How To Grow Your Blog (Part 2)

If you didn’t get here by reading the first part, this is part two of three in my miniseries called “how to grow your blog”. Click here for the first part and if you’ve already read it, just carry on reading. At this point you should have your blog completely setup and ready for action. Next is….

Setup Auto Promotion And Social Presence

At this point you could start blogging, but that would be silly. As if you just publish a blog post, how is anyone going to find it? They won’t unless you really promote. You absolutely need to manually promote your blog posts, but you can setup some auto promotional stuff. All while creating a real social presence in your market place. You need to get on Facebook and Twitter and you need to start building a real presence. First what you should do is setup a Facebook Page and Twitter account.

Once you setup your Facebook page, you should install the Facebook social widget in your sidebar so visitors can like your page straight from your blog. Once you’ve got your Twitter setup you should start following a few people and add another widget on your blog linking to your Twitter account. Next you should setup an update system so your Facebook and Twitter presence will automatically grow. In order to grow your social presence, you just need to share lots of great content on a regular basis. What you can do is plug an RSS feed into a tool so every time it gets updated it will feed your Twitter and Facebook.

What I do is find around 10 blogs in my niche that get regularly updated on a weekly basis. Then use RSS mix to combine them together so you have 1 feed that gets updated every day. For your Facebook page/s, you can use an app called RSS graffiti to automatically feed your Facebook page with content from the RSS feed (just search for RSS graffiti in Facebook – it’s very straightforward).

Then for your Twitter account you can use a tool called Hootsuite.com to auto feed your Twitter account with the content from the feed. Make sure when you combine the feeds into 1, you include your own blog’s feed as you want to automatically syndicate your blog’s content onto your Facebook page and Twitter account. Once you’ve got your Facebook and Twitter setup with the update system in place, your social presence will be taken care of. Next you can use a tool like Onlywire or Ping.fm to automatically bookmark/syndicate your blog content onto 30-50 social sites.

Start Blogging

At this point your blog should be up, your keywords should be set, your social presence should be sorted and your auto promotional stuff should be in place. The next step now is to start posting content. You have two options when it comes to the actual blogging. The first option is to spend 2-6 hours producing a killer piece of content once a week. The second option is to publish between 4 and 7 blog posts per week of around 500 words each. If you’d like to build an incredible blog, get a following and recognition you need to post nothing but AMAZING content.

The kind of content that takes several hours to create. Lots of images, videos, points and conclusions; the works. If you want to go the super high quality route then keep in mind it’s going to take a little longer to start seeing results. However if you’d just like to generate A LOT of traffic and aren’t so fussed about the quality of your content, try write a 500 word blog post every single day.

With the social presence and automated promotional stuff your content should receive a lot of traffic. You can blog about anything to do with your niche. As a rule of thumb; try to incorporate 1 keyword into every blog post you write. Find the keyword from the Google Keyword Tool and incorporate it into your blog post’s title, description and header tags.

Comments

James Anderson, December 1, 2011, 09:30

Great continuation from part one! I’ve already set up my social media accounts and started seeing some traction. Your advice on using RSS feeds for auto-promotion is brilliant. Thanks for sharing!

Linda Scott, December 1, 2011, 11:15

This post is a lifesaver! I was overwhelmed with the idea of promoting my blog manually. The tools you mentioned for auto-promotion will save me so much time. Can’t wait to implement them!

Tommy Nguyen, December 1, 2011, 13:00

Setting up a social presence sounds like a lot of work, but your step-by-step breakdown makes it manageable. I appreciate the practical tips and resources. Looking forward to seeing results!

Sarah Brown, December 1, 2011, 14:45

David, your insights are incredibly helpful. I’ve struggled with maintaining a consistent social media presence. Using tools like Hootsuite and Onlywire should make it much easier. Thanks for the guidance!

Robert Lee, December 1, 2011, 16:30

I’m curious about the effectiveness of automated tools for social media growth. Have you had significant success with them, or do you find manual engagement more impactful? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Emily Johnson, December 1, 2011, 18:15

This post came at the perfect time. I was just about to start blogging without any promotional strategies in place. The auto-promotion tips are exactly what I needed. Thank you, David!

William Martinez, December 1, 2011, 20:00

Hi David, what’s your take on using Instagram for blog promotion? I’ve heard mixed reviews about its effectiveness for driving traffic to blogs. Any advice would be appreciated!

Angela Davis, December 1, 2011, 21:45

Thank you for another valuable post. I’ve always been hesitant to use automated tools, but your positive experiences are convincing me to give them a try. Keep up the great work!