10 Little-known Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

This guest post is by Onibalusi Bamidele of YoungPrePro.com.

Getting traffic to a blog is the major challenge a blogger faces. Many have read about various traffic generation strategies, but they find it difficult to get traffic to their blogs because these tips are no longer as effective as they once were. For example, guest blogging used to be very effective, but now that a lot of people are doing it and talking about it, it’s no longer as effective as it used to be.

Here are ten little-known tips to get traffic that I’ve discovered from my own experience. Implementing all ten tactics at the same time isn’t that effective; the way to get the best from these tactics is to choose two or three tactics that you think you like, and focus all your efforts on them for a period of time. You will be amazed at the results you will get.

1. Secret blogging clubs

A major and underutilized way to get traffic to a blog is by joining secret blogging groups or clubs. Very few people are using this particular method, but it can be very effective if you focus your efforts on it.

Secret blogging clubs consists of a group of bloggers with one aim: to help each other spread the word about their blogs with a view to generating traffic for each others’ blogs. The concept is simple: you join a club with around 50 members, share each others’ post with your fans and followers (around once a week), and this will generate more traffic, since it exposes your blog to a wider audience.

You dont need to worry about spamming and the likes, because groups like these are heavily moderated. Also, it is not necessary to share every link that is posted to the group—you only need to share the links related to your niche, that you feel are valuable.

A great example of an effective secret blogging club is the DailyBlogTips Retweet Club by Daniel Scocco. A post of mine that went viral through a secret blogging club was my guest post on getting more blog comments—it presently has 97 comments and 87 retweets on a site that averages 15 retweets and 40 comments per post.

2. Social blogmarking sites

Another underutilized but effective way to get traffic to your blog is by making use of social blogmarking sites. Even though this concept looks similar to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, it operates differently.

A social blogmarking site can be useful irrespective of whom you are and your status on the network. All you need to do is write your best post and give it the best title. Submit it to your favorite social blogmarking site and, if it’s voted onto the site’s homepage, it will send a stream of traffic to your blog. The articles that make it to the front page are not determined by the authors who submit them, or dependent on the domain name of the author’s site. The quality and title of the article is all that matters.

I also respect social blogmarking because of the quality of traffic it sends. The visitors that come from the blogmarking site I’m involved with (Blokube) spend an average of ten minutes on my blog. Presently, this is one of my best traffic sources, as far as traffic quality is concerned.

3. Ning communities

Getting traffic to your blog through Ning communities is a great way to get traffic to your blog, yet few bloggers use this method. I learned this formula from Kim Roach and it keeps on sending me traffic, even months after I use it.

Like blogging, a lot of people have a version of themselves or their business on Ning.com. You can create a portal in the form of yourusername.ning.com, which can also be a great way to get traffic to your blog.

All you need to do is help community members with their questions, and reference your blog if necessary. There is also a place where you can submit your blog posts for the whole community to see—another great traffic source. If you plan on doing this, you don’t necessarily need to write new posts: you can submit some of your old posts with a link back to your blog.

Not all Ning communities bring results. Some communities will send you zero visitors, while some will send you hundreds, so it’s important to be wise when choosing a community you want to join. I have discovered that what works is to make sure you join a Ning community that’s related to your niche, and has over 5000 members.

4. Free, no-catch ebooks

This is another powerful but underutilized tactic to get more traffic to your blog. I didn’t use this strategy until recently, but when I did, I got awesome results.

To use this technique, write as many free reports as you can. A report is a simple, seven-to-ten-page ebook. Make sure you embed links to your blog in the ebook, and encourage readers to visit your blog. Then, distribute the ebook to free ebook directories, post it to your favorite forums, ask other bloggers to help you share it, and do as much as you can to spread the word about it.

What has worked best for me is sharing it on my favorite Internet marketing forums, like Digital Point Forums. After utilizing this particular strategy, I saw a spike in my traffic: I got an additional 60-80 visitors per day for some days, and over 100 new blog subscribers.

5. Content syndication

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are not using this particular strategy, but it can be highly effective to syndicate your blog content to big online portals in your niche. Most of these portals are visited by countless people every day, and syndicating with them will go a long way to give your blog a traffic boost.

Great examples of some of the best content syndication sites I’ve found are Alltop and The Daily Brainstorm.

6. Blogging collaboration

It pains me to see that this particular traffic strategy is not better utilized. In 2010 I collaborated with a lot of well-known and respected bloggers to give my readers some entrepreneurial advice.

