Well, I’ve got news for you, both good and bad.

The bad one: there’s no secret. You know why? Because no one’s hiding anything. The key to build a high-traffic blog has always been right in front of your eyes! Where? Just read on!

Ok, then what’s the good news? The good news is there are infinite number of solutions. You can be popular, successful, rich, whatever you want in many ways. Here are some examples.

Different approaches, all seems to work

If you look around and examine the blogosphere, you’ll eventually find at least a handful of people who made their way to the top and now earn much more money than they need for a living.

The funniest thing is that most of them tell you exactly how they accomplished it. And if you take a look, you’ll find that they did it in very different ways.

For example, here is Gary Vaynerchuk, who works like a maniac, often more than 10 hours a day, responding to hundreds of e-mails daily like crazy, and I’d say he’s more than a full-timer. But he’s successful, right? He achieved the desired results.

Or here is Darren Rowse, or Maki, both successful bloggers who use a great mix of social media marketing and creating excellent content. But while Maki writes “only” 1-2 great articles a week, Darren writes an averages two daily. Again, different ways, both of them work.

Or take a look at the Cracked.com blog! They figured out how to make Digg-friendly content to the extent that they hit the Digg front page almost daily and people are literally competing to submit their articles. Sounds too good to be true?

On the other hand, here is Steve Pavlina, who’ve never spent much time on marketing, yet he’s one of today’s most successful bloggers, producing a huge amount of quality in-depth articles every week, sometimes working 10-15 hours on a single posts. But he also succeeded, on his own, and he loves what he does for a living.

As you can see, there are several paths to a successful blog, and these were only a few examples.
But I think you already figured out what’s the problem with these…

The problem with the various approaches

I can imagine how some of you grimaced on the thought of working 15 hours a day, or you said: “I can’t spend hours on promotion just to be popular! I have a job and I have to spend some time with my family too, I don’t have time for that! Besides, it’s not even my style, I don’t want to spend hours daily only to make myself popular on a damn social media site!”. And you’re absolutely right. Everyone’s different, and that’s why you can’t simply copy one of these people’s success. Even if you try to, eventually you’d understand that it’s just not your style, you’d become overwhelmed and realize you hate what you’re doing. And that would be silly. Isn’t it the same reason you started your blog to quit your job and earn money from something fulfilling?
If you started your blog for non-profit reasons, then it’s even more true: you don’t want to settle for doing something you don’t enjoy, do you?

Don’t get me wrong. These bloggers are fascinating and popularizing your blog on a social media sites or working 10 hours on a post is not a bad thing. In fact, it can be a picnic. But only if you enjoy it. And it’s very important. You must find your own style and your own way to success, and enjoy every moment of the journey. Or else you’re going to fail.

No matter how many articles you read on leveraging social media traffic or about those little tricks to get backlinks to your blog, if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’ll either stop doing it do it poorly. And why would you waste your time doing an awful job anyway?

Honest blogging - an approach for you

If you look at blogging, what are those areas you can’t live without? What are the actions you have to take in order to run any blog?

You know, the basic stuff: writing content and some search engine optimization.

That’s all, you don’t need to join any blogging communities, run any silly “backlink-campaign”, or do anything fancy, you need to focus only on these two areas: creating content, so you provide some kind of value to others and some search engine optimization to make sure you get some visitors. And since some basic search engine optimization takes virtually no time, there’s one thing left: creating quality content.

What!? What about getting inbound links, commenting on other blogs, dropping those Entrecards all day long or buying some ads on other sites?

Nope, you don’t need anything else. With the Honest Blogging approach, what you basically do is concentrate only on creating content and spend almost no time on conventional marketing techniques.

How Honest Blogging works

Creating content is a vital area of blogging that every blogger have to do regardless of topic, his style or whether he likes it or not (if you don’t like it, why would you even start a blog!?).
This is the only thing that’s identical in every blog. You must create content.

And this is why the this approach is right for you: because it’s the same for everyone.

What about promoting your blog? Getting traffic? You must realize that creating content doesn’t equal to writing posts. It’s much more. I’m going to show you how to get vast amount of traffic using your content, and how to write unique, original posts to hook your readers onto your blog.
And guess what? You can still do any kind of other things you enjoy about blogging. Honest blogging gives you the foundation that you can complement in any way you want. But you don’t have to! And that’s the key. If you choose to build a successful blog focusing only on content, you can easily do it.
Now, let’s see the other benefits of this method.

