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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Don’t you love it when celebrities post personal photos on Twitter? They just make it easier for you to stalk them. Did I say stalk? I meant admire. They make it easier for you to admire them. One of my favorite celebrities is Sam Pinto and I thank the Internet gods for giving me access to her photos beyond what we see in photo shoots for magazines and ads. As a responsible blogger and a proper Sam Pinto enthusiast, I took it upon myself to search for the 5 sexiest Sam Pinto Twitter photos. You’re welcome.

Even Instagram focuses on her luscious lips. /creeper [Instagram]

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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’ve been using LastFM Love and Twitterfeed to share my Last.fm loved tracks on Twitter alternately for the last few months and both services just don’t work for me. LastFM Love is not very intuitive and it only worked for me a couple of times. Twitterfeed is just not reliable. It keeps retrieving my Last.fm loved tracks but it doesn’t post to Twitter. I checked every possible setting on both services and I just can’t get them to do what I want them to do. This morning, I gave up. I searched for an alternative way of sharing Last.fm loved tracks on Twitter and what I found was Dlvr.it. And it delivers.

In this totally out of place blog entry, I shall show you how to publish your Last.fm loved tracks to Twitter using Dlvr.it. If you are familiar with Twitterfeed, you can pretty much figure out how to use Dlvr.it easily. If not, here’s the deal:  Dlvr.it is a service that publishes your feed (RSS, Atom, etc.) to an array of  web services like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr and more. This means in order to do the whole publishing to Twitter bit, your Last.fm loved tracks must have a feed of some sort for it to be delivered by Dlvr.it. Lucky for you, that feed exists.

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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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