I was able to work with 24 successful online entrepreneurs, who contributed to the post, and shared it with their Twitter followers and Facebook fans when it went live. This sent me double my usual number of daily visitors and, eventually, more subscribers and followers. It is also one of the most shared posts on my blog.

Collaboration is a great tool and every wise blogger will use it sometime. Try to get some of the top bloggers in your niche to contribute to your blog; once the contribution is live, encourage them to share it.

7. Online podcasts

This is another great and underutilized way to get traffic to your blog. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income is very popular for his podcasts, and has been able to build a successful blog based on this and other methods.

While the podcasting technology is not new, very few people utilize it. Yet you can get more eyeballs to your content by creating a great and informative podcast relating to your blog. Submit it to the iTunes podcast directory and as more and more people search for podcasts relating to your topic area, they will end up discovering yours and, if it’s good, might end up visiting your blog.

8. Online groups

This particular approach is almost as old as some of the biggest websites on the Internet, so I’m amazed to see that very few people use it. I didn’t realize the power of this tactic until the day I woke up to see a spike in my website traffic generated by a LinkedIn group.

A lot of people still congregate and look for solutions to questions in online groups; many of these groups are also highly respected by Google, so they are indexed and ranked quickly. Thus, you have a great potential of getting traffic to your blog by utilizing good groups. The post I published to the LinkedIn group I mentioned attracted over 200 visitors from that group in the week it was published.

Two of the most popular online groups are Yahoo groups and LinkedIn groups—check them out.

9. Authority sites

I didn’t realize how powerful authority sites were until I interviewed successful entrepreneur Raymond Lei. He wrote a Wikipedia page in which a link to my interview with him was listed as one of the resources. This link sends me continuous traffic from Wikipedia even today.

You can use this strategy with some of the biggest websites on the Internet; since most of these sites find it easy to rank for competitive keywords in the search engines, you may find it easy to get traffic from them. For example, you can read and review some of the top books in your niche on Amazon while including a link back to your blog. Or interview the top bloggers in your niche, then include your link as a resource in their Wikipedia page.

10. Webrings

This is also a very effective traffic generation strategy that many people overlook.

A Webring is a collection of websites that are linked to each other. A major advantage of using a Webring is that it also helps you get high quality links which means both short term direct traffic and long term search engine traffic for you. Probably the most popular Webring is Webring.com.

These are my favorite little-known traffic tactics. What are yours? How have you got traffic to your blog? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Visit YoungPrePro.com to learn how Onibalusi makes over $3000 online monthly and how he gets over 10,000 visitors to his blog every month. Download his guest blogging guide to learn how to get thousands of visitors from guest blogging. Also, make sure you follow him on twitter @youngprepro.

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Are Social Bookmarking Sites Dying?

A couple of weeks ago Technorati released the State of The Blogosphere 2010, and one part of their report that caught my attention was the traffic sources breakdown.

The report illustrated that bloggers are getting social media traffic from two websites mainly: Facebook and Twitter. All the others have been dwarfed, as you can see in the image below.

Some years ago getting in the front page of Digg, StumbleUpon or Delicious was the dream of any website owner, but it looks like that is not the case anymore. Facebook and Twitter are the only options right now.

And there is even more evidence to confirm this trend. Digg launched a new version some months ago, and it pretty much collapsed ever since. Its loyal users abandoned the ship claiming that the new version completely changed the dynamic of the site, and traffic is going down hill. I remember that a couple of years ago the top stories would get as much as 3,000 diggs, and now they get 200 or 300.

What about Delicious? It was one of the first social bookmarking sites, and it was tremendously useful, with a huge number of users who loved the service. Last week Yahoo! (the company who bought the site back in 2005) announced that they will either be closing Delicious down or selling it to someone.

I haven’t seen any news about StumbleUpon, but I don’t think it is going that well either. I used to get a lot of traffic from it on most of my websites, and that is all gone. Most of my webmaster friends are seeing the same pattern, so people seem not to be stumbling that much anymore.

All this background information to ask the following questions: Are social bookmarking sites dying? If so, why did this happen? The idea of bookmarking web pages socially seemed like a solid one, and if you ever used it you certainly saw the benefits. Despite that users are moving on to new and different things. What do you think?

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Fanning the Social Media Flame for Viral Exposure

Are you a content marketer? If so, you have a choice to make.

