Blog Building: Blog Participation
This is part four of our blog building series, wherein we enact various strategies to get our blog read by more people – and pass the things we’ve learned on to you.
In reading through online materials relating to increasing blog traffic, one theme in particular recurred over and over again: participate/network/comment on other blogs.
21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic from seomoz says this:
Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention.
Making Your Blog Content Discoverable from Vanessa Fox offers:
Join communities you’re interested in, comment on other blogs, jump into conversations and let others know your site is out there. If they’re interested in what you have to say, they’ll check out your site and link to you if it’s relevant to their readers.
The Secret to Building a Popular Blog from doshdosh notes:
…I’d just like to emphasize that the networking really starts with that first act of unconditional giving. That first sign of genuine interest in the other person or his/her work. The most effective way of networking is to offer something of real value for the intended party, without requesting something in return (at least not immediately). Let’s take comments as an example. Instead of just promoting yourself in your comment, write words which initiate a conversation between you and the blogger.
So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll try to initiate a conversation between us and a bunch of bloggers. But which ones?
We’re in a kind of funny place. The thing that we know about is business research. And we want to reach small businesspeople and the folks who serve them. But most of the popular business blogs, which I assume our target audience would read, deal with business strategy - which is a bit out of our knowledge area. Consider Seth Godin. He amazes us with his awesome business strategy insights, but I fear any comments we might make would run dangerously close to: “Great post on telling vivid stories to increase brand awareness… isn’t business research …neat?”
The types of blogs where we could consistently add valuable comments would be more research focused – like market research firms, library or SBDC blogs, or business consulting sites. But, the audience there is smaller and more focused. Not that that’s necessarily bad – we don’t want numbers just for the sake of numbers – but we do want to reach new small business clients…
Huh. I’m stymied. Any business strategists out there have any suggestions for us and the direction we should take with this? Leave a comment if you’ve got any ideas to share.
For now, perhaps we’ll straddle the line and start following a mish-mash. Some popular business strategy blogs (like Small Biz Trends, FastCompany Features, StartUp Nation, Duct Tape Marketing, and Micro Persuasion) as well as some with an interest in research (like John Battelle’s SearchBlog, LibraryStuff, and the Business Librarians Ning).
This blog building strategy is a bit up in the air, so we’ll keep you posted about how (or if) it’s going.
things that work for your own gut. I like to comment, but those online
communities can be SO time-consuming. In other words, I have no idea.