5 Reasons I Love BlogCatalog

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A few weeks ago I got a message from Monawea over at the iwebis website. She mentioned a big community buzz event she was organizing for one of the social blogging networks called BlogCatalog. I’ve been really pleased with the community so I said sure. The details of the event can be found in her article titled Social Networking – BlogCatalog Buzz Experiment – Join In! So here are the 5 reasons that I love BlogCatalog:

1. Meet Other Great People To Interact With

There are two different concepts that you will find and enjoy after joining the BlogCatalog site. There are neighborhoods and friends. Friends is a concept that links you up with people or bloggers that you resonate with. These show up in your profile under a My Friends list. You can click on the pictures of your friends to go straight to their profiles. Then for each of your blogs you have a neighborhood. People can join your neighborhood if they find they have things in common with your blog or they just like it. Under each of your blog listings you will have a Neighborhood listing with all of the friends or neighbors listed there. Clicking on their avatars has the same effect as clicking on a friend. Under your profile you will also have a My Neighborhoods that lists all of the neighborhoods that you have joined. This gives you a lot of ways to network and connect with people that share your passion, whatever that maybe.

2. Get Encouraging Feedback

BlogCatalog is well… a catalog of blogs. As such you can get quite lost for hours browsing around in the hundreds of very well written blogs. While you are browsing you can also take the time to stop off at the BlogCatalog profile for that blog and rate the blog which allows you to leave comments. This is a great way to give AND receive feedback about the content, design, etc. I love getting feedback if it’s constructive because this helps me to become a better blogger and to become more valuable to my readers.

3. Discover Other Blogs And Find New Ideas

Also while browsing the many good blogs in the catalog I’ve picked up several very good ideas. I can count two very distinct new concepts and/or tools that I’ve implemented as a result of browsing a blog through this community and I’ve in turned thanked those individual authors.

4. Generate Traffic To Your Site

BlogCatalog has a great widget that authors can (and do in most cases) add to their sites which displays the latest BlogCatalog readers of their blog. This displays your avatar/picture which links back to your blog. So of course the more you browse through the community the more your blog link is put out there in front of other readers. You may also pick up some regular readers through the community. Hint: I’ve subscribed to several of the blogs in this community.

5. Umm… It’s Easy To Signup and It’s FREE

Yeah, yeah I know most of them are free, but I couldn’t really come up with a 5th reason. But it is really easy, it doesn’t take that much time and you don’t really have anything to lose. BUT you have so much to gain. So go ahead and JOIN NOW!

Once you’re on board come check out my profile. You can also visit my neighborhood and leave me a few comments. Of course you can also leave your comments right here if you’d like too. 🙂