No Blog is an Island
A guest post by Internet marketing specialist Mark Johnson.
Blogging is a social media. It is all about sharing your ideas with your blogging community, and whilst a portion of that community will come to you, your blog will never reach its potential if you don’t put yourself out there and get involved with your community.
When you start a new blog, it is very easy to dive enthusiastically into writing post after post about whatever it is that you are passionate about. That’s great. This enthusiasm will carry you through where other bloggers lose interest. However, it is incredibly important that you don’t focus on your blog in isolation.
Getting to know your blogging community
Within your own blogging community there are many different readers, but there are also many different bloggers. If you just spend all of your time writing your own blog, you will be left out of the loop and miss out on the sense of community that good bloggers are able to build with their readers. It’s a bit like being at a party and only wanting to talk about yourself.
So put yourself out there, and start mingling. Here are a few pointers:
- Introduce yourself. Start talking to other bloggers in your niche. Read their blogs and email them to ask thoughtful questions. Building relationships is important, it helps you to share ideas. Once you have built a network of friends, you can help each other out. Your main competitors might just be your best allies.
- Leave comments. Talk to other blog readers. Don’t do it for the links, most blog masters use nofollow links anyway. Do it for the opportunity to get to know and understand your readers. As your community gets to know you, they may ask about your blog. Many readers will have blogs of their own, so this is another opportunity to get to know the up and comers in your niche.
- Invite discussion. Write your blog posts for your readers. Invite them to comment, and join in with the discussion. Readers love to know that you actually pay attention to comments left, it lets them know that you are a real person. Readers who like you as a person are much more likely to keep visiting your blog.
- Go to events. If there is some sort of event for your niche, why not go along. Maybe even organise an event. This is a great way to actually meet some of the bloggers you have built relationships with. You may even get to meet some of the high profile bloggers in your sphere and make valuable new contacts.
Summary
Never forget that blogging goes hand in hand with networking. Blogging in isolation is a lonely thing to do, and your blog will never achieve the following it is capable of until you know and understand your audience and your sphere. Be social, meet people and make friends. A solid community can help you to understand your readers. It will help you to find inspiration and share that inspiration with others.
Mark Johnson is an internet marketing specialist who spends his time helping small businesses to gain an online presence and writing his own blog where he talks about SEO, blogging, social media and whatever else springs to mind.
Tags: blog community, guest posts
The comments are closed on the article i wanted to leave a comment on (http://www.blogtap.net/notes-on-title-rewriting-keyword-density/) with just a simple addition.
Blogging platforms and in the case of the ones you mentioned there simply use a plugin similar to seo-slugs, look it up from your internal plugin search.
No magic beans, it simply strips “stop words” which Google and other SE`s largely ignore. Sorry for posting the comment here, but feel free to copy it across to the original post, or not.
Thanks for the comment. I have no idea why comments were disabled for that post!