BloggingZoomHow many times have you had a blog post reach page 1 on Digg or Reddit?  If you’re like me, the answer is a great big zero.  There have been many great articles out there by popular bloggers that try and tell us how to make it to the first few pages of these sites but, more often than not, these sites are often dominated by less-than-interesting links that have been posted weeks or months earlier.  So even when we write that awesome blog post to stimulate both traffic and discussion, we find it buried before it even has a chance to blossom.

We bust our butt writing a great article, and all we get is a lousy -8 Diggs or points?  Yeah … that was so worth the effort of submitting it to these sites :???:

So what’s the reason behind these negative reviews of our articles?  How can our posts get buried by people who don’t even read it?  Why is it that stupid “lolcats” picture has 800+ Diggs when our writeup on an important subject is completely ignored?  Perhaps the system is broken.

The most common explanation for these abysmal scores is “self-promotion”.  We write our great article, then submit it ourselves to Digg, Reddit, Netscape and others.  The power users see that we’re self-promoting and decide to punish us by burying our hard work.  This sounds a bit like Google, no?   This was one of the few reasons why I stopped visiting Digg and Reddit.  If I wanted to see links to pictures, conspiracy theories and stupid antics on YouTube, I’d go back to 4chan.   Is there no other option?

Until recently, the answer was a solid ‘no’.  But Courtney Tuttle and Vic have teamed up to bring us a new service that I’ve recently had some success with; BloggingZoom.

I hopped on the BloggingZoom (or BZ) bandwagon as soon as it was announced on November 1st.  Although I did have some difficulty submitting blog entries at first (that’s what I get for not reading the instructions properly), I have seen some decent traffic from the site.  For anyone that’s new to BZ, make sure that your summaries are at least 4 sentences long and 350 characters.  Anything less will result in an “Title or text” error.

BloggingZoom looks a little like Digg, but it’s designed for self-promotion, bloggers only, and we will not need to compete with the spam found on other blog search sites.  We’re encouraged to submit our own articles to the service and I think it’s a great way to get some free publicity.

In just 12 hours I have had over 50 visitors from BZ even though there are only four articles submitted.  This number is far greater than I had seen with both Digg and Reddit combined since April of this year, and it means that bloggers who start using this service now will have a better chance of gaining some readership.  Naturally, as the site becomes more popular and the number of submissions goes through the roof (like with other similar sites) it will become harder to get on the first page, but that shouldn’t stop us from using BloggingZoom.  Heck, if anything, it should help us make our posts that much better.

I’m looking forward to the next few months on BZ.  Already I’ve discovered half-a-dozen great blogs out there that have never been in the top 100 (that I’ve seen) of Digg and Reddit.  As word of this service spreads, more great blogs will add themselves and gain recognition.  From what I’ve seen in the last little bit, BZ is a win-win for everyone involved.

Have you joined, yet?  Have you seen any results?