8. Connections and interchange: The Good Old Boys had it right.
In the “old days” there was much made
out of the “good old boys network” and how they ran things. But
factually, these have proven to be the most effective ways of getting
things done. Lobbyists use the same tactics to influence legislation to
their advantage.
What you want to do with your blog is to help people network with you. You do this by making it easy to subscribe to your blog and follow you. Getting subscribers – loyal clients – is the major part of helping build your community.
I mentioned in passing the term “RSS” – this stands for Really Simple Syndication. Most Internet users don’t use it, even if they know it exists. But it will speed your life immensely when you learn to drop these into your Google Reader.
Every major blog platform I know of has this built in now. And Firefox puts a little orange symbol up there in the address bar to tell you one is on that page. Click on it and you’ll be able to set it up in Google Reader – that simple.
So you want to ensure that you feature this link on your site – so others will be able to follow you easily – and tell them to subscribe. Doesn’t hurt to be blunt occasionally…
Blog Directories
The next key point is to start registering your blog with the various
blog directories. These are like phone books in major cities – only
with a search function and other helpful gadgets.
While I’m in search for a “best of” blog directory list, here’s one where you can submit your blog, RSS feed, or both: http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/ Don’t kill yourself off doing all these at once. Do about 10 a day or so, and let the search engines catch up with you. Means you have to schedule this into your day along with your daily blogging.
Profile Outposts
We’ve touched on this before. But it’s a point you will be able to
harvest more people subscribing to you if you have these in. Everywhere
you have a profile, make sure you fill these out completely and
honestly. Reason being is that where someone thinks highly of your
content, they will start looking you up to see what they can find on
you. And of course these profiles also can have links to your blog and
to your other social media.
Just makes sense to do the little extra of telling those bits and pieces of yourself which will then promote trust in your viewers and get you some more traffic for your blog – as well as rankings on Google and possibly people who can help you in your efforts to nail these scammers.
So it would be a good point to re-check these profiles if you can and fill in all possible links. Keep a text document open with the links and pithy paragraphs about yourself – then copy/paste to update your profiles quickly. People want to know about you, they want to trust you. And letting people know what you are all about is the way to help build and guide this community.
