Use Publicize to help grow your crowd
One of the great features that came with our transition to WordPress.com this season is the Publicize tool for social media promotion. Be sure you have it activated to take advantage of more no-brainer traffic. Use Publicize to send out a new status update or tweet every time you make a new post to your blog, so your friends, followers and connections can stay up to date with your blogging about Major League Baseball.
Setting it up is simple in your dashboard. Create a connection under Sharing, found in the Settings menu. Once you have given WordPress.com permission to access your account on the other side, you will notice a Publicize section has been added to the Publish box when you are composing or editing a post, showing where the post is to be publicized. And it is fully customizable. You can choose to not publicize an individual post or to only publicize on a particular social media site. You can even customize the text of the status update or tweet if you want to explain a little about the post.
If you want to get onto the MLB.com/blogs Latest Leaders rankings for August, or want to try to run away from the pack, this is another good idea. There are many more ways to increase traffic as well. Be sure to comment on other MLBlogs routinely, always typing your full URL within the comment as it stands out more as a clickable ID. Post often, and obviously well. Make sure you About identification is prominent on the first screen, using the Gravatar or other method of display to show who you are. Give them a subscribe widget so they can get your posts by email. Experiment, and ask others who are in the monthly Latest Leaders how they do it.
Also, remember that you can order a JUMBO presentation of your MLBlog at MLB.com/blogs — the kind of specific baseball-crowd advertisement that only MLB.com can deliver. Just follow those specific instructions we gave you to do that, as others have done.
MLB.com Blogs Central 
I was hacked for the I believe third time now. I was able to obtain the e-mail adress of the hacker and I believe I know who he is. His posts as well as his comments are currently in my trash can. If anyone know how to report a hacker I would greatly appreciate it as I am very annoyed to say the least.
Bob:Soxoholics
http://soxoholics.wordpress.com/
REMINDER to everyone in the MLB.com/blogs community – WordPress.com handles support issues and your contact for that is always http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact
This was a case of user’s blog-access password (or associated email password) being compromised and according to WordPress.com both should be changed. Obviously always change your passwords and use alphanumeric.
Tags also were very helpful to me
yossif.mlblogs.com (The Rays Rant)
I don’t know why that thing is showing up as my Gravatar pic
ok nvm it works now
I’ve found the “Publicize” tool to hold great potential, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for — specifically, I haven’t found a way to customize the tweet that is generated. Here’s what I do instead.
At a minimum, I want my tweet to say “New Hoppers Fan Blog entry: [post title] [link]”. If there’s room, I might put other hashtags and/or @-mention the teams involved. It’s a little more work than just using the “Publicize” tool, but it’s not much work at all, and I like how my tweets come out when I hand-craft them just a little bit. You can use a URL shortening service to make your blog links smaller, but WordPress already has that covered for you — just look for the “Get Shortlink” button and copy the link you get from there.
For Facebook, I use the RSS Graffiti to automatically aggregate my blog entries onto my FB page. That works great.
Maybe I can keep tinkering with “Publicize” and find a combination that I really like. I definitely love the improvements we have now that we’re on WordPress. Thanks for the suggestions about how to use this platform to help drive traffic to our blogs.
-greg, aka Hoppers Fan
http://hoppersfan.mlblogs.com <– Greensboro Grasshoppers fan blog
http://baseballhaiku.mlblogs.com <– Baseball Haiku