How To Build A Following

Follow, friend, retweet, link, circles, networks…. It gets confusing, doesn’t it?  I get confused and off track all the time.  But I also get back on track all the time.  These following five subjects are what I’ve gleaned from tons of research on having a successful blog.  Follow along with me to see if they work.  I’m implementing them as strategies and in 6 weeks we will see how I did.
 
 

The Five Elements of Successful Blogs

Attitude

For the next 6 weeks or so, longer if my strategy works, I will be trying out these  techniques for getting Twitter, Facebook, Triberr, BlogHer, and most of all Blog readers.  “Some people call them followers, I call them readers.”  (Do not think of Slingblade here!) You see I have been building up to this point for 5 years and I am ready to rock the social media world.  Attitude is everything, I hear.  Plus I have worked with information for a couple of decades and know a bit about what works and what I am willing, ethically, to do.   Let’s watch it work!

Taxonomy

What you will see here on my blog at ReasonCreek.com will be more posts, shorter (for me), pithy posts with one category, but lots of tags. There will be quality links.  Search engines will love me. Quality and real networks are the new SEO.

Quality

Posts will contain quality information, and will not just be hawking products like many sites fall into the trap of doing.   Neither will I be filling up my side bars with badges.  If it is on my site, I truly believe in it.  Yowza.  That is right – integrity will out!  It isn’t about numbers.  It is about having something to say.

Sharing

I will share my own posts.  I will ask others to share.  I will share things I truly find interesting and let people know I shared their thing.  Simple, no?  No.  But that will provide info too, info that I can share.  I will cross-post, but the posts will vary – Google punishes you for identical content.

Promo

I have my elevator pitch about my blog, my book, and my writing on a train trip, and business cards with differing info on the back.  Have pitch, and takeaways, will travel.

Come back and see how I have done!

These are the essential ingredients for the ways I will improve my blog, twitter, and network presence. in the next month to 6 weeks.  And yes, I will post about this and how it worked mid-August.  So set a calendar reminder  for say, um, Monday, August 20th to check out my evaluation of how my experiment using these 5 components went.  I will title the post How To Build A Following, Follow-Up.  You can copy this and put the url on your calendar now even though the actual content will appear on August 20th, then when the reminder pops up, you can see how I did.