This guest post is by David Alford Griffin   

It’s hardly surprising that new bloggers are not having much idea about what is the social value of your blog. It’s a complex equation, with a two-way street between every blog post and the social accounts, and the question of which social networks you want to focus on.

It might surprise you to know that the social network which sends the most traffic to blogs is not Facebook, but StumbleUpon.

According to Statcounter, StumbleUpon all by itself accounts for 50.27% of all referrals to blogs from the top 10 social sites.

Facebook is a distant second with 38.9% of the traffic, and Twitter, Youtube and Reddit each send less than 4%.

So, now you know which social networks will send you more traffic. But the how part is a bit more complex. Adding social value to your blog is a bit of a bootstrap operation, where visitors Like, Tweet and Stumble your blog posts while social networks in return sends traffic to your blog.

If your blog already has significant value on the social networks, then every post goes viral on the networks as soon as it is published. An example of this can be TechCrunch or Mashable posts, each of which gets hundreds of tweets, re-tweets and likes. These blogs have made it easy for visitors to do this by adding social media sharing buttons on the blog template.

Those who do have the value will need to work for it. Write posts with the potential to go viral, and promote it aggressively using your own social media accounts and prominent sharing buttons on the blog, such as Sharethis or Sociable.

But networks like StumbleUpon and Digg are different creatures. The bulk of the traffic comes from networking on StumbleUpon and building a large network who will give your posts the initial push needed. Even so, StumbleUpon users tend to promote a specific type of post, such as top 10 lists with large pictures for each item on the list. They like record breaking stuff, like fast cars or tall buildings and bridges.

Since this is where the bulk of social media traffic is going to come from, you cannot afford to ignore it. Join StumbleUpon and start stumbling pages and making friends. You can send people in your StumbleUpon network links, and ask them to stumble these pages. It’s not easy, but even one post that goes viral on StumbleUpon will be enough to make your traffic stats jump through the roof.

This guest post is by Darren Dias.

I thought I’d share my blogging resolutions for New Year 2012, because it seems to be the popular thing to do.

Therein lies the seed for the first resolution, which is to write about things which are popular instead of sharing fascinating pictures of my cat snoozing all day long. Unless, of course, the blog is about cats.

That’s the second resolution – no matter what subject your blog is about, be on topic. There’s a difference between resolutions one and two, because you can be on topic and yet write about something incredibly boring that no one wants to read.

Put together 1 & 2, and write interesting posts related to the subject of your blog. This can be breaking news, top 5 or 10 lists, or an analysis of some hot trend or topic that everyone wants to talk about – like smart phones, social media, election coverage, celebrities, etc.

Remember that you still need to be on-topic, but there are plenty of ways to plug in these trends into something related to the blog’s subject. For example, former Gov. Mitt Romney just won the Iowacaucus. A financial blog could focus on what would policies he would enact if Mitt Romney went on to win the GOP nomination and then became President.

If you don’t do things like this, your blog will soon be among the 95 percent of blogs that are discarded by their owners within 3 months of launching, if not the 60 to 80 percent who do so after a month.

That brings us to Resolution No.3, which is to use facts, names, places and specific things that people can connect with. A blog post blathering on in general without any supporting facts and statistics or discussion about specifics isn’t going to be very interesting.

Speaking of interesting, Resolution No.4 is to make sure to include pictures and videos in each post. No matter how interesting or exclusive your text content may be, it just doesn’t attract attention if there’s no image or video.

It’s not so hard to find images under the creative commons license that you can use without paying for them. Flickr has over 6 billion images, Wikimedia has another 12 million or so, and 3 billion YouTube videos get viewed each day.

Lastly, resolution No.5 is to publish at least one post every single day. The point is to keep visitors and the search bots coming in every day to read new content. That’s what builds loyalty, and you really cannot expect a reader to come back unless they’re sure there’s going to be something new to read or talk about.