I recently received a message from Broc Copeland of Existential Ventures to tell me about his new blog. I hadn’t met Broc before or heard of his blog, but I’m always on the look out for new blogs and websites. His blog is intended to be a mostly personal blog it seems with a focus on a variety of topics that catch his interest. What’s interesting, though, is that he’s aggressively marketing it to build his readership and traffic quickly.

What caught my eye on my first visit was his article about marketing your blog using MyBlogLog. This is a topic I’ve been interested in since I started hearing about MyBlogLog and finally decided to sign up. There are three tips listed in this article and I’d like to add my commentary to each one:

1. Add 15 Communities a day.

This isn’t a bad idea. The more communities you’re a member of, the more users have a chance to see your avatar and possibly click on it. This brings up the question of whether to have a flashy MyBlogLog avatar that will draw users to click it or just a picture of yourself. I’ve chosen a picture of myself at this point, but I wonder if it’s scaring off potential readers…

2. Add 15 Contacts a day.

This one isn’t a bad idea, either, but it’s one that I haven’t done myself. I’ve added some contacts, but they’re mostly people I’ve had some contact with before. Some of my contacts are people who added me as a contact and I reciprocated after checking out their sites. I’m not sure what the etiquette is or should be for adding contacts on MyBlogLog. Any ideas?

3. Warning: this is more gray-hat than the above two. Comment on a MyBlogLog users blog and then repeatedly click on the link that goes to your profile (from the comment).

I don’t really care for this type of approach. Although, I’m not sure there’s ethically anything wrong with doing this, it does seem to be a little shady. When lots of users begin doing things like this to artificially inflate their numbers, the community will necessarily have to react and implement some sort of stricter controls. My recommendation is to avoid this tactic.

All in all, I’m curious as to how Broc’s tactics will work out. His next post is about emailing other bloggers to introduce his blog. In the post he links to 30 different bloggers whom he’s emailed and mine is one of those linked. I can’t help but be flattered to be included in the ranks with CopyBlogger, ShoeMoney, and ProBlogger, among others.

This tactic is actually a pretty good one as long as it’s done right. Broc’s email was brief and polite and didn’t include a hard sell. I get emails like this fairly regularly and I try to check all of them out. In this case I was struck by the newness of the blog and all the work he is doing to promote it. I’m going to be watching this one to see how things develop.