Social sharing has become the de facto way for people to discover content.

Now, if you want to really promote your blog posts, you've got to promote them on social networks. Why? Because social sites like , and are where the viral sharing of content takes place.

In fact, people now have so much content in their social streams that they're less likely to click over to that blog post. So posting on blogs, then promoting it on social networks, doesn't work as well as it used to.

If you post something on a blog, fewer people are likely to find it. It's like nailing a printout of your post on a tree in the forest.

Hybrid sites that combine social networking features with blogging, such as and , are a step in the right direction (especially Tumblr, because it's a real blogging platform and it lacks 's character limit).