I’m not ashamed to admit it, I’m after fame and glory and my blog is going to help me achieve it. The only problem is how do I convince a legion of people to read my wonderful words?
At this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival (MWF) I attended an event called “Colonising the Internet”, a discussion, I thought, with published authors about building an online presence. I was expecting fireworks and tips on how to attract readers, what I got was a talk on how the Internet has effected they way they write novels. Interesting but not particularly helpful to the fledgling blogger.
There are a buckets of sites and blog posts out in the ether that will provide tips on how to promote your blog (in fact searching for them is no. 2 in my list below) but none that chronicle how someone actually did it (they’re probably out there too, I just haven’t found them yet – do you know of any?). So I’m going to, right here, right now. I hope you find it, if not interesting, then at least helpful.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
- Installed Google Analytics as a barometer for how my efforts are succeeding.
- Googled “promoting your blog”. Quite a number of sites came up in the search and provided me with some great tips like give meaningful comments on other blogs.
- Post to twitter and Facebook. I’m not a fan of either, but many people are and they offer a great platform for say “Hi, I’m here, check me out”. So every time I post something new a link to it goes up on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve used some WordPress plugins to automate the task for me, Twitter Tools and Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook.
- Found blogs with similar topics/interests to mine. Link to them. It’s amazing what you can learn from other people and what opportunities can arise. I’ve described one such below but before I get to it …
- Left comments on the above blogs complete with my name and website address. The hope is if you leave a meaningful comment the blog authors will be inclined to visit my blog in return.
- Participate in writing exercises like Writer’s Weights run on some of the blogs I found. These are great ways to build relationships with other people because you’re (kinda) working with them and if you post a link to your finished exercise on their blog, maybe they’ll read it.
Does any of the above need more explaining?
There are links to a number of helpful sites on All My Links. If you know of any others let me know, I’d love to hear from you.
Hi Belinda, you have a good list here. I’d add google alerts to your list above that allows you to track when people link back to your blogs. I’m not a huge user of twitter (mostly use it to chat (rarely… )) but there is a great writer set of groups that you can find out there as well. You might be interested in looking at #fridayflash, where people link up their fiction. It’s a supportive community of writers.
P.S. Thanks for the link 🙂