BlogCatalog - A Social Blogging Community

So, you're a blogger. You've created your blog, have been writing blog entries, and even have some followers. Excellent! If you know how to promote your blog, I'm sure you've already sent emails to all your friends and acquaintances, and have searched around a bit for other bloggers that are into your topic of interest. You may even be creating a name for yourself as a popular blogger, but are you on BlogCatalog?

What is BlogCatalog? BlogCatalog is a blog directory and blogging community of over 200,000 bloggers. These bloggers are from all over the world, and are blogging about everything imaginable (here's an example: Social Security Disability SSI). Why do you need to be on BlogCatalog? There are countless blogs on the web, and being a part of one of the largest blog directories can help be you found among the blog noise. In addition to being a great promotional tool, it's a great social community for bloggers, a great place to find new and interesting blogs to follow, and a superb place to learn more about blogging from the experts themselves - other bloggers!

BlogCatalog's social community is diverse and lively. You can find people from every corner of the world with blogs that range from Victorian Horror and Retirement Planning to the Double Cheese Blogger. It's quite amazing how many blogs are out there on the blogosphere, and even more surprising that so many bloggers are chatting it up and sharing their expertise on BlogCatalog.

Discussion Forums

There are many ways to interact with the blogger community on BlogCatalog. The discussion forms hold endless discussions between the bloggers about making money, blog promotion, blogging help, and general discussion on blogging. These discussions are tagged by keywords that make it easy to find the type of discussion you are looking for and it's easy to join in and find the information you are looking for, while making new friends and connections.

You can find keywords for joining an interesting discussion by searching the tag cloud. Right now some of the popular discussion tags are: blogging, SEO, travel, twitter and adsense. Not all the information and discussion on BlogCatalog is blog related: other popular tags are: movies, money, religion, photography, health, politics, and love. You can sort the discussions by newest, and most recently updated.

BlogCatalog Groups

Another great way to get social on BlogCatalog is by joining or creating a group. There are over 1,700 groups right now, ranging from Foreign Languages, Religion and Spirituality, to Current Events and Blogging Traffic and Analytics. Why join a group? Finding people who share similar interests with you will allow you to connect to the other bloggers in that field, and allow you to make friends with similar interests. The amount of information and sharing in the groups allow for learning new things and keeping up-to-date on what other bloggers know.

For instance, the 'Home and Garden' Group currently has 606 members and has a thread called 'Do you have a home and garden related blog?' There are 97 replies to this thread. If you have a home and garden blog, this is the place for you to connect to others in your field, all while promoting you blog and gathering more readers.

Effective Social Networking

Let's face it; all bloggers want a higher readership and effective networking is extremely important if you're a blogger. BlogCatalog is set up for effective networking. Beyond the discussions and groups, they have excellent search tools and features on their profile pages  that allow you to network and help promote your blog. It's free, it's fun, and it's effective. And, last but not least, its a great way to make others aware of the information that you have to share.