Sage advice for business bloggers
Jessica Duquette, founder of In Perfect Order and blogger at It’s Not About Your Stuff offers some sage advice in my interview of her.
The best advice I have for any business bloggers is to spend as much time connecting with other bloggers as you do on your own posts, by visiting their site, commenting on specific postings that can then link back to your site, participating in blog carnivals, quoting excerpts from their posts and linking to their sites, and allowing others to do the same from your posts. You can be writing all day long but if you don’t have links from other sites, you will not be seen by nearly as many readers. Not to mention the wonderful personal connections you can make by meeting people through blogging. It only takes one lucky link from someone to turn you from 120 people a day to 12,000 visitors a day!
I wholeheartedly agree. Do you spend as much time connecting with other bloggers as you do writing posts? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Consider, for example, Eric Ward’s hilarious LinkMoses’ Ten Commandments of Linking. If Eric hadn’t nurtured so many relationships in the blogosphere, this page would not have gotten the publicity that it achieved.
[...] Stephan Spencer reminds that bloggers should comment, as well as write. [...]
Great advice, Stephan. Blogging is fundamental about relationships, and relationships require two-way communication.
We just had our first ever blogging conference in South Africa. And as part of my presention on the Busines & Marketing panel, I mentioned you should start by reading, then commenting and then you will be ready to write your own blog.
[...] Ok, I admit it. I haven’t been walking my own talk. I say how important it is to comment on others’ blogs, that a blogger should spend as much time commenting on others’ blogs as posting on their own blog. You might have read my (hopefully compelling) case for this here or here. Yet, ashamedly, I have been terribly lax in commenting in the blogosphere. I’ve been, for the most part, a lurker. My excuse — “I’m busy enough as it is just trying to keep up with my blog” — isn’t going to wash any more. It’s about time I get out more. [...]