Bloggers need to get their blogs read – regularly – by targeted readers and one way that most of us try to increase our readership is by submitting out blogs to blog community sites. These sites can also provide good one-way backlinks to your website or blog, unlike many of the directories which have worthless listing pages with hundreds of links. Two of the biggest are MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog and for quite a while I got the two sites confused but there are some differences and some varying opinions on how useful they can be. I am also a member of MySiteProfile and Bumpzee, and I think these two merit some consideration as well.

MySiteProfile has just over 300 members and you may think this is a disadvantage, but I have found the blogging community very proactive, my Blog for Profit profile has a page rank of 2 and the inbound links provided are recognised by Google.

MyBlogLog is now owned by Yahoo but for the moment the site is run by the same team who built the site up. This is a big site and allows tagging of your blog profile to enable other members to search on topic. The controversial aspect of MyBlogLog is the widget that shows your MyBlogLog Avatar whenever you visit a site that uses the widget. Some bloggers find this a little intrusive, and there is another downside to using the widget. Because the MyBlogLog panel contains up to 15 images it can slow down the loading speed of your web pages dramatically, this is a good reason why a number of bloggers have now removed MyBlogLog panels from their pages. I have read of one blogger whose site was claimed by another member of the MyBlogLog community: maybe the site needs a verification process before members can claim blogs as their own, in the same way that Technorati does. My Adsense Profile on MyBlogLog has Page Rank Two, again this is worth having.

BlogCatalog is a big site that claims to be the premiere social blog directory on the internet. The site was redesigned just one month ago and features a Shout-to-Shout -box where other members can leave you a message, but most of the messages I have received this way are quite spammy. A valuable new feature is the ability to send broadcast messages to members who have signed up as followers of your blog. One thing the site boasts of is frequent thumbshot updates but I noticed that one of my home business blogs is still shown with its original Kubrick theme – I scrapped this more than four months ago.

The most useful part of BlogCatalog is the Discussions area. These are a useful way of communicating with other bloggers, getting answers to questions and – of course – raising your profile and attracting readers to read your profile and your blog.

Bumpzee is a fairly new blogging community site with a similar layout to MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. This site uses widgets similar to MyBlogLog, although they do not seem to slow down the loading speed. Bumpzee also features discussions but these are not as busy as those on BlogCatalog and as far as I can tell the heavy hitters of the blogosphere have not joined this site yet.

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