Seven Most Important Blog Lessons Series – Lesson Five: Be Social

Welcome to the fifth part of my series Seven Most Important Lessons I’ve learned since becoming a blogger. This series marks the second anniversary of PJ Pro. In case you missed the first four parts of the series, here are the links:

Comment on other Blogs. A Lot

This lesson is about becoming more social. You can’t blog in a vacuum. Well, you can, but chances are you won’t build regular readers. In order to get people to read your blog, you need to get out there and pull them back toward you. The two best ways to become social are by being active on social networking sites and commenting on other – especially related – blogs.

One of the best ways to become a better – and more successful – blogger is to read other blogs. Not just blogs in your niche, but all types of blogs. If you blog about fishing you still need to learn about search engine optimization and building website traffic. If you blog about building website traffic you might find some great design ideas on a fishing blog. You never know where your next successful idea is going to come from. And while you are wandering around the blogosphere, make sure you interact.

While it is certainly most beneficial to leave comments on blogs related to your niche, interacting on any blog has many advantages. When you leave a comment on someone’s blog you are leaving a piece of yourself (your personality/opinions/etc.) and your blog (a link). Even if that link doesn’t count to the search engines (check out Courtney Tuttle’s Do Follow List for details on this), if you make a good impression, the blogger and their readers might just click through to your blog.

An excellent way to find other blogs to comment on is to use a tool called Link Luv Post Builder. The tool is designed to help you easily find articles and creating “link love” posts – like my Trip Around the Blogosphere. However, it also works perfectly as a way to find current blogs that are mentioning keywords related to your niche. The application is only $27 and you’ll be surprised how often you use it.

Participate in Social Networking

Aside from commenting on other blogs, there are many other ways to be social in the blogosphere. In fact, social networking is probably the very best way (and certainly the hottest right now) to build traffic, links and notoriety for your blog. The only thing you have to be careful of is spreading yourself too thin. Just like Internet marketing information overload, it is very easy to waste a bunch of time on social networking sites that won’t do you any good.

After much trial and error, I have learned that it is best to focus on establishing yourself and building your brand on one social networking site at a time. Build your profile, reputation and “friends” on that one site and then move on to another. Schedule a small amount of time each week to keep up with your already-established networks. I’ll be publishing an article later today about how to choose the best social networkings to participate in, but here’s a quick example of how I maintain my social networking connections each week:

• Monday:One hour touring Stumble Upon, commenting and rating sites as I go. I also add interesting links to my weekly Trip Around the Blogosphere post. As soon as I post on Sunday, I open my template for the Trip and start getting the next one ready.
• Tuesday:I spend about an hour on Facebook replying to messages, leaving messages for connections and making new connections.
• Wednesday:I spend about an hour on Digg searching for articles containing specific keywords for various blogs I maintain. I Digg the articles, leave a comment, etc. By doing this I am letting the author and other readers know about my blog without having to directly tell them, “Hey! I have a blog!” I also watch out for interesting links and add them to the weekly Trip Around the Blogosphere post.
• Thursday: I spend an hour or so researching new social networking sites to see if there are any that might fit any of the niches in which I write.
• Friday:Check out new Twitter followers and see if I want to follow them back. You can use auto-follow apps so that when someone adds you to their follow list, they are automatically added to yours. I don’t recommend using these because I think the quality of the people I follow is more important that quantity. I’d rather follow 300 people who entertain and educate me on a regular basis than follow 3,000 people who write about what they had for lunch.
• Various Days throughout the Week: I open TweetDeck in the evening and catch up on that day’s tweets. I reply, retweet and tweet if I have anything interesting to say. (I use Twitter Tools for WordPress to post a tweet to Twitter whenever I publish an article to my blog) I keep TweetDeck open throughout the evening/night while I work to occasionally read and post tweets. I also use Twhirl to monitor and post to my Twitter accounts other than @sarach. It has fewer features than TweetDeck, but allows you to monitor and update several Twitter accounts without having to log in and out.

I change this schedule occasionally, but that gives you a good idea of how I limit my social networking. I say limit because I could literally spend all day every day on social networking sites. There is always something new and interesting going on so it’s important to set your boundaries before you jump in.

A quick note about mobile social networking. My Blackberry Storm plays a big part in my daily social marketing activities. I use Newsgator Go! to read feeds and email them to myself for my weekly Trip Around the Blogosphere post or to check out later on my PC.

I also Tweet and check Twitter from my Storm. The only problem is, I have not yet found a mobile Twitter application that does everything I want it to. Right now I use two: TwitterBerry and Tiny Twitter. Between the two of them I can do almost anything I can from TweetDeck. However, if anyone knows of a fully functional mobile Twitter application (for Blackberry), please let me know in the comments.

Being able to do some of my social activities even when I’m not officially working is really great. I no longer waste time waiting in line – they’re now an opportunity to get some reading or tweeting done.


Using your Blog as a Social Networking Tool

I have talked about getting people to your blog from social networking sites, but I haven’t yet mentioned what you can do on your blog to connect to the social networks. There are really two topics here: (1)getting visitors to add your content to social networking sites and (2) getting people to interact with you on the social networks.

First off, the very best way to get readers to add your blog to social networks and news sites is to make it easy for them to do so. If you use WordPress, there are many plugins available that will place submit buttons to social networks and news sites at the end of each of your posts. I use Submit It and it has always worked beautifully. So that takes care of getting your content into the networks via reader submissions.

Secondly, you want people to follow/friend/etc you on social networks after you’ve wowed them with your blog. The best way to do this is also by using a WordPress Plugin or hard-coding links into your sidebar. I hard-code my social networking links, but have recently been looking at a WP plugin called Social Profilr that appears to make things very easy. If you don’t know much html and haven’t ever edited a blog theme, I definitely recommend using some sort of widget or plugin.

There is a ton to say about social networking, but I’m going to leave it at that. Well, sort of. As I said, later today I’ll be posting an article about how to decide which social networks to join. And tomorrow’s lesson will continue with the topic of being social. Unlike today’s article, though, lesson six is about making your own blog a social hub. See you then.