Using Social News Sites to Promote Your Personal Brand and Blog

Being part of the Social News scene is a lot of work and takes time, but in time, you’ll definitely get something out of it. When you figure out that you want to put time into becoming a user of these social news sites to eventually get your content out there, there are some things to look into before even diving in.

1. Determine the site you want to use and learn how it works. See how the community responds to certain types of stories. Observe the kind of stories that are on the front page too.
2. Find the most popular users, learn about what they do for a living, and befriend them.You can learn the ways they use the site, as well as learn what they know to eventually get to their level – if you’re really determined. There are two benefits for doing this – you learn from those who know more that you do and they could help you out by featuring posts on their own blog.
3. Since being a part of these types of communities takes time, you need to set time out of your day to explore and contribute. Just like being part of any online community, you take time to get to know it and submit stories, as well as comment on other stories you find interesting. In order to build some sort of trust, you need to start by submitting stories that may be useful to others.
4. Connect with other users of the site and get to know them. Just like in real life, you learn from others, so it definitely doesn’t hurt to add people you find interesting to your list of connections on these sites. Once you built a reputation of being a helpful part of that community and build contacts, most likely other people will return the favor back to your blog posts.
5. Ask your friends that aren’t on these social news sites to join. It’s not a community unless there are people participating, and you will automatically have another friend added to your list of connections.

Developing a user profile is also a great way to brand yourself and become an influential part of the community. The most popular sites are Digg, Mixx, Reddit and Sphinn (for internet marketing related stories) with new sites like these popping up all the time.