Blogging is a great step in the right direction if you are looking for ways to dive into social media. Conversations are at the core of what it’s all about, after all. However, there is much more you can do once you have that blog up and running. You can think of your blog as a hub connecting all of your social media activities, and you’ll want to encourage visitors to engage with you socially in as many ways as possible. Here are some ideas you can run with:

Social badges, buttons, and widgets (oh my!): Why not advertise your social presence while you have your readers’ attention? There are many different ways to do this.

Facebook recently introduced Fan Boxes for those users with Fan Pages. These allow page administrators to embed the latest activity from their page directly on their website or blog. If you don’t have a fan page and you want people to know about your personal Facebook profile, you can also add a badge to your site provided by Facebook. Use the “Create a Profile Badge” link all the way to the bottom below your image.

Facebook Connect is another option – this is a tool that allows software, websites, mobile devices and more to integrate with Facebook and send information between them.

Want to encourage your readers to follow you on Twitter? A simple Google search shows that there are many different badges to add to your site. Twittercounter.com has one of my favorites: the “big bird button” has a stylish design that shows your number of followers.

Finally, Google Friend Connect and MyBlogLog are two online services that allow web users to connect with their friends on different websites. These free services help build the community around blogs and bloggers.

Submit buttons: If you use the WordPress blogging platform, a wonderful plugin to use is “Sociable”. This adds a row of buttons to the bottom of your posts for various social sites and tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, and more. This way, readers can easily submit your content to bookmark, vote for, and share.

If you are not a WordPress user, the ShareThis or AddThis buttons are a great alternative.

Sharable content: It goes without saying that you want to add content to your blog that provides a lot of value to your readers. This is what creates your subscriber base and ultimately determines your success. Some content can be “shared” more than others.

For example, people love lists. “Top 10 tips on ….” “7 ways to ….” – you get the idea. Consider adding these types of posts to the mix, because readers are more likely to share them.

The headlines are also worth mentioning. Consider what might catch your eye when writing your blog post titles. People are more likely to not only keep reading, but also share it with others and those people will share it too.

These days, people look forward to being able to interact with you when they visit your site. Make it very simple for them and they will come back for more!