I thought I’d compile a list of resources for Atheist bloggers which might be useful for new members of the Atheosphere or might have been overlooked by the old ones.

Joining and utilizing these services should give you more exposure and interaction. Of course it’s not a magic recipe but if you have good content that fails to get noticed this should help.

Participate

This is the first and most important tip I can give you. If you want more exposure and readers, the best thing you can do is be a part of the Atheosphere. Don’t assume that just by writing on your own blog people are going to flock to your brilliant writing. Well, it might happen but it’s going to be much more easy if you return the favour.

How do you participate? Just read what others have to say and then comment if you have something interesting to contribute. Bloggers are generally delighted to receive comments, even it it’s the occasional “well said” and if you seem to become a regular at someone’s blog, they’re bound to visit your site to see who you are and what you’re all about.

If you want to refute, analyse or improve on what someone else said, don’t leave it as a comment. Trackback instead from your own blog. Write a normal blogpost and aim a link at what someone else has written (don’t aim at their main blog unless you have to. Go for the permalink.) A trackback is sure to make the author of the original post follow it back to see what you wrote.

Finally, if you find something particularly good or interesting, do not shy from voting, sharing, redditing, digging or anywhere else he has been submitted. Indeed, subscribe in all of these services beforehand so that it’s easy to vote up people with interesting ideas. Simply, do as you’d like other to do with your posts 😉

This is the classic first stop for most atheist bloggers. Joining the blogroll will not give you much more than visibility at the many blogs that have it displayed. Unfortunately since technorati changed their algorithms, appearing there does not help your authority.

The Atheist Blogroll is however a resource that some of us use as a way to create or organise other services for the Atheosphere.

Many people subscribe here for their daily news reading. By joining, you’ll appear at the feed reader of many pairs of eyes so there’s not reason not to. Unfortunately lately I haven’t been able to get in contact with the admin so hopefully this is still being administered.

You should use the Carnival to give some of your most interesting posts more visibility. Every two weeks these are compiled into a grand carnival and presented to the world. Posts submitted to the carnival generally get around 200 views from my experience. Not much for someone already estabilished but a nice boost for the more invisible of us 🙂

Join the Nexus and then also join the Bloggers group to find other like you. Taking part in the forum discussions is also a great way to find blogging material to write about. This is what I’m doing anyway 🙂

Go there, claim your blog and grab some widgets. Technorati is great at giving you some accurate stats about your popularity. Many prefer the authority widget (or bragging widget as I like to call it) but for me the simple linkcount widget is enough and a nice way to see how many people have found your post interesting enough to link back to it.

Once you join Technorati do not forget to favorite your…well, favorite blogs. Bloggers love when you do that and you may be rewarded in some way 😉

You can find me here.

This has only started getting more popular with the Atheists lately. Most use it to notify about their new blogposts but it also serves as a handy public channel for quick discussions. I’ve had many a quick answer as well as some good notifications for events of interest. And, hey, you can’t go wrong with befriending God and Satan either 😉

You can find me here and I’ve also created a delicious tag for all the atheists in twitter. Use it to quickly populate your contacts and then tag yourself.

You can pretty much see this on every blog nowadays and most people use it for the same reason, to have the nice little avatars of their recent visitors. I’ve honestly yet to find another function to it as for statistics wordpress and google analytics give me much more powerful tools and for free. Nevertheless, that widget is quite nice as you can easily discover who reads you and perhaps find some interesting new blog from there.

Still, if you find any other great use except for the visitors widget, let me know 😉

You can find me here.

If you’re on Facebook and like me you don’t like to add friends you don’t actually know, the Blog Networks should be a nice alternative to show your support for your fellow atheist bloggers. Join, add your blog and join the network of the blogs you’re reading meticilously. Leave a comment and strike up a connection.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here as well as my profile.

This is the newest blog helping tool I’ve found. As I understand, it is quite new as well but it has some promise. I’ve blogged about it recently so I won’t repeat what I said but I think it would be a good addition to your sidebar as it’s automated and the more Atheists that join it now that it’s still new, the more visibility we’ll gain in general.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here.

A nice way to get a rating for your blog. If your blog is not already in you can add it and in due time an editor of the site will give it a rating. It does not stop there of course as people who read you can rate and review your blog which should give you that warm fuzzy feeling. Return the favor and then everyone is happy 🙂

You can find my profile here.

Voting Services

There’s a bunch of Popularity services that many atheists use to improve their visibility. You probably know most of them already but just in case, I’m going to mention some of the more useful ones.

It is in all of our best interests to join these social networks and vote each other up. We have 750 Atheist Blogs at the moment and if just 200 of these people were active on the voting services, the atheist voice would be hitting the headlights every day. It is a sad fact that between all of us, we are still invisible.

I found that there is a reddit devoted to atheism just recently and it seems to be quite active. I wasn’t using reddit that much before but I started just for this. The good thing about reddit is its usability. A post that has the reddit buttons (like this one *wink*wink*) can be voted up or down just with a simple click which should make the action so painless that you have no reason not to do it.

Also, even if the buttons of reddit do not exist on the blog template, by putting the bookmarklets on your toolbar, you can vote without leaving the page either. Don’t forget to be bold as well. If the article is good enough and has not been submitted, do so yourself.

Another voting system especially for Atheism. This is quite new and still in the process of building up a readership. It’s not as easy to use as reddit but it is certainly less abused. With the addition of the handy social buttons it becomes a bit of an easier process.

You may not think it but Stumbleupon can give you significant traffic if enough people vote your articles up. The same also apply for other people who have their articles submitted. Since stumbleupon has a limit on how many times one can submit a specific site, the page author cannot do so for every one of his articles. This, if you read something interesting, press that “thumbs up” and if it’s not there, submit it.

I don’t know about the rest but I’m delighted every time I see visitors coming from stumbleupon in a new article. I always go and thank the one who submitted it 🙂 Remember that an post on stumbleupon gets more visitors depending on how many people have given it the thumbs up. My Firefox article of one year ago got 2000 visitors in the first 2 days and I’m still getting visitors now to it (just because someone voted it up again recently). So if you see something in there, give it the thumbs up.

Another way to help is join the network of atheists in stumbleupon. Not only will you find many great articles from there but the more of us that are there and vote each other’s sumbissions, the more visitors all of us get.

You can find me here.

I’ve already written about this in depth so I won’t repeat it here. I will only mention that there has been very little activity on this front and it’s a pity. The same things I said before about mobilizing the Atheist presence on the Internet applies here too. Consider that the Atheist Nexus at the moment has 3000 members but the highest rated Atheist blog has had just 24 votes.

This is not strictly a bloggers resource but I consider that it has great potential to increase visibility to blog articles, including the ones that were written a while ago. It also has the potential to make your web surfing a bit more enjoyable.

Epilogue

So here ends my little tour of the resources I use for my daily traves in the Atheosphere and beyond. I hope that I’ve given new bloggers some starting points and old geezers some ideas that might not have considered before. If you have anything I have missed myself, I’d love to hear it and perhaps update this small list.

Cheers!

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