How To Grow Your Blog

• Don’t Be An Ass.

You know that friend who thinks she’s better than everyone and has the answer for everything? She’s assertive and bossy and mean funny and talks only about herself? You can only stand to be around her for maybe ten minutes before you feel like cutting her eye lashes off? If you’ve never met someone like this than you’re probably her. Stop acting like that. No one likes to read a blog that focuses on how great you are or how right you are all the time. Unless you’re me.

• Make People Love You

You can’t go it alone. Find people you like who are roughly in the same place as you in the blogosphere and win them over with your winning personality. It’s so nice to have other bloggers to go to for help or advice with your blog. Not to mention they’ll email you any juicy gossip they find in blogland and you can giggle together at the ridiculousness of others when they start fights with each other on their blogs. If you don’t have a winning personality you really should think about investing in one.

• Linky Love

Linking to blogs you like will not only get you in good graces with those bloggers you link to, but it shows you’re selfless and lovely and interested in promoting things that mean something to you even if it takes traffic away from your site. Karma is real. It will come back to you.

• Comment

This isn’t as important as it used to be. It used to be that we would spend hours hopping from blog to blog leaving comments that would entice people to come to our blog and fall in love. Commenting is nice and it makes us feel good and we shouldn’t stop, but as far as using it as a means to grow your audience? It’s not an effective use of your time. Don’t STOP, but don’t spend hours upon hours of your day doing it solely for traffic. Do it because you like to do it.

• Tweet-a-leeta-leet

If you are new and you want to be the next big thing…you must must must open a twitter account. Follow people like crazy. Engage them in conversation. Talk about falling down the stairs or how your dog keeps pooping out kid sized socks or WHATEVER it is you do all day. If you spend just 15 minutes a day extending yourself to people on Twitter they will learn to love you. And guess what? The more people you get to love you on Twitter? The more people who will click over when you tweet a link to your blog about your mom throwing herself off a ladder…or whatever it is your mom is throwing herself off of.

• Forums: AKA Find People To Argue With

Don’t limit yourself to just one platform. It’s easy to get stuck in a neighborhood in blogland where it feels you’re not meeting anyone new. By posting thoughtful questions and giving drop dead hilarious answers to other questions, forum friends are going to come racing over to see what your blog is about. Or they’ll fight you. And that’s not fun. Forums are also a great resource for blog topics. Sometimes your question or answer on a forum can be turned into it’s own blog post. If you spend just 15 minutes a day extending yourself to people in forums they will learn to love you and check out your blog… BlogFrog is a great forum platform for this. Not only do you get all of the perks of regular forums, but when you leave questions and answers in different communities, the link to your profile shows up on their BLOG. Which is awesome. The more places you can leave your mark the better right?

• Ignore Your Family

Bribe your kids in exchange for computer time. A bowl of candy goes a long way. How is anyone going to take you seriously as a caring mommy blogger if you don’t consistently write about how much you care?

• Don’t Ignore Your Family

As lovely as blogging is. And as wonderful as it feels to get the feedback and comments and traffic we crave. Your family needs you present. If your kids are continuously ‘bothering’ you while you’re on the computer, if your two year old is closing the screen of your lap top while you type, or if your husband sighs loudly when you assume the position with your computer on your lap…these are all signs your family is needing more of you. Get involved. Blog posts and twitter and emails will all be here when you have time. A healthy family life begets a healthy blog life.

• Be Responsive

Whether it be through email, twitter, your comment section or by returning visits to their blogs every once in awhile. Respond to the people who spend time leaving you comments. This isn’t easy. I have yet to find a balance with my time management online. When you begin to extend yourself on a number of different platforms it can be tricky to prioritize, but it’s important if you want people to know their feedback means something to you. If you spend just 15 minutes a day extending yourself to people leaving comments on your blog they will learn to love you.

• Learn Something About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You won’t learn it here…but souping up your blog posts with strong tags, descriptions, key words, and permalinks means your blog will come up on Google search lists. For example, if you post about neutering your mouse and soup up that post properly with mouse neuter links…and say Oprah talks about that topic and all of her viewers get online and google neutered mice…BOOM! A bajillion people hit your blog. And that’s all I know.

• And Most Importantly…Write Gooder.

You can spend hours begging a million people a day to read your blog, but if it’s not readable they’re not going to come back. Keep your posts to the point, keep your blog looking clean, and remember, paragraphs and line breaks are. your. friends.

Tagged as: create a community, great forums, how to grow your blog