Blogging for money

If you’re trying to make some money from your blog, it’s a well known fact (and common sense too) that the amount of money you make is in direct proportion to the amount of value you provide. Consequently, your income is based on your contribution to your readers. If you’d like to understand this concept more deeply, here’s a fantastic article about money and its true nature.

Having said that, guess what aspect of blogging provides 99.999% of the value you deliver? Is it your wonderful blog design? Perhaps your Plurk karma? Or the number of hours you spend farming Entrecard credits? Of course not!

The value you provide comes from your content.

Now you know the single most important area you must concentrate on to make the most money from your blog: your content. And guess what? The Honest Blogging approach does exactly just that! With this method, you’ll spend 95% of your time learning how to make outstanding content and creating it.

This ensures that you not only share the most value, but also that you receive the money you deserve for your work.

Blogging and stress

Ok, stress may be a little strong word, but I’m sure there are times when your head is just spinning because of the several tasks you should handle, all at once.

After you come home from work, you’re tired, you sit in front of the computer, check your e-mail if someone has spammed your inbox on Blogcatalog, then you go do the daily “comment-campaign”, because you need to promote your blog, right?, then you drop something like 30000 Entrecards on affiliate marketing sites disguised as blogs, and then maybe you still have ten minutes or so to craft a short post. Sounds familiar? No? Well, I’m glad it doesn’t, I haven’t assumed my precious reader would do such stupid things anyway J.

But, you see, blogging is a complex job. You constantly need to focus on multiple things, and that’s fine and challenging to some extent, but can be very overwhelming above that line.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew that you need to concentrate only on a handful of tasks, and if you manage to do the most important (creating content), the rest doesn’t even matter?
You bet! And that’s exactly what you’re going to do with Honest Blogging. You need to focus only on creating quality content to achieve the results.

And besides that, remember the problem with the various approaches we talked about at the beginning of the post? If you follow the Honest Blogging philosophy, you don’t need to worry about the process becoming boring, or that you must do things that are against your own values.
That’s why I named it Honest Blogging. You can give yourself, always, and don’t have to worry about doing pointless, repetitive, heartless tasks.

Remember: content is King, and if you don’t believe it, then it’s probably because yours sucks. If you believe it, then why waste your time on unnecessary things?

Is Honest Blogging a superior approach?

As I’ve said, there are many ways to success. I believe it’s one of them. I don’t say it’s the best. But I say it’s a pretty darn good way.

I’m sure what I’ve written above is going to trigger a lot of resistance, and that’s fine. I don’t expect anyone to believe me everything. But I expect you to at least be curious and see how it works out. Because I’ve resolved to make my blog successful using this approach.
It’s a great challenge for me, and I’m sure my success will to inspire others as well to choose this path, create quality content, and make the blogosphere a richer place.

But hey, whether you become an Honest Blogger right now or you wait to see what happens, stay tuned! Because in the following weeks I’m going to share some great tips on how to write really original articles, how to master the art of promoting your website with your content, and some other insights on how to think about blogging in a very new perspective…

As you can see, the blog has a new design, which I don’t think is going to last forever, but I’m sure it’ll be used much longer than the previous one.
As I’ve mentioned in this post, no free wordpress theme can compete with the one you make for yourself. And it’s not because yours will be so awesome, but because it’s unique, and the feeling that you made it for yourself gives you the very special feeling that you really “own” the website.

I hope you guys like it too, I’m quite satisfied with it at the moment, although I still need to make some changes here and there, and maybe the colors came off a little strong, but I think it’s really not bad for first try.

Why?

The reason I created a new theme for the blog is that I wasn’t completely satisfied with the previous one, it bugged me every day, so I thought the best solution is to make the change early, so I can focus on writing after the design is OK.

