What To Do With Your Blog
Earlier I talked about setting up a daily blog. Let's assume that you have followed the advice given and that you have a blog. You’re writing material and getting daily items posted.
What happens next?
The truth is that a blog post, sitting out in cyberspace alone, is not likely to attract much attention. As I explained earlier, a daily blog post in itself will not particularly serve to attract a public. All your hard work, and the fact that you haven’t missed a day for months, doesn’t mean much directly to anyone.
So what’s the point?
Well, as I also explained, a daily blog will generate TONS of material for you for other purposes. But what about the daily blog itself? Is it of any use, other than as an engine to help you create content?
Yes it is, if you know exactly what to do with it.
The key point here is that a blog alone is exactly that: a single point in the vast galaxy of information and communication that is the internet. The Very Big Secret is that a blog connected up to other things can help you in numerous other ways.
To make this work, apart from having a blog, you need to be on social media. I’m going to talk here about Facebook, as that is what I am most familiar with, but the principle applies to social media more generally. If you have created a ‘social media presence’ either by being an active contributor to conversations, a group member of several groups, a manager of a Facebook page or in any other way appeared and become relatively real to other people using Facebook, then you will be able to find ways of dropping the link to your blog into various appropriate places.
Many groups on Facebook don’t like links and even forbid members to drop them into conversations, and it’s always wise to abide by the rules of any group of which you are a member. The best thing to do is to start your own group.
‘What?’ you might protest. ‘You mean I have to do that too?’
Well, the truth is that you don’t ‘have to’ do any of this. But if you can or are so inclined, having a Facebook group of your own is an extremely wise and productive thing. How to create and run a successful one is the subject of another book, but for the sake of this article, let’s assume that you have one. With your own group, you have a ‘captive audience’ of group members who are already interested in your topic, if your group is to do with the topic about which you are blogging (and of course it should be). Then all you have to do is drop the link to your blog into the group every day.
Suddenly you’ll get readers. And the Facebook group environment will provide an automatic and instant forum for comment, support, questions and development of your blog post. All the work that you’re pouring into the blog will have somewhere to go: the daily posting will immediately feel worthwhile.
That’s just one way of connecting your blog up to the rest of the world. There are other places you can put links to your blog - look around and find social media sites related to your topic and opportunities will present themselves.
Don’t be afraid to participate in conversations with people on the internet - in fact, you must actively engage with people if you want to experience benefits. At some suitable point during an ongoing conversation, you’ll be able to say, ‘I wrote a blog post about that the other day’ and someone will ask to see it. If you don't engage, they won't ask - and if you put a blog link in without them asking, they won't read it.
In brief, a blog on its own is like a lonely star in the sky. It won’t attract much attention. You need to connect it up to other things until you have a constellation with a shape and a name. Then the power you have flowed into it will start to pay off.
To what benefit? That’s coming up next.