Welcome to Healthy Living Blogs’ Blog Tip Thursday! Every week, we will share one of our favorite ‘how-to’ posts about blogging. We welcome your questions, your suggestions for future topics, and your ‘how-to’ post recommendations at healthylivingblogs@gmail.com! Today’s post comes from HLB admin, Heather of Then Heather Said.
You spend a lot of time on your blog, with your blog, for your blog – right? You blog for a purpose [or two, or three!] and you blog for an audience, and if you are anything like the dozens of bloggers I’ve talked numbers with in the past several months, you sometimes [if not allthetimes] wonder how to grow your audience.
One thing I personally take into consideration in terms of growing my blog audience is fairly simple. I want to attract an audience which is interested in the content I’m creating. One way of doing this is meeting readers where they are – in this case, where they are hanging out on the internet.
A lot of my posts I promote on Twitter and Facebook. I share links to posts covering any number of subjects here, because those who subscribe to my Twitter feed or Facebook stream are my “followers.” These general social media sites are places I go to have conversation and share information I think others may enjoy – no matter if it’s a link to my own post, or a link to another blogger’s post I enjoyed, or article I read.
Of course, Twitter and Facebook are sort of obvious, right? But there are several specific websites I visit to share links to my posts covering specific subjects. I call this ‘sharing with intention.’
For example – I often link to posts I write about running and fitness on my Daily Mile page. Daily Mile is a workout logging site with a social edge. The people whom I am “friends with” on Daily Mile, are most likely interested in fitness activities, so sharing links to my fitness posts and race recaps here is a way to share with intention.
Another place to share links is Urban Spoon. Kelly from Brownies and Zucchini did a great job of sharing how and why to partner with Urban Spoon in a previous Blog Tip Thursday post. If you ever write blog posts about restaurants you visit, this is definitely something to consider.
Some other examples?
Posts including: Recipes –The HLB Wednesday Recipe Link Ups are perfect! There is a new one every week, which is a great opportunity for those of you who create a lot of recipes on your sites.
Posts including: Weight Loss topics, struggles, and tips are perfect links to share on my Spark People page.
Posts including: Blogging, blog tips, the blogging community, etc. – Tweet with the hash tag #fitblog, which is followed by several HLBers interested in blogging and healthy living.
Can you think of other specific websites in which we can “share with intention”?
I’ve started to post to Reddit and Digg in specific areas (race recaps, weight loss) and have seen my page views climb. I also post to BlogEngage and Zoomit (Canadian site). I always try to select the appropriate area of the site to target the readers I think will be most interested and share only posts that I think will be interesting. Wellsphere is another site as well.
More great places are delicious and digg.
Great article!! thank you!!