Earlier this month my company launched PimpThisBlog.com. PimpThisBlog.com runs on ASP.net MVC, a SQL Server database and combines a number of online third party services, such as Gravatar, Re-Captcha, ShareThis, and more, to provide a rich Web 2.0 user experience.

While I will soon publish another blog post to outline the details of the application’s technology stack, I first want to use the spotlight of this first post on the topic to outline how PimpThisBlog.com works, how it can HELP YOU promote your business and content, and how you too can harness its wit and power with very little effort.

What is PimpThisBlog.com?

PimpThisBlog.com is a place where you promote and publicize your content. It is a social community where its members help promote your content by way of “Pimping” (A.K.A rating --  YES, IT’S A GOOD THING), commenting, and sharing your content across a multitude of social networks and web communities and circles.

The act of spreading content generates an incredible amount of inbound links to YOUR content. Ask any SEO, inbound links are what increase your search engine page ranks and therefore make it more likely that your customers will find you, your products and your services. The more the better!

PimpThisBlog.com is simple to use and effective based on the early results. Just feed your content to PimpThisBlog.com and it'll take care of "pimping it" for you. As soon as it is published, your content is shared, syndicated and extended on Twitter, Google, FriendFeed to name a few.

Why should I use PimpThisBlog.com?

If you own a business, a web site, a blog, or anything that hosts relevant electronic content, then surely you want to direct web traffic to it. Industry experts, SEOs, and web marketing GURUs agree, inbound marketing is the key to being found, and most importantly found before your competition is. Make no mistake, outbound marketing is dead, and if you waste another cent on that yellow pages ad, well, that’s just too bad.

PimpThisBlog.com unleashes the power of social networking to the fullest extent possible, so that you don’t have to. The main value proposition is to save you time, money and trouble it takes to be discovered.

How and Where do I use PimpThisBlog.com?

Using PimpThisBlog.com is easy. If you are simply interested in being part of the community, simply visit http://www.pimpthisblog.com, register, and pimp on!

If you are publisher, or in other words host content that you can harness to promote yourself, your company, your products or services, then you can place a badge for it. There are currently 2 ways you can start “pimping” your content:

Pimp Badge

A pimp badge is a dynamically generated image that displays the number of active “pimps” – this badge is also linked to the resource entry on PimpThisBlog.com, and once clicked the “pimp” count is automatically incremented. Here is as example badge for this very blog post: 

Here is some sample code to get the badge installed on your blog, just make sure to replace the {YOUR_CONTENT_ABSOLUTE_URL} string token, with your content’s URL:

<a href="http://pimpthisblog.com/submit?url={YOUR_CONTENT_ABSOLUTE_URL}" rev="vote-for">
<img alt="pimp it" src="http://pimpthisblog.com/image.axd?url={YOUR_CONTENT_ABSOLUTE_URL}" /></a> 

The are alternative ways with which you can get the code snippet generated for you directly from the website. To do this, first “pimp” (or submit) your content to PimpThisBlog.com, then navigate to the “pimped” content’s detail page on PimpThisBlog.com, and click on the “show counter code”. Using this functionality you can even customize the colors of the badge to match the color-scheme of your own web site – cool!

Pimp Link

This a simple link that your web site users can click on to “pimp” your content, and increment its “pimp count”.
This method might generate a simple link looking like the following:

Pimp This Blog Post

… and here is the code for it, where, once again, you would replace {YOUR_CONTENT_ABSOLUTE_URL} the string token with your content’s URL:

<a href="http://pimpthisblog.com/Submit?url={YOUR_CONTENT_ABSOLUTE_URL}" rev="vote-for">
Pimp This Blog Post
</a>

Go ahead click on the badge or link above, and “pimp” this post for us… after all this is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

Now, if you Twitter you should follow @PimpThisBlog (http://www.twitter.com/PimpThisBlog).