There are 2 ways to gain popularity in the blogosphere. One way is being social, and the other is having high SERPs. The social way requires you to spend time socializing with other bloggers (mostly A-list bloggers wannabes). To be social with other bloggers, you have to have a social network profile such as facebook or twitter. There is also digg, stumbleupon and other social bookmarking networks. I don’t really regard them as a social media. I see them as a media to game the search engines mostly Google. It is social because you have to contact other people to digg or stumble your articles, blog or post. And those people would likely want a reciprocal digg or stumble. The other way of being social is commenting on blogs. From my post on how to increase your page rank, commenting on other blogs help to increase your backlinks. It also helps to get you traffic if you make a thoughtful comment.
If you are not on the social media group, then you are probably trying to use SEO to gain popularity. The SEO bloggers just care about their backlinks. They just want their backlinks to have their desired keywords. For this to be possible, they do mostly article marketing and personal bookmarking. I said personal because they don’t contact other people to bookmark their article. They also do blog commenting, but the blog must be dofollow blog.
In my opinion, I prefer using SEO to gain popularity. My main goal online is to make money on the internet. The only thing I like doing as other social bloggers is reading other blogs. I love reading blogs that contains blogging tips. I read other blogs to get ideas on what to write about when I ask bloggers if I can guest post on their blogs. When I read the blogging tips blogs, I try to think about how I can incorporate make money into the guest article, so that it can be relevant to this blog. Also, as I read other blogs, I usually come across blogs that are dofollow. When I see that I make sure that I leave a comment on that blog with my anchor text, and I either bookmark the blog or save the link in my list of dofollow blogs. I prefer building my own dofollow list because most of the list on forums or on blogs are popular, meaning that the blog will be well moderated to prevent spam.
I also like commenting on the unpopular dofollow blog so that I can be on the top commenter list. This is possible because not many people know a lot about the blog. So if I drop 2 comments and the comments are approved, I would be on the list.
I also like reading other blogs to know what is going on such as how much this blogger made last month or who has found a new way to increase their search engine ranking. I know that the group of bloggers that are focused on search engine ranking would say that I am wasting my time on other blogs because it doesn’t help me to make money on the internet. I would tell them, it is not really true. I am reading other blogs to get ideas about how to get backlinks to my blog, and that would increase my SERPS, thereby making me money. I am not looking to become popular. And moreover, I usually a reader and doer and not just a reader.