Do I Overuse The Atheist Spot?
I have a rather monotonous way of sharing posts for this blog. Once I’ve typed it all up, added useful and relevant tags, and put it all into categories, I submit the post. I then check it all looks good on the actual page, and start my submission process.
This usually starts off by submitting the article to Digg, then to Del.icio.us, Reddit, and finally The Atheist Spot. If you want your blog to get popular quickly, I highly recommend this strategy (it helps to actually have something readable as well). I would say that the precious few minutes I spend submitting content to sharing sites like these is one of the reasons I get so many hits and responses.
I regularly check my stats for the blog, and visitors per month has increased exponentially since February 2008 when I started. My technorati authority has likewise increased, and I am awaiting the day it finally reaches the first milestone of 100 (at the time of writing it is at 90). What I am concerned about is The Atheist Spot, the newest sharing site I’m using, but also the most useful given the common topic.
The Atheist Spot is a Digg-like site which operates by user votes. When a blog article is submitted it gets 1 vote (from the submitter). People who read the article and like it can vote it up, and people who hate it can vote it down. As soon as an article gets 5 votes or more, it can get a place on the homepage, which shows the “top” articles.
Why am I concerned?
Since I write an article roughly once every day, sometimes more, I check The Atheist Spot daily as well. I cannot remember a time in the last month when I have not had less than 3 articles in the top 10 at any one time. A few weeks ago five of my articles were on the homepage, making up 50% of the entries listed. Today, I count four, three of which are in the top 4 overall.
I’m naturally glad that people like my articles, but I am certain there must be more deserving blogs out there that are being pushed out of the homepage by my stuff. The Atheist Spot is there to be used granted, but am I overusing it? If I cut down on the posts I submitted to it, I would lose some interest, but I wouldn’t be the dominating blog. Of course conversly, if the reason I am often on the homepage multiple times is because only a few regular bloggers use the service, then I would encourage more people to submit their articles!
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No need to take it easy on the rest of the users, keep those submissions coming!
Hey I hadn’t even thought of doing that. Submitting my posts to those services. Is this a regular practice?
Sean,
I do it every time I write something relevant (so general posts about the blog aren’t submitted. I used to use StumbleUpon but apparently it’s against their TOS so I stopped. Quite a few pages find their way onto StumbleUpon through other visitors though.
Here is something, I thought, you might find amusing :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o
Enjoy :)
Thanks for making me aware of the Atheist Spot, I come here from Digg regularly, (and straight here if no Digg friends have Dugg you recently).
I’ve bookmarked it as a must watch site.
Thanks again.
Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to submit every single post to these sites. You should be submitting the best and trying to vary where you send them. Submit too much of your own stuff, and you’ll typically get penalized.
vjack,
As far as I am aware, only StumbleUpon start getting annoyed when you submit multiple things from the same site. I’ve built up quite a few fans on Digg because of the stuff I submit (as Somnambulator shows) and if I hadn’t submitted things I doubt whether that would have happened.
Likewise on reddit I have a load of comments appearing on my submissions.
I think it is quite hard to choose the “best” articles, mainly because I consider all of my articles to be good (I don’t publish them otherwise).
thanks for the advice. i was always wondering how your blog got so big. probably because i dropped off the face of the earth for a while or because yours is just better! but anyways, i’ma try some of these out.
cheers