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A great idea is for you to join one or even more, online blog communities. I’m going to be looking at some blog communities from a few different perspectives. Even if you don’t own a blog, joining a blog community could open a lot of new doors for you.

Blog communities offer a bunch of different services but probably the most interactive feature that all of the mentioned communities have are viewer widgets. For the most part, a viewer widget allows a visitor on your site to see who else has been visiting the site. It also announces a user’s visit to the website owner and creates a level of interactivity where someone can reciprocate a visit to their “friend’s” site. You can see a couple examples of viewer widgets on the side of this site —> (over there, where you see all of the small user pictures lined up in rows and columns).

“So, what’s the benefit of these blog communities?” you ask. Well, let me tell you! As a viewer, you can see who else is interested in similar subjects as you. Perhaps one of those people also has a blog or website with similar topics that you can check out. They really are like communities, as you will meet new people every day, interact on new sites and just discover all sorts of new things. If you own a blog or other website, a blog community allows you to interact with fans of your’s. I would say the “cut-off line” for companies joining a blog community would be if your company doesn’t update a blog or have anything current to offer a blog community. If that’s the case, just join the blog community as a “viewer” or “voyeur” haha. Some of the blog communities have “rules” associated with your joining, so just make sure you read-up on their policies before you join as a “voyeur”.

There are three main blog viewer communities and one up-and-comer with a similar, yet different idea. Currently I’m only using two of them, but there’s always room for more :P. Here’s a quick review of all four of them:

BUMPzee!: This is an interesting and ever-increasing blog community platform. It’s probably the third most popular after Blogcatalog and MyBlogLog (in no particular order). BUMPzee! has a few interesting and unique features. One such feature is the ability to list how many people are currently online on a site. As a website owner, I find no real use for this feature but it is one of those “this is cool for a day” ideas. A couple other features that are interesting, is the ability to “Bump” articles in a way that is similar to “Digging” an article, and the other feature being the ability to show the most popular articles for the last seven days for that site. Other than those features mentioned, it is pretty much the same as the following communities. At the moment it isn’t as popular, but everyday it seems to be getting more and more popular. I personally don’t like their widget as much as the other sites because I find a lot of the features too gimmicky (but that’s just my opinion).

Blogcatalog: Blogcatalog has a beautifully functional website. It’s very easy to join other people’s blogs or websites as well as mark people as your friends. The statistics that they provide on your blog are a little lacking. I still haven’t figured out how they auto-rate your blog and their numbers for visitors are usually only the number of visitors that visited your site from the blogcatalog site specifically (which is kind of a useless fact). Other than that, the community of users is great and there are some really easy and nice communication tools that allow you to talk or chat with other members. Another nice feature is it’s ability to match you up with other blogs you may find of interest on blogcatalog.

MyBlogLog: I think the best thing about MyBlogLog is that it’s simple. I’m a very technically-inclined person and can understand very complicated things, but late at night when I want to check on my blog’s community, I just want a simple site. Simple doesn’t mean useless. MyBlogLog has all of the essentials that you need or want to see. You can see recent viewers to your blog, recent viewers to your community profiles, recent messages from other users, etc. There’s even an amazing statistics section for your site where you can see what users clicked on, and where people came from to view your site. Of course most people already have these statistics from the web server, but MyBlogLog just simplifies the information so much that’s it’s nice and easy to read. I would say that this is the best or most important blog community platform to join, but once again that’s just my opinion ;).

Criteo: Now this is the new guy on the block and I’m not sure I should be including it on this list but it caught my eye recently. It’s a also a blog viewer community widget but instead of listing or showing visitors to the website, it instead shows links to other blogs that may be of interest to your viewers. Yes, I’m sure you’ve seen something like this before…or you thought you have because in reality this is very different. Criteo actually customizes itself in real-time to each individual viewer to find other sites of their interest and not just related to the current site that they’re on. So say for instance that you normally visit automobile blogs and you came across my blog…well if I had Criteo installed on my site, it would most likely show you links to mostly other automotive blogs and maybe one or two blogs that were similar to mine.

So, if you’re a visitor to many sites and don’t own your own blog or site, I’m sure you can see the benefits of these communities. If you’re a visitor to many sites and you do own your own blog or site, I’m sure you also see the benefits of these communities. And, lastly, if you own a blog or site and don’t visit many other sites…well, you may be wondering what other benefits these communities all have. The answer to that, is traffic! Each of these communities act very well as traffic exchanges. Not just generic traffic, but targeted traffic. Just think about it…whenever you visit someone else’s blog or site, you most likely have an interest in their site or a reason for going there. Whether it be that the site owner left you a comment, or they write about a topic that interests you, there’s a reason for your visit. The same is true for people coming to your site, for the most part, they’re interested in something that you have. Of course you have the occasional people who are just browsing around and curious to find something new but for the most part, people are looking for things. So, the next time you’re looking for more friends, a new audience, a bigger audience or just bored (haha), check out some blog communities! Also, if you know of any other large ones that I’m missing with similar features, let me know!

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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