But a few weeks ago Jason Clark at Inner88 introduced me to BloggingZoom, and it’s been an invaluable tool so far. It also led me to realize that I wasn’t using another site built in the same manner to its full capacity: ShowHype.com.

So what do these two tools do and how are they helping my blog?

BloggingZoom is fairly new and it’s blasting through the roof. The idea for BZ is that it’s basically a “Digg for bloggers.” If you don’t know what Digg is, it’s basically a site where people submit links to cool places online, be it blog stories, news items, whatever. People then see those and if they like the story, the click on the “Digg” icon, thus bumping up the number of people who liked the link.

(You likely have seen the Zoom icons on my blogs lately and on this one at the bottom of the article. )

BZ is the same thing as Digg, but it’s only for blogs. It does not allow mainstream or news websites at all, which really makes it focus on the hard-working blogger. You submit blog links from your site, or others that you visit, and write a description of the link. Others see it and can “Zoom” it up, thus causing it to get “Published” after five Zooms.

I wasn’t sure at first what being published at BZ meant, but I found out today that it essentially gives you a backlink to your blog. Check out the reactions to A Mike Life on Technorati to see how I already have FOUR links from BZ back to my blog. That’s huge for me, and it’s only been a few weeks.

This blog is still growing, but with a total of only 24 reactions, having 6 new ones in the past two weeks is a big deal. So you can already see how great BloggingZoom is for you. Scott over at Career Waymark started on BZ today since I’ve been hounding him about it, and he’s already got a published post. Way to go Scott!

BZ not only helps you with your site, but also gives you the ability to find new blogs and good stories that you would have missed otherwise. You can make friends, zoom other people’s stories and then save ones you like in a special area of your profile. I love the community feel to it and it’s starting to become a site I visit multiple times a day.

It’s more than just getting your own blogs on there. You also end up Zooming others and meeting people. What a great idea!

Since I started using BZ on November 11th, I’ve gotten around 36 total hits from it. Not a lot, but it has been going up the past few days and that includes a big holiday week. I am looking forward to what it will do down the road.

The next tool that I just discovered some amazing value in is ShowHype.com.

ShowHype came out of another site called BallHype. BallHype was essentially a Digg or BloggingZoom for sports blogs. So from that came ShowHype, which is the same kind of thing except that it deals with entertainment: movies, music, television, etc.

SH does something that BZ doesn’t: It lets you add your blog to their index and it grabs your RSS feeds and displays them if people visit your blog area on their site. From there, you can then “Hype” up a story, which is just like Zooming one. They also rank your blog on the amount of links it gets, Hypes and blogs posted. You will notice a SH ranking in the right column of this blog.

For example, here is A Mike Life on ShowHype. You can see all the posts, the ranking, etc.
Now, where I went wrong before is thinking that because they pulled my RSS feed, that meant they were displaying new blogs much like BZ does now in their Upcoming section.

Well, you know what assuming does…

Because of what I was doing on BZ, I realized the same thing needed to be done on SH. My blogs showed up there, but I needed to Hype them up to get them to appear on their “new” pages.

Once I did that, the response has been pretty brilliant. I started doing this on the 22nd of November and have received a total of 46 hits in three days.

Obviously better than what BZ has done, but both work together pretty well. I like the features and social aspect of BZ better than SH. I also tend to get more Zooms on BZ than Hypes on the SH. Yet the traffic is better. Who knows!

All I know is that I love them both.

The main thing about SH is that it’s for entertainment, meaning it excludes a lot of topics out there, but since that’s a big part of what A Mike Life is about, it works well for me and brings in focused traffic.

So what I’ve learned the past few weeks is this:

If you have a blog, you should be on BloggingZoom.

And if you have an entertainment blog, or post those kinds of stories on occasion, you need to try out ShowHype.

If you have had any experience with either of these, I’d love to hear your opinions on how they’ve helped you.