Giving Good Blog: Helping People Follow You

Last week we talked about why it is important to reply to blog comments and how and I challenged you to try and reply to your blog comments from this week. How did you go? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll be sure to reply 😉

Following Blogs

How do you follow your favourite blogs? Email, a reader like Bloglovin or Feedly, bookmarked? And then there’s the social media options like Facebook or Instagram, which will offer more than just following the blogger’s blog posts as they usually share other snippets of life or interesting tidbits. For each of the methods that you follow blogs, you should offer as an option for others to follow you and your blog. Why? Because if you use those methods, others will already be doing so too!

Please note that today’s post is not an in-depth tutorial on how to set all these up, but rather a (very long) information post on the what and why! Should you wish to take immediate action, there are plenty of good tutorials to be found via Google. If you need any extra help, please don’t hesitate to ask me via the comments section!

Help People Follow You

When you find a new blog you like and want to receive their blog updates, the first place you look for the options to do so is in the sidebar, right? Then make sure the options to follow your blog are just as clear and easy to find! You can find a variety of options to follow my blog right at the top of the sidebar underneath the picture of me. You can see I have a few different buttons – Facebook, Pinterest, Bloglovin, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, and RSS, with a box for following via email underneath all that. You don’t need to have all the same! But there are 5 main methods for people to follow you and your blog that you need to be aware of should you wish to make your blog more accessible and grow your readership.

Facebook
Having a Facebook page is a popular way to share your blog posts and other interesting bit and pieces like my daily Facebook {i HEART this} posts where I share funny, inspirational or awesome sewing and quilting related things.While you can set up options to automatically publish your blog posts to Facebook, it is much better to manually share links to your blog posts due to the way that Facebook works. Automatically shared links do not get very good “reach” – meaning that Facebook does not show the post to many people. The best way to get Facebook to show your post to more people is to share a photo with a caption that includes a brief description of your post and the link.

Another option beginning to emerge is to create a group – a place to talk and share photos related to the blog, like Flickr groups. I have just begun a Blossom Heart Quilts group where you can share pictures of items made from my tutorials or patterns, ask questions about my patterns and such! Just like Flickr groups, but so much better 😉 If you want to join me in this experiment you can easily join here. Admin approval is required, just to make sure you’re not some weird man trying to find a wife. I have enough of those messages in my Others folder!

Instagram
Seriously, Instagram is THE place to be for creative bloggers! Our work is so visual, that sharing snapshots of your day and creative processes are a great way to keep in touch with everyone. It’s a free smartphone app available on iTunes and Google Play, and when you set up your account, make sure to include your blog site in your profile so that people can easily click through – these days we need quick and easy options, I don’t want to have to go into my browser to hunt down your blog!

Twitter
Twitter is a good social media outlet to catch up on news and headline snippets. There a lot of active bloggers on there, chatting and sharing ideas. Unlike Facebook, you will see everything people post, so you can easily set up your blog posts to automatically share to Twitter using Feedburner and people will actually see it! You can also set up your Facebook page to automatically publish to Twitter too, plus Instagram when uploading a new photo.

RSS
Talking of Feedburner, this is the main way people will follow your blog to get post updates. An RSS feed pulls your blog posts and sends it to whatever mode the reader uses. Until last year, this was usually Google Reader. When that closed, people turned to Bloglovin or Feedly, both of which have apps. As you can see in the image above, people are able to follow via Feedly using the normal Feedburner link, but you will need to manually add a Bloglovin button to your blog yourself.

You also need to consider what settings you use – to truncate or to share the full post. I wrote about what you need to consider when making this decision earlier this week.

Email
The final common way for people to follow blogs is via email, where they receive an email for each blog post. This can also be set up via Feedburner as it uses the RSS feed.

Another common option is to follow people on Flickr. However, the disgruntlement at their latest changes, especially not allowing any other log in but Yahoo now, seems to be pretty widespread and I don’t see it lasting much longer for a place for us creative people to share our work. Which is a bit heartbreaking!

This week your challenge is to update your social media buttons on your blog. Do you have them and are they easy to locate for your readers? If you don’t have all of the 5 top options mentioned above, consider adding them to boost your readership – if you do, be sure to post about it to let your readers know they now have more options to get more of you!

Other posts in the series:
– The Importance of Replying To Blog Comments (and how!)
– Five Easy Ways To Update Posts In Your Archives
– What Static Pages To Have On Your Blog