I learned to love GIMP

All the images and graphics on the site are made or edited by GIMP. It’s a free photo- and image manipulation software, much like Photoshop except it doesn’t cost you 999$. I always wanted to learn how to use it for easy tasks, but over the past few days I’ve found that it’s much more powerful than I thought.
You can do literally anything you can do with Photoshop, you just need to learn how to use it. So I’m sure I’m going to use it intensively in the future as well with photo manipulation and stuff. It made for much bigger challenges than the calculator on the right for example

I learned to hate Internet Explorer

If you’ve ever designed a web template from scratch, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Sure, I’m a total beginner in this area, but it wasn’t the only reason why I had so much trouble with IE. After you get everything in place and are very happy that it looks fine in both Firefox and Chrome, then you check it out in IE, and you wonder why it loads some kind of Picasso gallery rather than your blog. It’s just a big mess. Then you make some changes to clean up your code to be good enough for Internet Explorer (although I can’t understand if it’s good for all other browsers, why isn’t it good for IE..), but then I find that most of the errors are not even my fault, in fact they’re well-known IE display bugs that’s been existing throughout 3-4 versions. It seems ridiculous there are so many online discussions dedicated to help you solve IE bugs. Why haven’t they solved them yet if they know about it since IE 5? I can’t understand.
But after hours of work and some compromising I could solve all the problems, fortunately. Though in IE the site is still not the same… Uhh, probably this is the main reason I won’t redesign the blog for a long-long time.

New stuff

As you can see I’ve made a lot of changes including some ad placement optimization, with the banner at the top, I’m also curious how adsense backgrounds will perform, and the little calculator of course, so now you can bookmark my blog easier

But the biggest change maybe is that I “converted” the blog into a full site, with a home page, and some other pages as well, like the Blog For a Living Center, where you’ll find my biggest series, some contests I’d like to hold and other crazy stuff I make up.

I also changed my mind a little bit about how I want to and how I should write, I won’t go into details, you’ll see it anyway in the coming posts, but you should expect longer in-depth posts in the future.

I’m also going to promote my blog in other ways to make it more fun and less boring for me, you’ll see what I’m talking about in the Honest Blogging series.

Hmm, I think that’s it. Now you know what to expect, so stay tuned and don’t miss the next posts.

I welcome any suggestions on how to make the design or the blog better, and I’m very curious what you think about it. And be honest, I won’t be aggrieved

But I’ve found that it’s not only because I didn’t post so the SU traffic didn’t come, but also because I haven’t participated in online communities as I did previously. It’s really not a big deal, that means only 10-20 visitors daily, but quite quality traffic, most of them bloggers themselves who spend an average 5 minutes on my blog.

And it scared me a little. It seemed a little like if I’m not doing my daily “job” in such communities, I loose part of my traffic. And while I like hanging around on Blogcatalog for example, I’m not that kinda person who spends time for that if I’m not in that mood. And I definitely don’t want to go through all of them every day. That’s why the title is about carrying your blog on your shoulders.

I realized I should look for opportunities to automatize the traffic as much as possible, so I can focus more on writing posts instead. Then I can still check Blogcatalog or Mybloglog when I feel like doing it.

What about you? How much time do you spend promoting your blog “manually”? I’m curious.

What? You’ve just written a post titled Why you should Stumble and Digg your own posts! – you can say.

Yes, it’s true, but it seems things have turned around a bit since then. 2 days ago I was reading a post on michaelaulia.com where Mike mentioned that stumbling your own posts isn’t a great idea after all, because they ban you for that.

Well, I wasn’t convinced. I’ve heard some things previously that they might terminate your account for this, but their TOS doesn’t clearly state it, nor does their FAQ. Although they said that people will be banned who try to cheat the system, or try to promote their service, it’s kinda blurry for me if I should call my blog a service or not, and I definitely don’t think submitting a post might be considered as cheating the whole system.

But I thought it’s time to put a period to this case, so I tried to contact SU directly. Fortunately they have a nice little method handling these kind of support questions, so they offer some additional Q&A before you send a message.

Sadly, they clearly state you aren’t allowed to submit your own site:

“StumbleUpon does not allow personal accounts to be used for the purposes of incentivization or promoting sites. This would be considered a breach of our Terms.

Accounts participating in such practices will be deleted and banned, and the related sites deleted and banned from the system.

The practice of sending PM’s encouraging or inviting other stumblers to rate/review sites in exchange for reciprocal reviews/ratings, monetary, or any other form of reward is strictly forbidden.

The practice of actively soliciting a rating or review for a site is also forbidden. Should you receive a PM, or encounter forum postings that breach this rule, you are encouraged to report this via feedback.”

I still think if they’d just copy and paste this little piece of information in their FAQ, it wouldn’t cause such misunderstandings.

What now?

First of all, my deepest apologies to everyone who I misled with my previous post. You all know it wasn’t my intention, as I discussed my reasons there. I’m sorry though.

