How do you market your blog?
It doesn’t matter what topics you cover, to get more readers to your blog you’ve got to tell interested people that it exists and give them a reason to read it.
Online Social Networking Websites such as Twitter are IMHO essential for growing your community and staying abreast with current topics.
It’s important to remember that blogging, at its core, is a conversation. If you write a post that no one wants to link to or comment on, or doesn’t address your opinion on what others have written, then what exactly is its purpose?
You need to be an active part of the conversation
If your blog is well established, then you can spend a lot of time starting the conversation, if you’re just beginning to blog, you’ll spend most of your time adding to other conversations. That’s one of the main strategies I’m following here at Marketing-SEO.com and to do that successfully, it’s vitally important that you know what the conversations are and where they’re taking place!
To a large extent, I don’t think it matters what social network websites you build a presence on (although some industries will benefit from following a related niche network), what does matter is your approach to networking within that community. For now, I’m concentrating the majority of my efforts on Twitter (in case you haven’t noticed!) but it won’t be long before I start branching out into other networks too.
Here’s a real example of what online social networks can do for you
A few days ago, a twitter account came up for sale on eBay. This was a hotly discussed topic on Twitter and generated blog posts on some very prominent blogs which presented an excellent opportunity for me to add to the conversation. My blog post Do we need to worry about ‘Tweet Jacking’ was an attempt to join in on that discussion by raising the related issue of hackers targeting Twitter accounts now that the value of having a large group of followers has been established.
It was only the third post I had made to this blog, I hadn’t even announced the blogs existance, yet it highlights just how important this strategy is for growing an audience. You can see the analysis of those first couple of days in my weekly traffic report, but the effects didn’t stop there. Earlier today Problogger, Darren Rowse tweeted that he was reading an article on protecting your personal brand on Twitter - since my article was directly related to something he was interested in right now, I sent him a quick message with a link to my article - a few minutes later he tweeted my link to his 4000+ followers.
It’s not like I’ve made the front page of Digg or anything, but for a blog that is less than a week old, only has a few articles and only having Twittered for about two weeks, I have found the response to be quite remarkable (now if only I can get those people to leave comments!).
How to build a popular social network profile
I’m not going to try and tell you how you should build your social network profile - I’ll leave that up to DoshDosh, he’s a power user in nearly every social network website I’ve looked at, his branding is easily recognisable and his article on seven characteristics for building a popular social network profile is the only article you’ll need to read about the subject… all that and it’s got some really cool lego action photos that’ll keep you entertained for hours!
Please take a moment to consider your own approach to blogging - are you striving to be an active part of the conversation, or are you passively writing on any subject hoping someone will notice?
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Great Post here Martin. I’m wondering if Search engine has the same impact as social networking sites for bloggers? Can you say something bout that? Thanks
Hi Dave,
Most of the data I’ve seen first hand and read from top blogs such as Problogger, still show Google organic and direct input as significant traffic sources. In some cases they still have the #1 and #2 spots, but other blogs report sites like StumbleUpon etc. as their main source of traffic. Here’s a great post on Stumbleupon traffic that Skellie wrote on Problogger - some of the comments refer to google traffic etc, so good reading.
What’s more, if your strategy focuses on the social networking sites, you’re still going to get indexed in the search engines and gain traffic the regular way too - one isn’t done at the exclusion of the other. It’s a strategy that makes a lot of sense, especially if you are conscious of the SEO aspects of your article while you’re writing it.
Finally, SEO is a long term strategy, if you’re starting a new blog, it’s likely that you won’t get significant SEO traffic for several months, whereas targeting the online social networks will generate traffic for you instantly.