Networking in any type of business is a great way to build your brand and promote your business. On Tuesday, I visited a few blogs left comments, emailed a few bloggers and promoted the Blogged out Project; you could call this blog networking.
If you have been keeping an eye on my stats you will have seen that yesterday my stats jumped from 60, to 271 unique visitors per day. So, what can you do to put this into practise on your own blog; find some high profile blogs within your niche, i.e. gadget blogs, and leave comments, do not spam, but leave questions, answer questions and put across your point of view.
You will find other bloggers and readers clicking on your link within the comments and visiting your blog. Also, have a think about quizzes, competitions, and challenges which you can introduce in your blog to attract new visitors.
Obviously, it is difficult to get this amount of traffic every day from blog networking, because it means a lot of time and effort on your part, but it is a good technique to attract people to your blog, build awareness, and find new readers who will subscribe to your RSS feed etc.
Thanks go out to the following bloggers for helping me raise awareness of the Blogged out blog:
Chris | Anthony | Colleen | Leigh | Darren | Jenn | John | Richard | Pete
Network with your fellow bloggers and go check out the cool blogs featured above..
Great tip. I think it’s also a great idea to pass along an article on your blog that may interest another. They’ll appreciate sharing great content with their readers, and your blog get’s a nice infusion of new eyeballs.
Good idea, but be careful of duplicate content – this is a big issue for bloggers, and I’ll go into more detail about this later, but my advice is to take a snippet or quote from the article, write a few words yourself about the article and then link to the original source.
By linking your also giving the writer some link love.
This is something that I’ve neglected to do for quite sometime. It’s a good reminder on what people really need to do to keep their blog ALIVE…
Great tip!
Thanks Pete.
We all need a reminder from time to time, and I hope that even if readers are aware of the advice, it’ll help to remind them.
Awesome idea Darren, going to be keeping my eye on this.
This is a great tip and easy (at least for me) to implement since I already read and post on other’s blogs. I like seeing what other people have to say and hope my comments combined with everyone else’s will encourage the author to keep it up.
Thanks Colleen, and thank you for promoting the blog it’s much appreciated.
Leigh, thanks for the kind comments. Yes, I want everyone to join in, network and discuss how we can all earn an income and probably more important to write a successful blog.
Hi Darren, I notice that you are very good about replying to the comments. Thank you for the warm welcome. Is this one of your strategies for happy visitors, or do you just like to be part of the conversation?
Hi Leigh,
I think its important that any blogger replies to comments, even if it’s to say thanks for leaving your comment.
It makes readers feel that the writer is interested in what they have to say, and the readers feel comfortable leaving comments.
It annoys me when i see readers leaving comments on other blogs and no one replies.
I think what your doing is awesome. Good luck with promoting the blog, I don’t think you will have any problems with the start you have taken.
Thanks, Darren, you raise a good point. I haven’t responded to many of my comments yet, but I’ll be sure to respond from now on. Great advice! I’m new, so I still have plenty to learn.
I have a small audience at the moment, but an audience nonetheless and it’s growing, so I’ve posted an entry about your project. Thanks for doing this.
No problem Leigh.
I have added a link to your blog in this post
Have you got any stats software, to monitor where your readers are coming from, i.e. search engines etc.
I have Google Analytics, in which I have not yet found where my readers are coming from (not to say it’s not there, just that I haven’t had a lot of time to explore yet). Do you happen to know if Google Analytics has that? Do you have other ideas/suggestions?
Leigh, it’s not easy to find in Analytics, it’s not the easiest of tools, but choose the following:
Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > Referring Source.
You’ll then see a list of referrals, i.e. where your visitors have come from. By default it’s set to the top 10 referrals, so you need to expand it to 25,50 etc if you have more.
An easier option is use what I am using for the project and thats BlogFlux stats.
http://mapstats.blogflux.com/
Time for my bed
Found it! Thanks, Darren. I may also try BlogFlux.
This is the correct link for my blog. Raise awareness by putting the right URL might help!!
Yo Darren,
Thanks for the linkage, sir.
About replying to comments: I don’t know about others, but comments are one of the reasons I blog. I’m not in it to monologue.
If someone takes the time to leave a comment, they’re worth the time it takes to make it a good experience for them. This is how good relationships begin. -j
Good tip… Its something I have started doing recently, and it is paying off. It also has the side benefit of adding more links to your blog, which the search engines generally like.
Nenad, that’s not true unfortunately. Alot of blog links in comments do not get picked up by the search engines because by default links are set to ‘nofollow’ on the majority of blogs.
The ‘nofollow’ tag stops the search engines from spidering.
They are plugins out there so you can turn this is off.
Adding comments though are good at promoting your blog providing that they arent spam comments. It’s also a good idea to reply to any comments you get on the blog.
No problem John
Richard, I’ve altered the link
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