In the first part of A One Year Experiment in Blogging, I shared lessons I learned about producing content. In the second part, I shared lessons in making blogs readable and marketable. In the third part, I shared lessons in bringing in visitors from search engines. Today, I’ll tell you about social media. While bringing in visitors via search engines is important, an equally important task in building your reader base is attracting visitors via other people. Being social is the name of the game and the traffic you’ll be bringing in from social networking sites is more valuable than that from search engines.

Share if You Care

Purchase my dickery, won't you?

Although most of my traffic  comes from search engines, I find that readers coming in from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and other social sites are much more compelling. The reason for this is communication and engagement are strong with this kind of traffic. When people like your shared posts, you know that they’re interested in what you’re selling. In terms of my personal blog, I’m selling my thoughts and the silly things I have to say about comics and all forms of dickery. They are interested in similar shenanigans that I offer, hence the possibility that they will come back for more.

If people share your content with their own networks, you’re practically getting free advertisement. It also means that your content is compelling enough that other people want to share it with their friends, relatives and random Internet stalkers. This is why posting your blog updates to social networking sites is pretty much a must especially if you’re still building a following. Don’t overdo it, though, because  sharing everything — even your less than stellar content — can be quite annoying. I know this because I get easily annoyed with people who overshare too.

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Welcome to the 2nd installment of Tumblr Thursday! Here are some of the most awesome things I found on Tumblr for the week of July 21-27, 2011. Enjoy.

Ah, yes. Tumblr girls. [via]

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Google+ is turning out to be one of the best sources of lulz for me and traffic for this blog, which is nice and somehow baffling. Still, Tumblr remains a good source of interesting and sick tidbits of entertainment even if I’m spending less and less time there. That won’t stop me from starting a new blog series called Tumblr Thursday, though. In this series, I just recall some of the best stuff I’ve seen on my�Tumblr�dashboard in the past week. Here now is the first batch of Tumblr Thursday goodness.

Behold, the Mobius Cake! [via]

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Being single for the past 3 years, I know a lot about the whole experience of spending Valentine’s Day alone. I know some of you would say that on Valentine’s Day, love between lovers is not the only kind of love we can celebrate. We can celebrate the love we have for friends and family. WRONG. We all know only bitter single people say that. Valentine’s Day is about the passion and the romance shared between two people. For those of us who are single, it’s a jarring reminder that we are, indeed, single.

We usually spend this day locking ourselves up in our cold and dark rooms or crying in the shower while eating fried chicken. This year, let’s mix it up a little. Let’s go on the Internet and wallow in self-pity there. As a trained professional expert in being single, it is my duty to inform you of your options for celebrating Valentine’s Day online.

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I stopped making New Year’s resolutions several years ago, right around the time I realized planning is not one of my strengths. This year, although it’s a bit late for this kind of thing, I’m making a list of things I’d like to resolve. I’m fully aware that I’m not capable of following through with these resolutions, but at least I can say that I made some kind of effort. Let me begin by saying that I resolve to use Photoshop regularly, even if I’ll just create dumb things like this:

This is to hopefully improve my Photoshop skills. I’m not doing this to impress the ladies — and we all know the ladies find Photoshop skills sexy — but to help myself reach my goal for this year, which is to have a web design portfolio that people would actually take seriously.

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