You can sit around and wait for your content to go viral.

You can hope you’ll get sudden bursts of traffic, hope your readers will spread the word, hope your content will catch fire.

Or you can bring your own matches and lighter fluid to set the dang thing aflame yourself.

As bloggers and content marketers, which will you choose?

Sure, sometimes the passion you have for a subject will be enough to ignite a spark and compel your audience to share your content with their network. Being able to unleash something with such conviction and power that it combusts on its own is great.

Over at my SEO consulting firm Outspoken Media, we’ve been able to do it several times.

Sometimes we post something like The Power of the Unexpected, something that goes hot without us lifting a finger. As content writers, we live for these moments.

However, they almost never happen.

What is more common is that marketers need to fan their content to help it ignite and go viral. And sometimes that means stepping in when an accidental hit shows signs of life. How do you recognize those signs to take advantage? Here are some methods we use at Outspoken Media.

Identifying the spark

You know what’s normal for your community. You know how many comments an average post gets, how many tweets, how many shares, etc.

When you start to see activity that is double/triple what you’re used to seeing, act.

For example, early on we published a post called It’s Not The Recession, You Just Suck. Almost immediately after hitting the publish button I noticed the post being retweeted and passed through social media at a velocity that dwarfed anything we had seen prior.

Once we noticed we had a spark, we jumped in to add fuel and fan it.

Adding fuel to the fire

As soon as you notice a post showing signs of life, it’s up to you to keep the momentum going.

On the social Web, that means keeping the conversation alive. Find people who are talking about your post and encourage them. Respond to comments, engage, fan the debate, and keep the conversation on a healthy note.

When we called out Robert Scoble last year for spreading misinformation, he was the first person to come and engage on our post, and he did so negatively and aggressively.

The tone he set could have killed the conversation right there and caused people to be fearful of jumping in. But we weren’t going to let that happen. Instead, we went in there to engage Robert and show the community this was just the beginning of the conversation that would ultimately take place. We made it obvious that we were still in the post listening, and that everyone who commented would be heard and responded to.

No one wants to hang out at a party that’s dead or on its way out. Its important people see you’re still there.

Another way to add fuel is to allow readers to subscribe to comments so that they’re alerted each time a new voice enters the fray. This will keep them in conversation mode. It’s good for debate, but it’s also good in terms of SEO. The more page views the post receives, the more time people spend reading comments, the more it’s going to give off positive toolbar data to the search engines and help the post appear on an Alexa hotlist.

Fanning a positive flame

So, let me fill you in on something you already know — it’s really hard to have an intelligent conversation on the Internet.

Things always start out okay. Someone chimes in to offer an intelligent opinion and then, almost before your eyes, it devolves into threats, accusations and commentary about who still lives with their mother.

While it’s 100 percent entertaining to watch people have emotional breakdowns in public, conversations that get too far off track hurt your chances of going viral.

As the owner of that community, you’re responsible for fanning the flame in the right direction. When you see personal attacks being made, it’s up to you to steer the conversation back. If you think people are going too far, moderate.

Be careful, though. Viral conversations are typically rooted in debate. So you don’t want to discourage or squash it, but do keep things productive. You need to be the adult in the room, regardless of how good it feels to throw things.

Hitting the social streets

Once you’ve helped fan the flame, hit the streets!

Make sure your piece has been properly submitted to all the right social media sites, that it’s been Stumbled, that it’s on Reddit, that niche social sites are aware of it, and that it’s hit all of the communities and blogs you know are friendly to you.

Once you complete that, look outside your bubble to find other networks that may find your content interesting. What you’re trying to do here is pull people in from other networks so they’ll go out and talk about it with their community, one that doesn’t currently follow you.

It’s great that your own readers are passionate and involved in the conversation, but you want to use the natural sparks to pick up on other readers to help grow your blog and authority.

Tipping off mainstream media

You’ve covered your bases on the social networks, now look toward news sites and blog aggregators that may be interested in the conversation happening around your post.

If you’re part of the marketing community, you want to watch aggregators like TechMeme and TweetMeme. If you have a hot social media story, you want to tip off someone at Mashable. If it’s Google or heavily tech-related, tip off TechCrunch. If it’s a broader tech story, tip off more mainstream outlets, as well.

