A blog can be an island, or it can be a massive cruise ship carrying elite guests all over the world.

The best way for me to tell you how to Social-fy your blog is to tell you what I have done to make my blog more social.

1. Join as many social networks as possible especially: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Flickr, Myspace, Friendfeed (In this order).

This is the order of importance in my opinion, but for each case it will be a little different – for instance music bloggers will do much better targeting youtube and myspace primarily.

2. Ping it and they will Come. Link your accounts to a ping.fm account, and get the pingpress.fm plugin. This will basically send your blog post title to each social network with a link back to your blog to read the whole post(80%) of my traffic comes from this.

3. Groups and Fanpages. Create a facebook fanpage and group devoted to your topics, with links back to your blog. Try to be active in posting to your group / fanpages.

4. Be friendly to your Followers. Be sure to reply / respond to all comments and @mentions on Twitter, facebook, friendfeed, your blog, etc..

5. Disqus / IntenseDebate – I’ve also started using Disqus for my blog comments. Users can login to post using their twitter, or facebook account which cuts down on spam, and they can immediately tweet their comment – giving a link back to your blog, Intense Debate is also an option for some similar features – my choice is Disqus but don’t discount Intense Debate, I might go back to Intense Debate someday if they up their feature-set.

6. BacktypeConnect – This is a comment plugin that will pull all  diggs, tweets, etc about a blog post and put them after your comments on the post. It also has a community at the Backtype website where you can view your actions across the web.

7. Backtype TweetCount – This is a plugin by Backtype again that will put a button similar to Tweetmeme and lets users easily retweet your blog post. It also shows a count of all the mentions of that blog posts’ url. Very Cool. TweetMeme is a cool alternative with less features – the biggest difference to me is that Tweetmeme only counts when someone tweets your link from the TweetMeme button. Backtype actually searches twitter for your blog post and lists how many retweets they find via search.

8. Encourage Subscribers – Make sure your blog fans know where and how to follow you on twitter, facebook, etc. Make sure to ask them to do this, and let them know if you follow back (which I do – so if you’d like to follow me – just do it! @patrickcurl

In the end though, it still comes down to quality and quantity the more posts you have the more traffic you will get – but you cannot afford to sacrifice quality for quantity. I’ll leave you with one advanced method for getting social traffic:

Build something useful. Whether you build a mashup of somesort, a new twitter app, a firefox extension that makes social networks more interesting, etc– people will follow you on twitter and your blog will take off.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Disqus vs IntenseDebate (spicycauldron.com)
• BackType Releases Tweetcount to Challenge Tweetmeme for Retweets (mashable.com)
• To cross-post or not to cross-post… (thenextweb.com)
• My Social Media Tools AKA Social Media Tips/Tricks (newmediachatter.com)
• Zee.: Real Time Confusion: Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook | CenterNetworks (centernetworks.com)
• Shareaholic Launches Buzz Monitor (centernetworks.com)
• 20 Tips to Manage Your Online Social Life – Part 1 (makeuseof.com)
• Social Network Tools (From AlertThingy to Zemanta) (edbatista.com)

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