The Clean and Green Club

The last two months, we’ve talked about social networking communities–places like Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, CollectiveX, Ning, LinkedIn, and literally hundreds of others.

But social networking is only one of many types of Web 2.0 sites. Any site that allows visitors to participate actively, and not just passively receive information, is a Web 2.0 site, and can be used in some ways for marketing purposes. Among the possibilities.

Your Own and Others’ Blogs

Blogs have several advantages over traditional websites. To name a few:

• They get into the search engines almost instantly (I once did a Google search for something I’d blogged about ten minutes earlier, and my blog post was there, on the first page of the results)
• It’s easy to increase the reach of a blog by feeding it to your social networking profiles
• You can set your blog to automatically ping Technorati and other blog content aggregators, so people will find you quickly if you blog about something topical and hot

Your own blog should be closely focused on the topic you want to promote. It’s OK to have an occasional post that’s off topic, but you’ll get much better results if you can stay on track. This is a challenge for me, so I describe my blog broadly: as covering “the intersections of ethics, politics, media, marketing, and sustainability–that’s big enough territory that I can ramble, and still be within that rubric.

Note: I strongly advise hosting your blog on your own server, and not on the software’s server

There are also other blogs I follow, and make public comments every once in a while. Posting on others’ blogs gets me known and respected by people I want to impress, exposes me to their fans, and also provides high-quality backlinks to my own various sites.

More kinds of sites next month.