This post was submitted to YouBlog by Mike Olbinski, who owns and runs A Mike Life. It’s a blog encompassing most things entertainment, with a dash of technology and blogging on the side. If you would like to have a chance to be published like Mike, submit a post to YouBlog - anyone can do it.

Just before Thanksgiving this past November, I learned about BloggingZoom through another site I visited frequently, Inner88. I wasn’t quite sure what it was about, but I played along with the contest being held on Inner88 to try and help grow my site a bit and get a nice backlink. He was asking people to join BZ and then zoom up his articles to help promote the site. It was a fantastic idea and he gave those who participated a backlink from a blog post.

Up until that time, I hadn’t really tried to market my blog much. I was content with my friends reading what I had to say and the slow build of new people showing up here and there. I wasn’t sure what direction I was going with the blog, so I kind of sat back and let me fingers to the guiding.

It’s kind of an interesting experiment I’d say, to just start writing about what you love or feel like talking about, and slowly see how it molds your blog into the site it should be.

The Beginning

Seeing what it was doing for other sites, I decided to start using BZ on my blog. I never got into the other sites out there, like Digg, etc., because I just felt that they were so huge and established, there was no way to break into that. Besides, I didn’t think my main readers were big Diggers anyways.

But it was a nice was to start promoting my stuff and so I began submitting stories. BZ is still new enough that you can really get established and get to know the people there.

Immediately the impact was felt. People starting finding my blog, I’d see a few new readers commenting here and there, the traffic started to rise and the referrals from BZ started adding up.

I also started hyping my stories on ShowHype.com, which is a site like Digg, or BZ, but deals primarily with entertainment blogs. The downside there is that it allows official websites to submit stories and feeds, something BZ prohibits, which is what sets it apart from these other sites. Still, ShowHype has been beneficial somewhat, as I do get hits from it all the time. They allow you to set up a blog and claim it, thus allowing your feed to be displayed without having to submit it. If you want to know more about ShowHype, just contact me on my blog if you want to find out how to make it work for you.

So with these two services going, my traffic started going up, but nominally.

The Networking Begins

One day I read a blog post on BZ that opened my eyes. I believe it was Court who wrote it, not Vic, because of the lack of spelling mistakes. Of course, I’ve come to enjoy Vic’s ramblings and sometimes unrecognizable English. He tells it like it is and grammar be damned!

This is the highlight of that post for me:

The people that have had the most success getting zooms so far are the people that are participating the most actively. The people that aren’t getting many are the people that aren’t visiting other sites and zooming actively themselves. Making BZ friends will help you more than anything, and if you’re too selfish to visit the sites of your friends, they will probably make other friends.

I realized that yeah, I was being a bit selfish in just zooming my stuff and ignoring the rest. Blogging is about community and about helping others and I had been ignoring that aspect.

So I hunkered down and started getting to work. I found some people who I enjoyed reading and added them as friends. I helped them out by zooming their stuff and commenting on their blogs when I felt the need.

The great thing about BZ, is you can see who zooms you. I’d look who zoomed a blog of mine, I’d go read their submissions, zoom them up, comment and add them as friends. In the process of this, you end up getting links to your site from DoFollow bloggers (I love you guys) and help everyone out. They’d see my comments and perhaps wander to my blog, suddenly finding a new place to talk about TV and movies.

I just kept repeating this process and eventually it turned out to be a blast. I found some great blogs out there and made a few friends.

Jason Clark over at Inner88 is one of the good friends I’ve made from this experience. The networking, the helping each other out, the friendly competition to get our entertainment posts up first, really became enjoyable.

(On a side note, I wont get into the addiction I have to watching the live BZ feed all day and see what gets posted and what’s zoomed. I suggest you don’t get into it like me, especially if you have a full-time job to focus on)

The Results

The more I networked and helped others, the more I learned and the more traffic I started receiving. The backlinks from BZ with published posts started building keyword strength and helped get more hits. I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that my Google traffic started rising daily.

In fact, it’s been so good and I’ve learned so much about keywords and how Google works, that within seconds of my Journeyman recap last night, I was getting fresh Google traffic for people searching the mysterious term “Joseph Lee Comet.”

It was pretty amazing.

A bonus from the BZ traffic is that a lot of BZers are Stumblers as well. From never having a post Stumbled in the 4-5 months previous, to the first two, to now getting posts stumbled on a regular basis, it’s led more and more new people to find my blog, and hopefully some of them to stick around.

(As I’m writing this article, I saw that someone JUST NOW stumbled my blog last night about Journeyman, and the traffic is pouring in. Thank you readers!)

You can see some of the stuff that happened on my blog with this post I made earlier this month on how things were going, the last of its kind since Vic scolded all of us idiots for those kind of blogs. The end results there from just a few weeks ago is already chump change compared to what’s happening now.

So what has Blogging Zoom really done for me?

To me, the BZ community is one of the best I’ve been around. I’m a big online community guy. I also maintain a sports blog/forum that’s been a community site in Arizona Sports for a good 6 years now. I helped raise it up to massive amounts of traffic and became friends with many of the people there.

The same type of thing is happening at BZ. With it, I’ve become acquainted with a lot of people, I’ve learned a ton from many of you experts out there who actually take the time to help us young bloggers out and my traffic is slowly taking off.

Networking with BZ, becoming a part of its community can only help you grow. It’s not just the fact that when you submit a post, people will click on it and visit your site. Heck, my posts aren’t even usually zoomed higher than say 10, mostly because the majority of readers there are into content about the blogging world, not entertainment, but that’s not important.

But you get the links, you start getting the BZ traffic, the Google traffic and you meet people who want to help you out. You learn things, you make your blog better and you have fun.

I’ve gone from writing about Journeyman for my friends a few months ago, to having people hop onto the site after a show to talk about it on a recap post.

It’s been fun.

I hope this post has helped some of you looking for some way to help get your blog out there to the masses. It takes time and work sometimes for stuff like this to happen. Of course there are tons of ways to get traffic to your blog, but this has been one of the most fulfilling for me.

Good luck!

(PS. This blog wasn’t meant to kiss anyone’s butt, I really frakking love Blogging Zoom and I tell it like it is)