Using Social Media To Increase The Readership Of Your Blog

You have a blog and you are doing all the recommended things – you are adding good content at least three times a week and you are NOT writing long posts or using long paragraphs that discourage reading.

You are also using keywords in your blog post titles and in the content in your posts.  And you are using appropriate categories and tags for your posts.

Why then does it seem that few people are finding your blog?

Perhaps the problem is that you are writing as if you are alone on a deserted island because you are not connected to others through popular social media sites.

Let’s look at some sites where you can connect with people who may be interested in what you blog about:

LinkedIn:

To start with, you need an effective LinkedIn profile with a good headshot of yourself.  If you have very little information on your LinkedIn profile, most people won’t be interested enough in you to check out your blog.

Then, in the part of the LinkedIn profile where you can put links, do NOT use the default designation “My Blog.”  Instead click “other” and then write in the name or the subject of your blog to attract more interest.

And if you have a WordPress blog, you can send that blog feed automatically into your LinkedIn profile through an application on LinkedIn.

If you don’t have a WordPress blog, you can publish the link to a new post in your update box.

Twitter:

We are starting with the premise that you have an effective Twitter profile.  (To learn more about an effective Twitter profile, get the free report at www.millermosaicpowerof3.com)

Then you can either send the feed of your blog (whether WordPress or not) automatically through to your Twitter account using an application such as twitterfeed.com or you can tweet the link yourself.

And on Twitter you hope that the topic of the post is interesting enough that others will then retweet your post link.

Facebook:

You can update your personal profile page as well as a Facebook (business) page with the link to a new blog post.  This can be done automatically through a Facebook function or an outside application.  Or you can do it manually.

There is more that needs to be done:

For people to click on your blog post link, go to your blog, and actually read the post does require that you are effectively engaged with people on all these three sites.

If on Twitter, for example, you have almost no followers and no one ever retweets your blog post links, you are unlikely to get much additional traffic to your blog.

But if you do participate in these social media communities (and there are different strategies for effectively posting on one site and sending the link automatically through to the other two sites) and have a reasonable number of followers, friends, and connections, you will be able to send more people to your blog.

Then whether these people read your blog posts and hopefully subscribe directly to your blog feed depends on what you write.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (follow her at http://twitter.com/ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing, which offers a Quick Start Social Media Track at http://www.millermosaicllc.com/social-media-track/