Do you welcome Global Warming with open arms because electricity bills will be down and the weather will be hot all year around?? If you don’t, and you run a political or environmental blog, then Care2.com might just be able to deliver a small boost in traffic to your site.

Care2.com is a social news network for social activism topics, such as, the environment, green lifestyles, politics and health. If your blog has anything to do with these subjects then you should consider submitting your articles, here’s why:

Reach a targeted audience - you will be submitting content to an audience that genuinely cares about your message.

Easier to reach the front page than larger sites - while some of the larger social news and bookmark sites feature social activism stories, it’s far easier to reach the front page on Care2.com than those sites. You can also use it as an indicator to see what might become popular on the larger sites, such as, Digg, Reddit and Propeller.

First you’ll need to sign-up to Care2.com/news. Once you’ve done this you can start submitting stories. To submit a story click on the orange button towards the top of the page (helpfully pictured below with a huge arrow)

Now you’ll need to input the story title, description and keyword tags. There are a number of tags for you to choose from depending on what section you are submitting to. You can also include your own keywords.

Try to include a photograph if you can to make your submission stand out. You need to upload the picture from your computer so make sure you have a picture that is relevant to your story on your hard drive. If you don’t, then use everystockphoto or yotophoto to find one.

What sections should you submit to?

Generally, environmental stories attract the most votes on Care2, although, the front page includes popular stories from all categories.

If you want to reach the front page, there are a different number of votes you’ll need for each section (although, this is dependent on how many votes the other articles have at the time). Below is the minimum number of votes you’ll need for each category:

• Environment 37+
• US politics and Gov. 33+
• Business 24+
• Science and Tech 22+
• Green lifestyle 26+
• Health and Wellness 23+
• Animals 39+
• Society and Culture 31+
• World 34+
• Offbeat 22+

You usually have 24 hours for your submission to make the front page. Reaching the front page isn’t particularly difficult, but if you are struggling for votes, then you can make friends with other users and ask them to take a look at your submission.

To find friends that will be interested in your article content use the search bar towards the top right-hand side of the screen. Search for keywords that are in your headline or article content. You’ll then see a number of other articles submitted on the same topic. Add those users as friends by clicking on the username underneath the article title.

Now you can add the user as a friend. To send them a message, click the “Introduce yourself.” You can now send a message to the user before they have accepted your request to be their friend. Usually reaching the front page of Care2 isn’t that difficult though and if you have an interesting story and headline you’ll reach the front page quite easily.

Care2 won’t bring you in an avalanche of traffic, but if your site has anything to do with politics, animals or the environment then it’s an excellent method of reaching demographics who would be interested in what you have to say.