I’ve already deleted my own submissions except for maybe two that got a great number of thumbs up, I don’t think two posts will cause any problems…

But hey, it’s not the end of the world! My previous post for Digg is still accurate, so we just need to use a different strategy for Stumbleupon in the light of this new information.

As I was thinking about how to do this to get the most out of it, I realized it can be even more efficient than submitting it yourself. But that’s another story. Stay tuned and I’ll reveal this technique in the Blog for a Living series, hopefully with some real success examples of my own.

Till then, I must recline upon you to stumble my posts, which is not that bad, considering my kind and committed readership

This post is already submitted, all that’s left for you is one click if you liked it:

How to reach the pros

In the introduction I’ve mentioned some differences between the average blogger and the pros. 
I’ve also told you that the difference lies in the little details. Well, some of you may point out that they’re so far ahead because they’ve been blogging for several years now, and there’s no way you can reach their level in a short period of time.

But I have to disagree. Time is a factor of course, but not as important as you think. Are you familiar with Steve Pavlina? If not, you better check his blog, because he’s one of the biggest geniuses of our time. Besides that, he’s a very successful blogger who earned 1000$ a day. And that was two years ago. I can’t even imagine the current numbers. He reached all this by simply putting up content in quality that’s beyond any imagination.
Now, let’s suppose for the sake of this example that he didn’t start his blog a few years ago, but he wrote these same posts secretly behind the scenes, and now he decides to put it on the web, all at the same time.
What do you think, how much time it’ll take to become just as popular as he was? A month? Maybe two?

On the other hand, there are many bloggers who do this for 5-10 years now, without any particular success.

Time is an important factor we must take into consideration in several cases. But making excuses and blaming it because of your unsuccessful blogging career won’t do any good.
I hope now we all agree that everyone should focus on the other pieces of the puzzle in order to create a successful blog. So let’s move on and see how we can make those changes… 

Making up the leeway

Whether you blog for money or simply want to share something to the most people you can, your main goal, thus your basic strategy is the same.

The concept is very simple: you must get traffic to your blog and try to hold it, convert the largest percentage you can into loyal readers.

Why you’re going to succeed

Fortunately for us, we have a huge advantage that today’s professional bloggers didn’t possess back then when they started out, and that’s being the tremendous amount of knowledge that piled up over the years.

Blogging is quite a new thing. When today’s success bloggers launched their, everything was new, and they had to learn by trial and error. For now, a lot of things are much clearer and can be applied as rules for blogging in overall, and also a lot of techniques were born along the way, which are now proven to be efficient and guaranties us results.
It’d be foolish not to use this knowledge to our advantage.

The structure of the Blog for a Living Project

 As I highlighted a few lines above, there will be three mayor parts of this series:

1. Getting Traffic
   Here we’ll discuss all the most efficient techniques to gaining traffic, preferably maximum results with minimum efforts. Search engine optimization, using social media sites, getting links from more popular sites and such. 
2. Keeping Your Readers
   When you get some traffic, you must do something with it. This part describes how to convert your visitors into loyal visitors. Our main goal is to increase your direct traffic that comes from RSS readers, bookmarks or directly typed URL-s.
   Referral traffic comes and goes, but these people will visit your site every single day if you do it right. And my goal is to teach you how to do it right :) 
3. Miscellaneous
   Here goes all things that didn’t make it into the first two parts: how to build your image, how to schedule your blogging time, certain techniques that allows you to get the job done faster and less effort, … 

That’s it, in a nutshell. Tomorrow I’m going to add a page with a more detailed table of contents.

Note that I’m not going cover one section after the other. That would be lame. What’s the point getting 15000 visitors if you don’t know how to keep them?
So I’m going to post quite randomly, first covering the more important and essential parts, then go into the details.

Till then, stay tuned and get ready to change your life (or at least your blog)!  

The purpose of any blog

What if I told you that you need to meet only one single criteria in order to be a famous and successful blogger? It may sound strange, but it’s the truth. It’s a very common, thousand year-old-principle, but you can easily apply it to succeed in your blogging carreer.

You must provide value. That’s all. It’s quite simple, isn’t it? Well, actually we all know it isn’t. The amount of traffic, subscribers, and the money you make is equivalent to the the value we provide to our readers.
But if you have only 30 subscribers, you simply cannot provide as much value as an other blogger can with 10000 subscribers. It’s a quite strange paradox.

