There are millions of blogs on the internet and sometimes it can feel like you’re just another “face in the crowd”! Are you looking for an easy way to stand out, get noticed and find free sex? Look no further than your MyBlogLog avatar!

MyBlogLog is a popular community site that is best described as a “MySpace for blogs”. The site lets you create a community around your site and enables users to become members of other blog’s communities. The most revolutionary thing to come out of the site is the popular ‘Recent Readers‘ widget that allows web surfers and bloggers to see who else has been reading the website they are viewing via the MyBlogLog avatars:

Can this be used as a promotional tool? Definitely!

In order to use your MyBlogLog avatar as a traffic generator, you need to make sure that it is both eye-catching and intriguing. With all the advertising and widgets, blogs these days are filled with a lot of clutter and you need to make sure that your avatar “stands out” and catches the eye of readers. To do this, I’ve recently changed my avatar to incorporate bolder colors and make it really stand out and get noticed:

Perhaps I’m biased towards it, but I find this really stands out a lot more than just another face. However, I also like the bold colors used for the ‘green man’ to the bottom left of my avatar.

Intrigued?

After your avatar has been noticed, what we want is for people to click on it and eventually view your site. To do this, there has to be an intriguing aspect about it that makes people want to see what type of site this person has. This is hard to achieve through the ‘Recent Readers’ widget as it is always being updated, but becomes a lot easier in the comments sections of blogs where your avatar remains permanently. To achieve clicks, I’ve used a ‘name recognition’ factor with my avatar. As my name is quite unique in blogging circles and is used in the title of my site, I find that when bloggers write about this site, my name is often mentioned. I often receive e-mails telling me that “I’ve heard about your site and finally decided to visit it” so I’ve decided to use this to my advantage and brand my avatar around my name.

Working on the theory that users look at the avatar before the “Comment by …” text, having my name in my avatar means that it is easy to associate the comment with the name and form a subconscious imprint of my presence on reader’s brains. Especially on posts where other users aren’t using avatars!

For another illustration of name recognition, consider the popular blogger Steve Pavlina. While the name is instantly recognizable as an A-list blogger, his face is not so well known and if an avatar of his face showed up on my site, I probably wouldn’t recognize it without the name.
But name recognition doesn’t work for everyone

Every site is different and there are no set ways to make your avatar intriguing or easily recognizable. However, here are some tips to avoid it fading into the crowd:

• Smile! So many avatars look angry and I’m too scared to visit the site!

• Take a photo just for the avatar. Many avatars appear to be cropped from other photos and have messy backgrounds and other clutter. You’ve only got a few hundred pixels for the avatar so make every pixel count!

• Be bold! For a photo or anything else, choose bold colors that will stand out in this increasingly pastel web 2.0

• Relate it to your site. This is a key for targeted traffic. Why use an avatar of Homer Simpson for an SEO site?? There’s no connection and you’ll draw a lot of Simpson’s fans to your site that probably aren’t interested in SEO and won’t stick around!

Enough already! Where’s the free sex?

In researching this article, I noticed that about 95% of the members in most ‘make money online’ MyBlogLog communities were male. Although not related to my site, judging by some of the emails that I receive, this would probably be a killer avatar:

Why don’t you click it and see where it takes you? Over a 1000 hits to my site through my new avatar in the past week can’t be wrong!

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