For example, our post about what we perceived to be brandjacking by Seth Godin received coverage from Business Week. My partner Rae Hoffman’s post on Google’s Real Time Spam Problem was noted in USA Today. And my other partner Rhea Drysdale is often featured on CNN.

These don’t happen by accident. They were opportunities created by tipping off the right people at the right time. This is where having a linkerati list comes into play. It helps you know who to contact for what type of story.

Making sure the post is optimized for SEO

The final thing you want to do is properly SEO your post to capitalize on search.

Going back to our Robert Scoble example, when we saw that taking off, we went back and edited the title tag to include Robert Scoble’s name. It was a small tweak that allowed us to take advantage of Google’s freshness factor and appear in his News results.

It’s a temporary rank, but it made sure that anyone who searched for Robert Scoble that day found our post. Sometimes that’s all you’re looking to do, to help keep the momentum going and get eyes to the page. You have to build awareness.

Content marketers don’t have the luxury of sitting back and hoping something goes hot. It’s up to you to help things take on a life of their own, whether it was planned from the start or you picked up on early signs of success.

Savvy content marketers always have the matches and lighter fluid ready for when a spark presents itself.

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Newsletter Readers Do Click Ads

I recently attended an event where a presenter talked about the reasons that they didn’t use email marketing as part of their online business. One of the main reasons that he presented was that he didn’t think that people coming from a newsletter would click the ads on his site.

His reasoning was that people coming to his site week after week from a newsletter would become blind to the AdSense ads he was using (his main source of income). So rather than working on building loyal readers he put all of his efforts into SEO to generate one of readers.

There were lots of nods in the room from attendees – on one level what he was saying did make some sense – but for me it didn’t quite ring true.

You see my biggest days of earnings from AdSense are always the day I send out my newsletter. It drives a lot of traffic but also does seem to convert in terms of income (all kind, including eBook sales, affiliate promotions and AdSense).

Today I decided to dig a little deeper into my Google Analytics stats (which now integrates with AdSense) to see if what he said was actually true. Here’s what I found when it comes to AdSense earnings on my photography site from different sources of traffic over the last 3 months.

I’m not able to share with you actual eCPM (earnings per 1000 impressions) or CTR (click through rate) as I think it’d break the terms of service with AdSense – but I think the chart speaks pretty clearly for itself.

‘Aweber’ is the traffic coming from my newsletter and I’ve included a number of other sources of traffic to compare how it performs. You can see on both eCPM and CTR that Aweber out performs not only Search Engine traffic but traffic coming from different types of social media and referral traffic from other sites.

Newsletter traffic is certainly converting on both CTR and eCPM. This is confirmed when I look at other newsletter traffic (for example traffic coming from AOL and Yahoo’s mail servers) which is similarly higher than other types of traffic both in terms of eCPM and CTR.

What I also found interesting in these results was traffic coming from sites like Facebook and Flickr which both again out performed Google traffic on both CTR and eCPM. I had always assumed that social media traffic didn’t convert as well as other types of traffic but at least on these results it seems that not all social media traffic is alike. On that topic – Twitter didn’t convert anywhere near as well as Facebook.

Of course these sorts of results will vary from niche to niche. Perhaps because my photography site is not specifically a ‘product’ site but is a ‘how to’ site the traffic from Google is a little more general and less in a buying mood which could decrease the conversions – but for me at least it is an indication that I’m on the right track investing time into growing my newsletter list!

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Want More Readers? Try Expanding Your Internet Universe

Ever notice how everyone on the blogs you read seems to agree on everything?

We all know that content is king, that transparency is good, that sleazy sales pages are bad.

We even seem to know the same people: Brian, Sonia, Naomi, Johnny, Dave N, Chris G.

What we forget is that this little galaxy we’re occupying is only a tiny sliver of the universe. And if we want to expand our audience, we need to start boldly going beyond our own safe little corner.

I was recently exploring some strange new worlds on the Internet, places I hadn’t ever been before.

On this particular journey, I wasn’t looking for content, but for patterns and themes. Here’s what I found:

• Blog and site designs in the rest of the Internet universe are quite different. We might think that Thesis, Headway, and Frugal themes are everywhere — but they aren’t.
• Their presentation patterns are different. There are many more implementations of left-column, three-column, and, occasionally, one-column layouts.
• The way they display banners and advertising is considerably different.
• Highlighter much? The fake yellow highlighter we make fun of here as being ridiculously old hat is a common, accepted tool to focus attention.
• There are far, far fewer comments on posts, even on “big” sites, than what you’re used to seeing in our galaxy.
• The blogs you see on “everyone’s” blogroll simply don’t appear.

