This is a guest post by Steven Snell. Mr. Snell designs websites and maintains a blog for Vandelay Website Design. You can read more of his writing and see his portfolio at www.vandelaydesign.com.
Social media websites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Stumble Upon send thousands of visitors to blogs and websites everyday. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of articles about becoming a top user of these sites to build your traffic. While they are all tremendous sources of traffic, getting a significant number of visitors from these sites can take a lot of effort—especially with Digg, Netscape, and Reddit.

If you’ve avoided social media marketing because you don’t have hours every day to spend submitting articles and voting on those submitted by other users, you are missing out on countless potential visitors.

For the average user the main problem with the most popular social media sites is that it can be difficult to generate any kind of traffic to your site. Most of us are completely overlooking the opportunity to benefit from 2nd tier social media sites that send decent levels of traffic and can make it easier for the time-starved blogger to succeed.

Literally hundreds of lesser-known social media sites exist that present far less competition for the top spots. Yes, they will send less traffic than Digg, but if you choose the right ones to use you can see substantial results.

With a general topic and keywords in mind, you’d think it would be a breeze to name your blog. It would be, too, except that “great minds think alike” and you’ll be hard-pressed to think of something that’s never been thought of before.

The reason it’s so tricky is that you’ll really want to have .com domain name (like yourblognamehere.com) that matches the name of your blog, and each domain name is only available to one owner, so if the one you want is already taken, you’re out of luck.

I advocate getting a .com domain name in almost all cases (the main exception being if you can spell something clever by using a different extension, like del.icio.us has done). This is because most people naturally assume .com if they don’t remember (and most won’t remember), and that’s what they’ll type in. A .com address is especially important if you ever give your blog address verbally or in advertising). For the same reason, I suggest avoiding domain names with hyphens or numbers… they’re too easily misunderstood or forgotten.

It’s important that your domain name and your blog name match because, again, people will take the path of least resistance and type in your blog name plus “.com” and expect to find you. Even for those who would go to the effort of remembering something different, it’s a much easier memory task if they only have to remember one name to come up with the other.

This all makes sense (I hope) but it also limits your choices somewhat. When I’m brainstorming for a domain name, here’s what I do:

Many good writers get stuck when they decide to start blogging, mostly because they aren’t sure what they’re shooting for in a blog post.

I’ll write another post about how to choose a post topic in the near future, but regardless of the specific topic, there are some common characteristics of good posts. You’ll come across plenty of exceptions, but it’s one of those “know the rules before you break them” things.

I’m not just talking about how your blog looks. The actual code behind the design has a much bigger impact on your online success than you might guess.

Wendy of eMoms at Home did a great writeup on ProBlogger yesterday where she talked about the importance of a well-coded blog template and described the phenomenal results she saw when I implemented a much better coded them for her (the number of people that Google sent her doubled the next day). Wendy explored the reasons for that and the result was the ProBlogger post.

I want to go into a little more background here so that you’ll understand why the theme change made such a huge difference. Most people choose a blog theme based strictly on how it looks (and that’s definitely a valid concern, since it’s setting the tone for your blog) but aren’t aware that the behind-the-scenes details of the code can drastically affect the way the search engines “feel” about your blog.

I have visited plenty of other blog websites and seen a lot of things I like… but also a lot of potential that’s not being used. Many people have the right idea when it comes to blogging, but a lot of bloggers (particularly beginners) are missing key ingredients that make blogs that really buzz!

I’m sure you can relate to this, and have visited blog sites that are as dead as a doornail. You’ve also probably visited blogs that haven’t seen any updates for months or years. Clearly they’re still getting traffic (you’re there, right?), but they’re not using it in any kind of useful way.

So, how do you generate buzz on your blog website once you attract the traffic? It all comes down to a few simple points: presentation, writing style and topic choices.