re looking for and make contacts with potential clients or other bloggers, and Blogger makes this process fairly easy to navigate. Often all it takes is some quick copy and pasting of code to add a widget to your sidebar that will help open up new ways to get your content noticed and help others find your site.
Blogger provides its own insular form of social networking through its followers feature. By adding this widget to your site, which can be done by simply selecting it from a list of popular widgets from your dashboard, it allows others to click and become a follower of your blog, and one signs in with their Google or OpenID.
This puts their icon and name on your site as a fan, which allows others to click and read their profiles and jump to their blogs. Conversely, it also allows you to become a follower of other blogger sites, and as such, your information will show up on other people’s blogs, allowing others more access to you.
When you become a follower, the blogs you are linked to will appear in your Google reader, along with all of your RSS feeds. This does help to boost your readership, but you shouldn’t stop there, as it is limited mostly to only other Blogger users, but anyone with a Google mail account can sign in and create a Blogger profile to use.
Another option, and one that can be used to link to sites and by sites outside of Blogger, is Google Friend Connect. This handy little script, when posted on any website, allows other people to sign in either from Google, Open ID, Yahoo!, or AOL, create a profile and become a “follower”, just like inside the Blogger network.
This allows people to network on a far wider scale than just within Blogger, and is another way of promoting social contacts. I’ve seen many Wordpress sites for example employing this widget to help connect to the Blogger readership, and vice versa. Getting started is as simple as signing in, and copying and pasting the code as a widget on the layout section of your Blogger dashboard, and this will provide a wider range of sites, social and otherwise, to link in with you, and allow you to do likewise.
A third option for social networking is using the Networked Blogs application from Facebook. Just sign up for the application at Facebook, copy and paste the provided html code into your Blogger widgets sidebar, and this allows people from Facebook to follow your blog.
One of the nicest things about this option is that after you get eleven followers from Facebook reading your page, your Facebook status will automatically update with your blog content any time you publish. This application is another great way to get the word out about your site, about changing content, and to draw in traffic and regular readers, and again, Blogger makes it very simple to do. It looks a lot like the Blogger followers widget, providing icon images and links, so it also allows you to get your information out there by following other blogs too.
The last networking option to discuss today is Google Groups. This is a social networking medium that allows people to join a group and hold conversations via e-mail or through the main site, where files and other resources can be permanently stored. Something you might consider is creating a Google Group for your blog, which will automatically send subscribers an e-mail whenever you publish.
All you have to do is go to your blogger dashboard, then to manage settings and type in the e-mail address of the group you have created. You can then place a widget right on your blog that will allow people to sign up for your group. This also facilitates feedback from those following your site, allowing them to discuss your content or make comments via the group.
Blogger is a fantastic place to start a personal or business operation as it provides so many easy and various methods for social networking. Never before has it been so easy to make contact with others and gain visibility for your content.
Author Resource:
MrCyberSmartWeb- For more information, free videos and podcasts, be sure to check out my marketing resource website: http://www.cybersmartwebmarketing.com/ CyberSmartWeb Marketing Solutions (TM) Your "How To" WordPress Business Web Development Resource Center
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.look4articles.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.look4articles.com/images/rss.jpg "XML Feed For RSS")