Get your Blogging Zoom on!

One of my favorite quotes from The Office comes from Andy Bernard when he’s talking to Michael Scott about his Wednesday night plans:

“Gonna go home. Get my beer on. Get my “Lost” on.“

I sort of have my own set of events that I do on a given day or night:

“Gonna go home. Get Diet Coke on. Get my Google Reader on. Get my Askimet spam deleted on. Get my Blog Stats on. Get my Feedburner subscribers on. Get my writing blogs on. Get my BLOGGING ZOOM ON.”

Yes, it’s an exciting life I lead. But the one big thing that I’ve found important in my blogging life so far is Blogging Zoom.

I don’t know why I’m even writing this blog since there are already so many people out there that talking about BZ (short for Blogging Zoom), so what good is another one going to do?

But I’m one of the top submitters at BZ (although I fight Jason tooth and nail for the top spot), and with that in mind, I felt like I should write a bit about why it’s great for your blog and why you need to be using it.

I know this is a bit off-topic from what I normally write about, but there are bloggers out there who read this site and may not know about BZ. And if you read on down to the bottom, you can find out how useful BZ can be without having a blog.

So after this brief commercial, we’ll be back to scheduled programming in no time.

I’ll try to keep this short and sweet.

What is Blogging Zoom?

Blogging Zoom is sort of like the site Digg and other social bookmarking websites out there. People submit posts to it and others read them, vote on the ones they like and so on.

Everyday when I post a blog, I also submit it to BZ, write up a short description and I continue on my day. It’s just routine now.

Why use Blogging Zoom?

Well, while other sites out there are bigger, like Digg, they are also harder to break into. And while I am no expert on Digg, you REALLY have to be lucky to get up on the frontpage. There have also been rumors of super users at Digg who can bury a story at any moment.

Now I don’t know for sure about the super users, but what I DO KNOW is that BZ has an entirely different feel to it. The point of it is not to get to the FRONTPAGE of Blogging Zoom with 300 Zooms…the strategy is to build keywords for BZ and yourself, and thus getting you additional search engine traffic.

It’s also new enough that you can get in now and sort of be at the ground floor. More chances for you to grow on it early on and be strong enough to survive when it becomes really popular.

How does this frakking work?

Vic and Court, who run BZ, have a nice little setting of FIVE zooms needed for your blog post to get Published. Being Published means your submission on BZ gets a permalink and also a backlink to your blog.

Granted, having 100 backlinks from BZ wont grow your Technorati ranking at all since you need unique links, but it does something better I think.

If you write a normal blog post using keywords in the title and body of the article, and somehow make it on the first page of Google for that search term, that’s amazing. Well done. Now, if you next submit your article to BZ and write a unique introduction to it, using the same keywords and title, you’re likely going to see that also arrive on the first page of Google.

That basically means you wrote ONE blog post, added a quick excerpt about it on BZ and now you have TWO links coming to your ONE post from Google.

And the more we submit to it, the more keyword strength BZ gets and the more its submissions will rise to the top.

I hope that makes sense. It seems like a lot of users on BZ right now don’t really get how it works. They are more concerned with posting a submission and thinking people just go directly to BZ to browse articles. Yes, that happens, but the main goal is the keyword strength and Google search results.

Be a part of the BZ Community

Now, you can’t just submit your post to BZ and be done with it. You need to help everyone else out too. The more you help zoom other articles, the more people see your name and the more they’ll want to help you out as well.

And if you see people zooming your stuff, don’t just sit back and twiddle your thumbs, go check out THEIR submissions and help them out. Make friends, meet people, find new blogs.

Of course you don’t want to just zoom every blog you see, it’s actually a GOOD thing that if you find bad content you don’t just zoom it up. Part of it is about making sure the writing and subject matter is beneficial.

But if you have friends who you just KNOW always write stuff well, then just hit their personal submission history page and zoom their stuff up. Like JFrankCarr from OpTempo, or Jason Clark, or Scott Williamson…I know what these guys do and I’ll zoom up their stuff without reading it all the time, even though I try to as much as possible.

It’s all about helping each other out.

If you submit one story and it doesn’t hit five zooms, don’t be discouraged over it…just keep submitting and helping others and you’ll make an impact. It took me quite awhile on there before things started clicking. Even as little as a month ago I had 25 posts submitted that never hit the published mark, but now it’s rare to find one not make it.

What if I don’t have a Blog?

Okay, so you don’t have a blog and you think this post isn’t for you. Well, I disagree.

Blogging Zoom isn’t just for submitting posts. It’s also for finding great content! There is such a wide variety of stuff out there, you can probably locate whatever topic you want. Granted, it’s still growing and new people are finding it everyday, but it’s coming along nicely.

You can also help A Mike Life by being a registered user over there and zooming up my blog posts. But in doing that, you will likely find more blogs out there and other great articles that will distract you from here. I’ll miss you, but that’s the way it goes!

So give it a test drive and see what happens.

In Conclusion

Well, it’s not much of a conclusion, all I can say is get over there, get connected and get your Blogging Zoom on.

Many people who don’t get BZ will submit a few articles and move on, never really committing to what it can do for them.

Give it a shot and let me know if you have any questions. You can always add me as a friend on there (mikeo75) and I will try to do my best to zoom up your articles.

Plus they just had a face-lift and the site looks fantastic.