Digg

Every blogger should have a Digg account, no matter where you blog. If you don’t write crap for blog content, it won’t long before someone starts Digging your posts. You are going to need an account to help with the self promotion and respond to people Digging your work. As you build your network you can shout out not just your cool new finds but the ones elsewhere to your friends. Digging others is almost as important as getting dug yourself, since people do profile the people Digging them, especially when you’re among the first to Digg a new page or the other user is just getting started. On that same note you should be profiling the people Digging you and reading their work, not just to be nice either. You reap what you sew in social networking. Popularity snowballs on Social Networking.

Stumbleupon

Just like with Digg every Blogger should get a Stumbleupon account. At first you should be asking your friends to your posts not to mention if you use FireFox you can get a Stumbleupon toolbar that will let you quickly add your own posts. Once you start building your network there expect the same kind of profiling from your friends there to occur as it did on Digg.

MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog

MBL and BC are very similar in terms of the way they look on the surface. As you can see from my sidebar I think you shouldn’t get one without the other. You can basically create networks of users the same way you do in the other programs but that is where we start to diverge from them. You can actually see in real time which other members, not just the ones from your network are visiting your blog. MBL gives some nice statistical tracking data when you register your blog(s) but lacks the same sort of rapid friend building you can do in BC. BC also lets make announcements to the people of your network which comes in handy the way it does for Digg.

In the end if you want to develop a following and are writing quality posts none of these tools are things you want to be without.