My 8 Hours As A Blogging Socialite

Recently I spent 8 hours as a blogging socialite. I found out some awesome things and was shocked at the positive results!

How I Became A Blogging Socialite From The Beginning

When I started blogging 3 short months ago I already had some websites that generated income. The only reason that I wanted to switch to blogging was because it made it so much easier to organize content! I wouldn’t have to design each and every page and I would be able to dedicate more time to writing content.

One thing I didn’t anticipate when I started blogging was how social it is. Bloggers love to be friends with other bloggers! I am still amazed by how friendly bloggers are; people genuinely care about you in this cyber-social world!

A few weeks ago I was reading Wendy’s Monday Motivation and felt compelled to make a goal to meet 50 new bloggers. My motivation to meet them was based on three factors:

1. Curiosity – I wanted to know what’s out there and was hoping to find some new, helpful blogs to read.
2. Social Interaction – Meeting cool people is fun for me and I was hoping that I could meet a few bloggers that I liked.
3. Ambition – I obviously wanted to get some extra visitors to my site and was hoping that this experiment would bring some.

A funny thing usually happens to me when I decide to do things like this. If I’m going to experiment, I love to take the experiment to the extreme. I decided that instead of meeting 50 new bloggers, I would meet new bloggers for an entire, 8-hour day.

I decided to spend the entire work day finding new blogs and introducing myself to the prospective bloggers through comments. I figured that in order to best analyze the results I would need to make the experiment bigger than 50 people. I had no idea how many I could find in a day so I didn’t know how big the experiment would end up.

Preparing For My Day As A Blogging Socialite

The day before I started this little social experiment I had to organize a few things. I first wrote my post for the next day – I didn’t want my readers to miss a day of learning just because I was going to spend my day as a socialite. I also told my friends that I would be turning my phone off. I completely blocked off 8 hours of my day.

How I Approached The Day

I decided that I would completely focus on the new sites that I found as part of the experiment. I never once tried to draw attention to my own site, although I did leave my URL each time I left a comment. Since I felt that I would be more likely to click with bloggers whose blogs are similar to mine, I decided to use Technorati to find them. I went to Technorati and set the search bar to “in tags” and did a search for “blogging tips”:

I didn’t discriminate between the results at all. I visited each site that appeared on the list hoping that I could find something that inspired me to comment. If nothing inspired me to comment I simply moved on to the next site.

Each time I was inspired to comment, I did. I sincerely thanked each blogger who was able to teach me something new. I asked many of them questions and praised their good work. Interestingly, I didn’t really expect to learn much about blogging from the experiment, but found tons of information I didn’t know before. I had to email 6 different bloggers to find out how they were able to do certain things with their blogs. Amazingly, each of the 6 answered the emails.

During my 8 hours as a blogging socialite I visited nearly 300 blogs that were somewhat related to mine. I immediately closed the ones that were splogs (spam-blogs that steal content from others) and read at least one article on the rest. I left a genuine comment that added to the discussion on almost 150 blogs.

Positives From Being A Blogging Socialite

• I met some outstanding people. I can’t believe how friendly everyone was! I asked questions to multiple bloggers and was amazed by the number of them that emailed answers to me.
• My daily traffic grew to over 100 unique visitors higher than its per-day average. During the 24 hour period following the experiment, I got nearly 300 visitors more than my all-time high. Much of the additional traffic obviously turned into daily readers. At first it didn’t really make sense that the traffic spiked that much; I only commented on 150 blogs. After thinking it over I realized that I received visits from the bloggers and their readers.
• At least 22 of the 150 blogs I commented on linked to articles on my site. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there were more that I haven’t been able to find in Technorati. So far it has been exactly a week since I became a blogging socialite, so I would imagine that I’ll get even more links as some bloggers probably haven’t gotten around to reading through my site yet.
• I was added to 4 Blogrolls. Again, there could be more that I haven’t found.
• I got some great ideas for my site. I was able to find a very powerful plugin because I saw it in action on one of the sites I visited. Teaching my readers about the plugin sparked a great debate and the article was linked to by several of my readers.

Becoming Permanently Social

This experiment taught me that being social is one of the best things that you can do to promote your blog. For obvious reasons I can’t spend eight hours a day as a blogging socialite, but I can definitely spend one. You don’t need to spend eight hours to get positive results. Spend a little time each day!

From now on, I will always be a blogging socialite! I would highly recommend doing the same.

This guest post was written by Court Tuttle, who blogs about making money online, SEO and internet marketing at CourtneyTuttle.com.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

1. How I Began Blogging on 90 Minutes-a-day
2. Blogging Beyond the Blogosphere :: SOBCon 2007
3. Connecting via Blogging