Getting traffic via blog communities

This is my first post in a long series of posts on how to get traffic to your blog or website, starting with a good look at the web's current most popular blog communities.

A blog community is of great value to you, because it will get your site noticed by other bloggers. Therefore I recommend that you join one or more, if you want your site to get more visitors and more returning readers.

Technorati

Technorati is a mastodont in blog communities. It's a MUST that you add your blog/site here! Not only will you be able to get widgets for your blog, you are also able to follow your own traffic-rank closely. Your Technorati rank (also known as "authority") is based on how many sites that link back to your blog, and how many people who favorite your blog.

It's a very large community, probably the biggest on the net!

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is also a fairly popular community with a lot of users. You can join other people's communities and interact with other users by sending messages. MyBlogLog also provides you with a widget that tracks all visitors to your site, and saves them for you to see in up to 7 days. It means that you can check where your visitors came from, e.g Google searches and images.

It would be smart to join this place as well, as it is a huge community. Not to be missed!

Blogcatalog

Blogcatalog has the same basic features as MyBlogLog, but in another design! Except there is no tracking-system at Blogcatalog. Features includes widgets with your visitors shown, discussion groups, messaging other users and the opportunity to reach the front page of Blogcatalog with your blog (know as "The Blog Spotlight" and "Featured Blog".

Fuel My Blog

Fuel My Blog is what you'd call a "voting community". You can add your blog(s) and other users can vote you to the top, if they like your site. Once at the top, you will recieve a great deal of traffic from other users of Fuel My Blog. I might add that I hardly got any traffic from this place myself, but maybe you could! It's up to you to decide if it's worth putting the time and effort into this place.

Spicypage

Spicypage is a quite new community compared to the others. It is still in it's Beta version, and to me it looks a bit unprofessional (I'm talking about the design of the page!), but it's still worth a shot in my opinion. The concept is much like Fuel My Blog, with the voting. But you get a lot more with Spicypage incl. "Post your favorite website", groups, messaging and widgets for your site.