Their trends and pattern are different. They’re not necessarily worse, and they’re not necessarily better.

We’re in a hot, flat, and crowded galaxy

We often forget that the Internet is a network of data. Instead, we focus on sites that are just individual nodes in that vast network, and we mistake the part for the whole.

We don’t really understand what’s going on, because we don’t have a good mental picture of it. It’s too big to get our heads around.

The particular galaxy that we’re in is pretty dense, heavily-populated, and interconnected. We read each other’s stuff, link heavily, and have backchannel conversations. This interconnectedness and density creates a strong gravity well of ideas, patterns, and themes.

We’re just one galaxy, though.

Some galaxies are as tight as ours and others aren’t. But there’s so much space between us that what we do here hasn’t quite reached them yet, like the light from distant stars that takes millions of years to reach the earth.

We’re prone to assume that if we don’t perceive something, it doesn’t exist. Bad assumption.

Seeking out new civilizations

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a bit more on your game.

People who write effective copy that’s SEO-friendly do better both in search engine results and in getting readers engaged.

If you’re here reading this, it’s probably because you want to make your site better, and because you know where and how to find good information about that. That makes you different than most inhabitants of the other galaxies.

Just remember that what’s known and common here isn’t known and common elsewhere. In other galaxies, there’s no launch fatigue as we know it. There’s no third tribe. (Or first tribe, or second tribe.) Hell, there might not even be a Seth Godin.

Forget about “fields of opportunities.” There are whole galaxies of opportunities for you out there. While the particular aesthetic styles might be different, the principles of effective copywriting and SEO are universal. You don’t have to lower your standards just because the new galaxies you’re exploring seem to have less-evolved ideas of what makes a good blog.

To put it another way, visiting Rome doesn’t turn you into Caligula.

Instead of waiting around for the citizens of other galaxies to come to you, go to them instead.

Tips for interstellar explorers

Instead of using StumbleUpon in the usual robotic way, actually stop at a promising new website and get engaged. Hang around. See who they’re connected to. Be useful, relevant, and helpful there rather than on your own website or in your usual galaxy.

Click through to a commenter’s website, then click an interesting, unfamiliar link there. Repeat that a few times.

Follow your curiosity and you’ll probably find yourself in a third- or fourth-degree network from yours. Which pretty much puts you in the land of painted green dancing girls and monsters made from scraps of industrial carpeting.

It’s in those networks that you’re going to find your new readers. It’s also in those networks that you can really become next years’ A-lister, because A-lists are all relative to particular social networks.

If you’re happy where you are, then, by all means, stay put. Keep farming your own home planet.

But if your curiosity and ambition aren’t satisfied with that, consider this:

Someone out there in the Internet-universe is struggling with something you learned three years ago. What do they need, where are they, and how can you help them?

About the Author: Charlie Gilkey writes about meaningful action, creativity, and entrepreneurship at Productive Flourishing. Follow him on Twitter to get bite-sized slices of mojo.

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5 Blogging Activities Perfect for Summer

For many blogs, summer is the slow season. People are on vacation, schools are out, dorms are empty and most sites see a noticeable drop in traffic until the cooler weather comes.

So what is a blogger to do with this time? Even if one’s site isn’t outright dead or quiet, it’s often much less active and that can create a case of summer blues, where bloggers feel as if they’re putting in the hours but not seeing the results they expected.

However, there’s good news. The slower months are an excellent time to do some very valuable work on your site. Some of it is to gear up for when things ramp up later, others exploit the reduction in competition to have a more immediate impact.

Here are five things you can use your summer doldrums for to make your site that much better.

1. Change/Improve Your Theme

Since traffic is less, you can relax a bit on your posting schedule, either removing a posting or two per week or shortening what you write daily, and put that time back into your site by improving your theme.

With the release of WordPress 3.0, there’s a lot of great ways you can upgrade your theme, not to mention new themes you can change to.

Simply put, more time and fewer visitors makes summer a great chance to make these changes and make sure they’re done right. It is certainly better to have some downtime or make a blunder now than in peak season in a few months.

2. Do Some Link Building

This means two things. First, reach out to other bloggers and see about swapping links when practical. Second, write some high-quality linkbait posts and push them out over social media channels in a bid to draw others to link to you.

