How to Really Get the Attention of a Blogger
As a blogger, one of your goals should be to network with other bloggers in your niche and get to know them. This can be tricky if the other bloggers are busy or just have a short attention span like I do! I’d like to tell you a little story about one blogger who got my attention in a big way recently…
Why Bother with Other Bloggers?
Before I get on with the story let me just elaborate on why I think you should bother. There is a question I now get asked almost daily – “How do you get traffic?”. I usually just tell people to go read my archives as I have shared all of my strategies in there at one time or another but I can tell you now that the majority of my traffic comes from just one source – other people, in particular, other bloggers!
At the beginning of each month I write a post with all my stats from the previous month and in that post I breakdown where my traffic comes from. With the exception of StumbleUpon traffic, a great big chunk of it comes directly from other blogs who have linked to me in some way. Not only that but getting to know other bloggers has a knock on effect. That StumbleUpon traffic I mentioned comes only when people thumbs up your site – who does that? Well obviously it’s Stumble users but you’ll often find that many of them are also bloggers because bloggers understand the power of SU.
The effect does not end at the direct traffic you get from other blogs either. That traffic comes in the form of inbound links which is the major contributing factor to the authority of your domain which has a massive impact on your search engine rankings. My blog is now a PR5 because other people linked to it and I’m sure that’s one of the reasons that I am getting more search engine traffic now.
But it still doesn’t stop there – there is also the somewhat more intangible benefit of just being buddies with other bloggers. I chat to Josh Spaulding sometimes and ask him for advice on stuff he knows about. Don from Making Sales, Making Money often drops me a note to say hi and that might prompt me to write a commentary about one of his posts. I chat to Yaro Starak now and then about his Blog Mastermind course and the next thing I know, he’s writing about me again. When I did the email campaign for my ebook recently, I had already had prior contact with at least 50 of the bloggers I contacted. Most of them wrote straight back and said “Sure thing Caroline, I’d love to take a look at your book”, or something to that effect…
So Back to my Story…
Name ring a bell? If you delve into the comments section of my blog then you would have seen Mike’s name pop up rather a lot. I read every single comment that I get so when I start to see the same name pop up time and time again I can’t fail to take notice. Mike Huang has been one of my Top Commenters on my blog for several months now. Scroll down, he’s there right now. You’re slacking Mike, you’re not at the top! Just kidding, he’s a little busy right now :-)
But that’s not all that Mike did. See Mike has a rather nice blog called Blogging Ads and he’s obviously using blog commenting as a strategy to get the attention of other bloggers just like I did. But here’s the thing – other bloggers read blogs too! What does that mean? That means that not only was I seeing Mike’s name all over my own blog but also on all of the blogs that I read! I’ve been a bit slack in my own comments and very often Mike will have commented on a post before I had even read it – this made his name stick out to me.
Next thing I know I’m seeing inbound links come in from Mike’s blog. Now this is another thing that all bloggers will check – everybody wants to know when they are being talked about! I have a Google Alert on my name and a tracker on all links pointing to my blog just so I don’t miss a thing. I certainly couldn’t miss this post which was basically a review of my blog! Not a requested review I might add… it just appeared and I was thrilled to see it! What was great about this post is that Mike linked to several of my posts so I saw a ton of inbound links come in from one source so I couldn’t possibly miss it.
Oh but wait, it doesn’t stop there! Just to make absolutely sure that I knew who he was, he took one final step – he interviewed me! I have been interviewed several times but on some of those occasions I hadn’t heard of the interviewer before the Interview itself so I didn’t pay as much attention. This is a great strategy to get to know somebody, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself really.
So there you have it, the end of my story… The lesson to take away from this is that if you feel like you are talking to yourself when you blog then get out there and get involved with other blogs in your niche. Get to know other bloggers, be everywhere, get in their faces and soon enough people will sit up and take notice and you’ll see your blog stats rising. Has this worked for Mike? Well the truth is in the numbers – in a little over three months Mike has built up his subscriber numbers to over 700! I hope this post gives him a few more…
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Daniel Gaitan
February 9, 2008
Great post Caroline and “bothering” other bloggers is one item I have to start doing more often if I want my blog to become successful.