Via Yvonne’s Lip-Sticking (and guest blogger Lena West) comes more advice and insight on why just writing on your blog isn’t enough, it has to go beyond that:
The most common complaint we hear from new clients is “I’m writing blog posts three times a week and no one visits or comments. What’s the deal?”
Well, there you’ve got your answer.
Let me put it another way:
Let’s say you decide that you don’t have enough friends. Maybe you’ve been busy with your life and you haven’t taken the time to really connect with other people. But, now you could use a good friend or two. Someone to share potluck dinners…a movie…emotional support…yada, yada. So, you set the intention to expose yourself to as many people as you can (not in THAT way!). Night after night, you sit at home hoping, wishing and waiting for a friend to knock on your door so you can start sharing, planning and gossiping. Not one person calls. Not one person knocks. What’s wrong here?
If you’re bright enough to read this blog, you can see immediately what’s wrong. I bet many of you were thinking, “To make friends, you have to first be a friend.” Or maybe you were thinking, “Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.” True indeed.
It’s a very similar situation for bloggers.
To be a successful blogger, you have to take the initiative to actively connect with other successful bloggers — the operative word being ACTIVELY. That means not JUST sitting behind your keyboard and creating blog posts about interesting topics. Oddly enough, that’s the easy part.
[snip]
Bottomline: If you want people to read your blog, you can’t just blog. You might consider the novel idea of reading and being active on other blogs. *Gasp!*
From: Why Blogging Will Never Get You the Results You Want by Lena West
The actively portion is extremely important. Jim and I spend most of our days not just chatting with each other (via Skype, of course) but chatting with other bloggers. IM, Twitter, Comments, Pownce…all day. I don’t even see it as something that I have to do, I just do it. When we’re not actively engaging with bloggers, we’re reading them. Jim and I scan upwards of 800 RSS feeds each…that’s probably thousands of articles in a given week. It’s from the chatting, the commenting, the reading that we can get to the writing. Once a post is written, guess what it already has an audience because our friends are ready to receive our latest musings via RSS.
Jim and I are engaged in a bunch of different communities. Both of us in the general bloggy, social media group, I tend to hang with the other geeks as well chatting about vagaries of templates, RSS, and plugins, Jim more in the mommy and daddy blogger groups.
So if you’re wondering why no one is reading your blog, or linking, or commenting…step out, find other blogs in your niche. Read them, leave a comment or three, start a conversation, link to them, send an e-mail, just start that friendship building process and the rest will follow.
After my site was hacked previously, I thought that it was hard for me to move on because I couldn’t manage tell my readers about my new site. So what I did was I went to their blogs and start commenting! And I made new friends, and thanks to the existence of Sphere, a wordpress plugin, I can find bloggers who happened to blog almost the same topic like I just blogged, and hence you see my comment here because I read your post and I liked it!
Hi Cedric! Thanks for coming by. That is a great way to let folks know about a new blog of yours (or moved blog). I moved my blog this weekend and Twittered and Pownced it to help my friend know about the change in URL and feed.
SphereIt is awesome. I added it to my blog when it first came out as a script years ago. Now I make sure that plugin is installed in my other blogs and clients’ blogs as well. By adding it, you also make sure you’re connected into the flow as well.
Tris, thanks for helping to spread the word. I’m often confused by the fact that people don’t see the simplicity of blogging and its ability to connect people. They view visiting other blogs and commenting as a chore. It should be a delight! And, in business, it should be part of your daily routine. If you want to succeed, that is.
[…] So you link to a blog in your topic area, they visit, see that you have interesting content, subscribe to your feed, then you might get a link back. See? Very simple. It’s building that relationship I talked about earlier. […]
[…] So if you’re wondering why no one is reading your blog, or linking, or commenting…step out, find other blogs in your niche. Read them, leave a comment or three, start a conversation, link to them, send an e-mail, just start that friendship building process and the rest will follow. Via One By One Media […]