But what about the “big boys” or “professional bloggers”? It seems they have an unfair advantage when it comes to providing value.For example, Problogger Darren Rowse has 50 000 subscribers. If you have only 50, does it mean he writes 1000x as good articles as you? Of course not. But still, he can reach much more people, thus giving more to his readers.
If he can’t write 1000x as good posts as you, then how is such a big difference possible? How did some bloggers get so high, and is there any way for you to reach that level?

What’s the difference between you and the pros

Consider the following examples:

1. Mark works as an actor at a local theatre. He thinks he could share a lot of his knowledge to others who’re also interested in acting, so he starts his own blog. At the same time, Sean Connery, who isn’t very active on the screen lately, thus have lots of time, decides to do the same. Now suppose these two guys, by coincidence, launch blogs with the same design, with the same posts released at the same time, everything identical except for the authors. Who do you think will get bigger readership?
2. Tim and Bruce also launch their blogs on martial arts, again everything’s the same, same level of skills both in writing, martial arts, design, the only difference is that Bruce produces twice as many articles as Tim. Who’ll get along better now?
3. Now, both Rachel and Monica (Friends rocks!) starts a blog about natural beauty secrets. Everything’s the same, except Monica’s mother language is English, while Rachel has learned to speak on a 6-month-speed-learning program. Who’s gonna be the winner here?

The examples above are obvious of course. But what about these:

1. Two bloggers again, everything’s identical, but blogger A puts his subscribe button to the middle left of the page, while blogger B’s subscribe button is bigger and it’s displayed below each post.
2. Three bloggers, one spends two hours on social media sites, the other on online forums, and the third spends his time with search engine optimization. Everything else they do is the same.
3. Two bloggers, the first one spends a lot of time crafting his articles, but his content is excellent. The other blogger spends less time writing, so he produces worse quality but he spends more time promoting his blog.
4. Blogger A’s all post is exactly 1000 words length. Blogger B’s 2000. Their writing skill is exactly the same, just as everything else on their blogs.

Now who’s going to be more successful? Of course it depends on other various factors, but it’s quite difficult to decide.

Back to the original question: what is the difference between you and the pros? You should’ve figured out the answer by now : the little details. Your character, your posts length, quality, your design, your promotion techniques…

So what’s the solution? 

The solution is simple: you must correct every little detail and if you take all pieces in place, your success is guaranteed. 
How? This is where the Blog For A Living Project comes in. We’ll go through every piece of the puzzle, one by one. Where it’s obvious,  I’ll tell you what you can do in order to maximize your benefits. Where the decision is not that easy, I’ll show you what techniques you can use to make the right choice.
All this will be illustrated by examples in a clean, easy step-by-step format, so that you can’t have any trouble applying the concepts.

Tomorrow I’m going to launch the first post of this huge series, it’ll cover the basics and the overview of the whole project. I’m also going to create a separate page for this purpose, so you can always check the table of contents and the parts we’ve already covered.

I’m sure we’ll all benefit from it, so subscribe now, don’t miss the further posts of the series! I’m coming tomorrow…

This post is already submitted, all that’s left for you is one click if you liked it:

Although I could’ve done much better, but I can’t blame anyone, what I haven’t achieved in this month is only due to my laziness and completely my own fault.
Next month I’m going to do it much better. 

One thing I realized is that it’s fine to write these posts about totally random things, and it seems my readers enjoy these posts, but the problem with this is that it wasn’t my main goal. Yeah. This blog was built with the purpose of teaching other bloggers how to make a living from their blogs. And these former posts certainly help, but they don’t give what I’ve set as a goal to myself.

But it’s going to change. Next month is going to be a crazy one.

What you can expect in October: 

• the biggest and most comprehensive guide on blogging ever written, yes, and I mean it, you won’t find anything similar on the internet
• a big contest, preferably with great prizes
• some portraits and  interviews with other successful bloggers
• one more little surprise, I hope I can pull it off, and will be useful to everyone
• and of course a lot of “random” posts like in this month, but much better quality

Two more important things. I should’ve started with this one, but I hope it’ll be my last mistake in September…

I thank all of my readers the feedback, the encouragement, the kind and intelligent comments that kept me motivated every day. Love you all

I especially would like to thank to my three top commentators in the month (or during this 2 weeks):

Michael Aulia, Nihar and Yan (not in any kind of order ) Thanks very much for your help! 

Finally, my statistics for September (last two weeks):
( I know these are poor but it’s a good point of reference for the following months ) 

Income: 6.90$

Google Page Rank: 0 (Well, next time!)

