Blog Building: Notes from the (Social Media) Field

Sphinn hates me. And Small Business Brief doesn’t work.

I’m trying not to take this as a sign of impending doom in regard to the social media portion of our blog building strategy, but, well, impending doom is hard to discount.

Anyway, as you know, both of these sites are places to submit articles or blog posts and have them viewed by their respective communities. Sphinn is focused on online marketing. Small Business Brief is focused on small business.

In the last week, I’ve submitted two seemingly relevant blog posts to Sphinn, and they show up for a while, but then disappear. I suspect foul play, and grow more paranoid by the day. Emails to the contact page have gone unanswered. I’m sure editors on this site delete posts that they don’t see as relevant, so maybe I’ll take this protracted silence as constructive criticism and be ever more vigilant in keeping to the online search and marketing focus. That’s only fair, I guess.

I’ve also tried to submit blog entries to Small Business Brief, but their submit tool keeps giving me errors. It seems to have something to do with our blog url, but I can’t figure out what. I can’t even find a contact page on this site to ask someone about it.

I’ve wasted at least an hour posting, or trying to post, to these sites. We’ll chalk it up to education and hope that once we’ve got the hang of this social media thing, the time commitment will be lessened going forward.

I have done some work with our delicious and StumbleUpon accounts, so check us out there. I’ll keep trying at Sphinn and Small Business Brief, but might also look around for other alternatives. Anybody use any article submission sites that they’d care to recommend?