Blogging Communities Are They Worth A Look.

When it comes to promoting your blog posts, there’s a myriad of roads you could travel down – sharing on social media, commenting on blogs, repurposing content, influencer outreach to name but a few.

On and off, I’ve also been tinkering with sharing stuff on blogging communities too. Have you tried doing that before? I’m talking about sites like Blog Engage, BizSugar and Blokube.

I’m not convinced of their effectiveness but it could also be that I’m not buying into them in a way that I’ll ever make much headway.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH BLOGGING COMMUNITIES

My first experience with a blogging community wasn’t great.

I started out with a premium account on one of the sites a few months ago because I thought that automated blog syndication and social media marketing sounded like a good thing to go with. I came to the conclusion after a while though that I wasn’t getting and wouldn’t be able to get the value I wanted from it in the future.

I couldn’t find a way to cancel on the site itself so I cancelled the payment agreement, assuming I would just be downgraded to the standard account immediately.

It didn’t work out that way. I didn’t get downgraded immediately but when I did, all of my syndicated posts were deleted even though I’d paid for a few months of their service. My account was just blank; even any friends I’d added were gone.

I guess it was my fault because I didn’t notify them that I’d cancelled the payment agreement. I just assumed that’s how it worked because there was no other obvious way to cancel via the site itself.

IS IT JUST ME?

I’ve researched a few articles on various sites that go into how they promote their blog posts. Whilst blogging communities are discussed, it’s generally only in the context of sharing your link on them each time you write a post. In all honesty, that’s generally just what I do which I’m sure wasn’t the intention of the people who set these things up.

There’s a couple of things that put me off blogging communities because they’re either a duplication of effort or a more or less random act.

COMMENT DUPLICATION

My understanding of the way things should work is that you go to the blogging community, check out any posts you fancy reading and then you drop a few comments. Then you go to each blog and add another comment on the posts themselves.

OK, I get why you might want to leave a comment on the blog but duplicating that on the blogging community site itself seems like a waste of time. Surely it makes sense to just leave the comment on the blog and keep the conversation going in one place?

I can see that might not be in the interests of the blogging community sites themselves but is there any other reason why this duplication of effort is beneficial?

VOTING SYSTEM

From my experience so far, it seems hit and miss whether many people will see what you post in these blogging communities. I find the way the information is shown very confusing. There’s so many categories and sorting options following by endless pages of blog posts.

It makes it seem quite random which posts get upvoted and which don’t. Someone could have added a fantastic post at the wrong moment, it gets lost in the system and be on page 200 before you know it never to be viewed again.

That makes it tricky to trust the voting system, does it not?

ONE SAVING GRACE BUT IS THERE MORE?

Whilst I don’t like the duplicate commenting or the voting system, blogging communities do bring some referral traffic to my blog. That’s definitely a plus and a reason to keep using them. I’ve started to see some traction from both Blog Engage and DoSplash in my Google Analytics statistics. My testing continues with those as well as BizSugar, Klinkk, Blokube, Kingged.com and Inbound.org.

I purposely haven’t mentioned Triberr here because it’s a completely different system (other than possible comment duplication if you don’t use the TriberrWordPress plugin).

OK, now what I’d like from you please is to share your thoughts on blogging communities in the comments section below, specifically:

1. What has your experience been like?
2. Which ones do you use and why?
3. What sort of referral traffic do they bring to your site?
4. What are your thoughts on commenting and voting?
5. Are there any other benefits to using blogging communities?