Are any of You Guys Overwhelmed?

First of all, I apologize for using the term “guys”. That is what I learned growing up in Ohio. “Guys”, or “You Guys” is the same with “Y’ALL” where I live currently. I think I was called out on a post actually. Read the post here, then check the comments. I explained myself in the comments and didn’t feel as though I did what I was accused of doing. Either way, the Fire Critic isn’t all that PC anyways….

Ok, back to the post….

Are any of you bloggers out there overwhelmed by the possibilities for social media, blog add-ons, widgets, plug-ins, twitter, RSS, Facebook, MySpace if you haven’t grown up yet, digg, flurl, flickr, fluffer, and phlem? Ok, I made the last two up…you get my point.

Juggling the various social mediums is a difficult task. Especially when you have to level up on Mafia Wars daily!

I don’t really have a point, nor do I have a solution…but my readers might.

What I have found is that it is key to utilize these social media tools to increase traffic, readership, and branding. However, do not dig yourself in a hole over trying to get them all going at once. Nor should you feel you need to update all of them constantly.

My new pal David Konig (@davidkonig) put me on a decent tool on Facebook called Networked Blogs. I have only been using it a couple of days, but I have found it gets the job done as far as updating your profile and/or facebook page with the RSS feed from your blog. What I don’t like about it is that it has an interface that I think eats some of your traffic by creating another step in the action. In the end, I didn’t have much to choose from and I am happy with it.

This is the same for twitter. All you have to do is “set it and forget it”. Set up an rss interface with twitter using something like twitterfeed and sit back and enjoy the results.

THEN, if you have the time you can get on FB or Twitter and go to town with discussions, retweeting, networking, and replying (which is a really effective way of networking in general).

There are other mediums. I talk about Twitter a lot and Facebook too. That is because I view them as the top social mediums currently for bloggers.

With all that being said, I am probably the one who is on the computer the most…and making the least amount of money with it (for those who are monetizing). That last comment is not so related to the Fire Critic, but more so the other websites I run for profit.

Keep staying tuned for the monetization post. I am working on it diligently. I am also working on the top ten lists for the following categories….fire blog, ems blog, fire site, ems site, etc. Wait for it…

Thanks for letting me ramble.