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?

First, a confession: I’m intimidated by the words “social media sites.” The idea that I have in my head of these things is of a complex system involving lots of time spent putting comments out there, and lots of time spent figuring out how to interact on these sites.

You know what, though? I don’t think it’s as hard as I think.

We’ll get to why I now think that, but first some background.

Social media sites – in general – let you post links, Web site descriptions, blog entries, opinions, news stories, and pretty much anything else onto a site where other people can see what you’ve posted. These postings can be things you’ve created or just things you’ve noticed online. Other people see what you’ve posted, and can choose to visit those sites/news stories/videos/whatever and then post those posts on their own account if they like what they see. If it works, it’s a kind of domino effect. Your post leads to some people looking at whatever you posted about, and maybe some of those people post about it themselves. A bunch more people see those new posts, and maybe they post it themselves, too. As more people post, more people see, and it all gets snowballed. If the original post was one of your blog entries, each of those new social media posts means more traffic to your blog. Make sense?

Here are the big social media sites:

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Basic link building for blogs, or so we’ve been told by those who know about such things, begins with getting your blog listed in some of the various blog directories available throughout the Web.

As the name implies, blog directories are giant lists of blogs. But these sites place user-submitted blogs into categories, making it easier to find blogs of a certain topic.

The directories are used by people seeking blogs that discuss a specific topic, or blogs that engage a specialized community or user group. Including your blog in a directory can also help with search engine optimization, making it more likely that a casual Google searcher will find a post on your blog that has just the answer they’ve been seeking. Perhaps the biggest and most popular blog directory is Technorati.

But in order to build readership and increase exposure to your blog, there are several other blog directories to consider, and we’ll gradually be adding our blog to some of these others as well.

Click the ‘More” link for some additional considerations…

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A modified age-old Zen mondo: If Matt writes an excellent blog post in the forest, and no one zooms in using Google Earth to view the forest and read the blog post, has Matt really written an excellent blog post?