During summer months, though there is fewer people online, there is also less competition for those eyeballs. This is an excellent chance to get some inbound links to help your SEO and build new roads to your site for when the masses return.

3. Get Social

Summer is a great time to either gets started or get more involved in social networking. Since people often continue to tweet, check Facebook and manage other social profiles even when away from a computer, largely because these activities are mobile-friendly, those activities don’t drop quite as much during the summer months.

Take advantage of this and start working on your Twitter following, make some new friends on Facebook and so forth. Get out there and grow your social media/social news presence.

It will not only help grow your audience for your posts in the summer, but help you accelerate growth after the slow season ends.

4. Try Out New Ideas

Got a new idea for a column but aren’t sure if it will take off? What about a new video series you’ve been wanting to try? Now is the perfect time to try it out. The people still at your site are, for the most part, your core audience. Now is the chance to try out new ideas on them without worrying about what newcomers will think.

Though it might seem risky trying out things your core readers, remember that they are the ones who are most likely to give you honest feedback and not knee-jerk reactions. Experimenting now lets you maximize the amount of feedback you get from dedicated readers while keeping the new voices to a minimum.

5. Upgrade Your Site or Move Hosts

Finally, if you need to upgrade to the latest version of your blogging platform, switch to another system or change hosts, now is your chance. A few days of site downtime or erratic behavior will matter less now than in a couple of months.

If you have any upgrades or updates that you’ve been putting off for fear of breaking your site, now is a good time to make your backup and give it a go, especially if you do it during the slower part of the day and week.

In short, you’re never going to find a time with a smaller audience, the risk is as low as possible.

Bottom Line

The summer months can be a depressing time for bloggers but they don’t have to be, it can be the most productive time of the year and represents a chance both to grow your site and prepare for busier times.

However, don’t forget to carve a little bit of rest and relaxation time in for yourself too. After all, pushing yourself too hard at any time can result in burn out and that can be more dangerous to your blog than just about anything else.

Use this time wisely but don’t get too caught up. Your site and your mind will thank you.

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Be Kule with Sokule

Sokule is a way to bring all your social media, branding, and pings all together in one place while helping you gain much needed traffic to your blog or website.

It’s also available on your mobile phone so you can take it anywhere and use it’s advantages everywhere.

From Sokule, you can post updates to your Twitter account, Facebook personal or fanpages,  your My Space account and numerous high-traffic social media sites with the click of one button. How cool is that?

If you’re trying to build your online presence, brand yourself and grow your web traffic, Sokule makes this task much easier.

You can schedule your posts and messages (up to 25) in advance so you don’t have to worry about updating every single day.

Depending on what you want to accomplish, there are levels of membership with Sokule. Including Free, Bronze, Bronze Plus, Silver, Gold and Founder. No matter your needs for branding yourself and driving traffic to your site, there’s a level suitable for everyone. You can also upgrade as your needs grow.

Another great feature of Sokule an affiliate program. If you love this service and want to promote it, you can earn a commission for everyone who signs up through your affiliate link.

Unlike Twitter and other social media accounts where you’re limited to a 140 character message, Sokule also offers you the option to post article length messages to the Sokule service.

During signup you’re given options to choose 3 separate categories to describe your online purpose and interests. The category listings were pretty standard but covered a lot of ground.

One downfall I didn’t like, and this is personal opinion, is the look of landing pages as you’re going through signup. The first offer is an upgrade to Silver member and while it may be a great offer, I was simply interested in a free account to get started. I clicked No Thanks and was taken to the Bronze signup page. Again I clicked No Thanks.

Signing up takes less than 5 minutes. At the time of this writing, I’ve waited 20 minutes and still haven’t gotten the confirmation email. This may not be uncommon, but most of us are used to signups and confirmations being instant.

However, I signed in 24 hours later and was taken to my members area ready to get started.

Using Sokule with the other social networks above does require upgrading to at least the Bronze level. I did not upgrade simply because I don’t need this service at the present time. But with all that Sokule has to offer, this can be a valuable service for professional bloggers or those who are trying to grow their blog to that level. This has been a basic review of the free service offered by Sokule.

If this is something that interests you, simply click this link to get started. Yes, this is an affiliate link. I will receive compensation if you sign up and upgrade past the free level. With that being said, if you join the affiliate program, you will need to print out a W9 form and mail it to Sokule.