This is a piece of advice I got, when I first edited by blog on WordPress. They help you with everything you need to know in order to make the blog running. You are told to use services from the big companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in order to make your blog not feel like an island. If your blog is an island, then the explorers will find it with difficulty.
Make your blog, even if it is an island, to connect to the other islands around it and even to create bridges between them. You can use the widgets available on WordPress. Every theme has their own widgets. I have told you many times now that I use the Spectrum theme, which I consider to be one of the best in 2011. This is not only my opinion, but also of thousands of wordpressers, as I read in an article.
The visitors must be informed every time you post another article on your blog. You have to provide a sort of form, where the visitors to enter their e-mail address in order to be notified when you wrote a new article. You can send them also newsletters or other form of messages (not spam messages) to make them aware that your post is now ready to be read and full of useful information.
But this is not related to the social networks. To make the blog more connected to other blogs, you have to use the Blogroll more extensively and to make link exchanges to other Websites. This is very possible, if you have friends which also have a blog on WordPress, you can exchange links with them and the word about your blog will be spread more qucikly than you have ever dreamed of.
You may benefit of the help from the Blog Surfer, a tool that will present you everything that your friends have written in a certain period of time. It is a bit like an RSS feed, but for blogs. This also resembles with the Tag Surfer, a tool that lets you know what are the most popular tags at a moment and what tags have been used by your friends, by your family and so on. This tool also is similar to an RSS feed, but for tags, in this situation.
Without leaving the Dashboard, you can read what your friends have written, you can also see their Twitter posts, if you use Readomattic. More about this tool on WordPress. I promise I will write an article about it, because I find it pretty interesting and I never heard of it until today.
Speaking of RSS feeds, the blog from WordPress automatically comes with one. You can make your visitors to come more often, if you organize some contests for them. You must use the social media to announce that you will organize a contest. In this way, there will be more people than usual, which will see your blog. In those days, when you organize the contest, make sure to write a very good content, better than the content written usually. Make sure to speak nicely of anyone and to use good words and good pieces of advice for the targeted audience.
If you don’t have money to spend on offering gifts to your audience, you can organize surveys or polls, something like this: “Today you are invited to participate to a poll: Do you like the city in which you live?”. This poll can be very effective, if you run a blog related very much to the city hall of the city where you live. So, by asking this question, your visitors will be glad that you take their opinion in consideration and perhaps have some thoughts of changing something for the better in the city.
The reward in the case above is the money, but the consideration given by the owner of that site and by the city hall, if it is the true owner of the site. The questions inside a survey or a poll should be easy, should have straight answers and should be short enough to not bother the reader.
You can organize polls, by using the polls button in your Dashboard. That’s right, you already have a Polls button in your WordPress blog. You simply need to know how to create the questions.
At the end of soing these operations, which by the way, will never stop, you will want to check the results, in other words, to see how many users are visiting your site, what do they say about your blog and stuff like this. If you think that creating a page for your site on Facebook and tweeting from time to time that you have a new blog post on Twitter is enough, you are so wrong. This activity should be done on a permanent basis. You have to know how to attract the visitors without bothering them with spam messages. That is why Twitter is so good. If you enter various channels on Twitter, you can be sure that there are small chances for a person which saw your tweet a few seconds ago on Rihanna’s channel, for example, will see your current tweet about carrots on the Vegetables’ channel.
But by sending mail messages to your friends to come and read the post you have written on your blog, will definitely annoy them. They might even start lying to you that they have already visited your blog, that they are not in the front of a computer at the moment you tell them this, they don’t have a smartphone, they have a bad Internet connection and so on. Keep your friends for other things, not for bothering them with unimportant things like this. On the other hand, if they bother you with things like these, you can bother them as well. I’m kidding, you should not do this. In time, they will realise that you also have a blog and you don’t apply the same method as they do, so they will live you alone, especialy if you don’t read their posts.
It is nice to know about the buzz that your site is creating. Enter the Blog Stats in the Dashboard and see how many people read a certain blog post, from where did they come and other interesting information. You can see the evolution of the number of your readers on days, weeks, months and years, if you have years of blogging. If you do, you probably know by now how to read the stats and you are not interested in this anymore. That is why, especially for those who are accustomed to WordPress more, I will speak in my next article about Readomattic, as I promised. Until now, I wrote articles for beginners in WordPress. From now on, I will write articles for those who use WordPress for more than one year or so. I will tell you when I will come back to writing articles for beginners again.
