Being a full-time blogger, with daily deadlines, audience outreach and commenters to placate, can be a full-time job for many writers. And that blogging job may be on top of other bill-paying jobs held by the blogger.
If you’re a blogger, you should be looking for more efficient ways to grow your blog, your readership, and your ad dollars. Combine your best efforts with a basic knowledge of search engine optimization and, within months, you will see some growth. [To learn a bit about SEO and blogging, check out this Gravitate list of top SEO blogs, which includes great insights from top tech bloggers from site like Moz.com, Social Media Examiner and the iAcquire blog.]
Social media for bloggers
Social media plays a big part in the success of many key bloggers today. Writing good content, shooting a companion video and promoting this content across social media channels has helped lift up the sites like Problogger.net, Heidi Cohen and others. Many successful bloggers swear by the continuous use of social media outlets to further their cause and grow their online influence.
Building your online influence has become a key part of any serious blogger’s game. Accomplishing that comes in distinct parts:
Blogging on a popular topic with insightful content.
Understanding your target audience, growing your referrals and building relationships.
Promoting your ideas, your work, your writing and your results.
Promotion in Practice
Promoting yourself is crucial in today’s mobile-connected world. That means using social media. Growing an online network and consistently putting good content into that readership’s eyes and ears can make all the difference for your blog’s success.
Let’s presume you’ve gone online and filled out all your relevant online profiles. Make sure they are consistent with one another — there is value in consistency. Strive to tell one blog brand story. If you’re a environmental news blogger, stick to that. Try not to branch out into other blogging areas; it may dilute your main efforts.
Twitter and Facebook will be the most prominent when promoting your blog, but there is also search value in Google’s social site, Google +, and its video sharing service YouTube. Let’s look at how these sites can help build your blog presence.
Twitter
Twitter allows you to use your copywriting skills to come up with short catch-phrases to share your content. Using 140 characters or less can help sharpen your brain to nail down your blog content in several well-placed tweets. If you’re blogging about Italian food, try use searchable hashtags like #italianfood or #italianmeal to help fellow Twitter users find your posts easily and those will lead back to your blog content. Bloggers can even set up automatic Twitter posts to your LinkedIn site, and vice versa, in order to build your ‘expert credibility’ at that professional business site.
Facebook
Once you’ve written your blog post, you can drop it into your daily Facebook status box, with the URL, and it will show the image on your blog post. Once it’s on your Facebook timeline, you can share it around the web to friends and professional networks. Ask friends to send your blog post shares to their networks if they find value in your work. Never underestimate how willing people will be to share your content, if you only ask.
Google +
As mentioned above, your blog should have valuable, insightful and unique content that doesn’t just copy what’s already out there. There are instances of Google penalizing some bloggers who misuse the work of their blog. If you have new and great content every day, you should start posting the URLs on Google +. Posts on Google + go a long way toward establishing your blogging credibility, and can help to raise your profile on the almighty Google search engine.
YouTube
Are you comfortable using video? If you have a pleasant video manner, and can film and edit a minute-long clip to add to your blog content, then that makes your content more original and more appealing to readers. Add a short summary or focus on another area of the posts that you didn’t get to write about, and post the clip on YouTube. Then you can embed the clip into your blog post as a visual aid to your blog. Readers will likely enjoy the extra effort you made to get good quality content to them.
These tools take time to get comfortable with and may suck up a bit of time in the beginning. But as you go along, you’ll find that their consistent use will pay dividends down the line in terms of readers, advertisers and online influence.
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