Google Indexed Pages: 75

Traffic Rank: 1,232,653

Blog Rank: 1,106,224

Inbound Links: 487

833 Visits

1,728 Pageviews

2.07 Pages/Visit

57.98% Bounce Rate (uhh)

00:02:22 Avg. Time on Site

86.91% % New Visits
 

The statistics were all taken form Google Analytics and HubSpot’s Website Grader except for the revenue.

I’ve read various opinions on the internet, and most bloggers say it’s not even worth posting on weekends, because there’s just no traffic.

But last weekend, I’ve experienced the exact opposite. I posted on Saturday, but not on Sunday. My traffic was the highest on the weekend, precisely on Sunday. It surprised me very much especially after seeing that even bigger blogs follow the very common habit to stop posting after Friday.

So this weekend, I took a day off to see what happens. My traffic decreased significantly. 
Then I searched a little on the topic, analyzed the difference between the last and this weekend and I got to this conclusion:

• Traffic level is low on weekend, indeed, and I’ve already figured out why: because you don’t post!
• Last Saturday I finished the week with a quite popular post (How to get a hundred comments on your posts) that got a lot of comments and attention. This Friday I wrote the Do you still think Analytics updates only once a day?, which wasn’t as popular as the previous one. The moral: If you don’t post on weekends, you should end the week with one of your best posts to let your readers digest and discuss it on those “empty days”.
• My searches on the topic revealed that readers read your blog almost the same as they read it on weekends. Sure, there will be some who leave for the weekend, but the majority (I’d say 80%) of the people will read your blog regardless of what day it is.
  The solution for the others is to write a rather ‘light” post on Monday so that they can catch up after the weekend, and hold your bigger and more important posts to Tuesday.
• As Darren on Problogger has already pointed out, it’s also easier to hit the Digg front page on weekends, because the other lazy bloggers are sleeping then (own translation)

Oh, and one more important thing: posting on weekends doesn’t equal writing the posts on weekends. If you feel you need some rest at the end of a though week, that’s fine, you can prepare and write the weekend posts in advance, so you can enjoy your deserts.

As for me, I’ll try to give my best to post on weekends too, and I’ll check the results and inform you if this strategy really is working well or not. 
Though I’d suggest every beginner blogger (below 100 posts) to write as much as you can and fill your blog with quality content. Search engines and people will be both grateful.

Honesty. I emphasized this word many times in my posts and comments.
When I started this blog, I set the goal to reach financial abundance with this site as soon as possible. But I also made a resolution that I’ll do it without ever cheating or choosing the shorter way if I feel that’s not right.

So I think you could figure out what I think about this whole exchange thing.

I’ve been familiar with this method for years, and I never liked it at all.

But seeing others exchanging stumbles/diggs/technorati faves and such, I started to doubt myself.
Because I saw these guys are actually make more stumbles/diggs than I do and they’re moving higher and higher on the technorati list.
So I started to question if I’m right about it. After all, all that’s holding me back from using such techniques to popularise my site was only my own stupid precept.
Maybe it isn’t useful. Maybe it’s only hindering my blogging career. Maybe I should give it up and toe the line.

But I didn’t do that. And here’s why.

Why it doesn’t make a difference?

Don’t get me wrong, these exchanges make a difference. But not that much. Why? Because of the good old principle: if your content is crap, no matter how much you exchange, people won’t read it.

But still, I believe my content is useful for others and I provide value on my blog, so why shouldn’t I use it?
Then I imagined what would be the consequences if I’d exchange links/stumbles/diggs or my Technorati favs. And this is what convinvced me:

- the more time you spend with these exchanges, the less time you have to produce quality content
- exchanging such things can strongly influence my creditability on social media sites, technorati and even on my blog.
- and lastly, I hate doing boring, repititive robot work. And it definitely belongs to that category.

This is a very important one. If your readers see you’re linking to 200 sites that provide no value at all, maybe doesn’t even relate to your content, what will they think of you? Similarly, if your stumbleupon/digg fans see you’re submitting crappy content, you’ll lose them very quickly. Do you want to sacrifice your fans, friends and your creditability for a few more links/votes? I don’t think so.

Good content, of course.
And one more thing what these exchange gurus have forgotten: all the other, honest promoting techniques that exists. Yes, believe or not, there are other ways to popularise your blog and things you can even enjoy, for example reading and commenting on your favorite blogs. Amazing!

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