Saturday, March 30, 2013

Help me subscribe and share your work

I've deliberately not positioned Deadly Bloggers in the "how to blog" market. There are lots of those websites and it's not my intention to become one of them. As a result, I haven't written posts on hints & tips, how to market, grow your audience stuff etc. That said, I feel the need, this lazy Easter Sunday, after just spending twenty minutes attempting to find the URL of one Deadly Blogger, to offer some advice on how to help your audience share your posts.

Let's assume: Your audience wants to share your post. Your audience may love or loathe you, but either way, they want to tell others about your post.

Here are some of the basics -

1. Enable sharing buttons

These are the buttons at the bottom of each post. This lets your audience share individual posts. Why not just give them the URL of your blog? Because the post they may wish to share may have been published months (even years) ago, so the URL of the post will be www.myblogtitle.blogspot.com/thispost-is-amazing-you-should-read-it and not www.myblogtitle.blogspot.com. As you keep blogging, you will find that you have posts in your archive that are popular and as your audience grows, this is the one that they may want to share.

2. Tweet

You don't have to become a mad-keen tweeter with tens of thousands of tweets, but do us a favour and at least have a Twitter account that you check at least once-a-week.

Why? Think about it. Where do we "share" your posts? On social media platforms. I would like to be able to simply RT your post rather than wait until I get to my desk, then copy the URL and paste into Twitter (and Facebook and G+). Even if your Twitter presence is a broadcast presence, it's better than nothing. Oh. And make sure you write in your Twitter profile, the URL of your blog*.

3. Have a Facebook Page for your blog

See above. But remember, have a Page and not a PROFILE. I don't really want to be your "Friend", I just want to subscribe to your posts.

4. Have a G+ page for your blog

See Twitter and Facebook above.

5. Enable the subscription widgets/gadgets that are available

You don't know how people will wish to subscribe to your blog. I subscribe using lots of different methods - Facebook Pages, Twitter Accounts, Google+, Google Friend Connect, G+ Follows.

I don't use one method because each blogger has different subscription methods. So, the very least you can do, is to offer up a couple, even if it's just the default ones available on your platform. You don't even have to put them in the sidebar (and fill up all your real-estate), you can often put them in the footer.

6. Start an Email Newsletter

When you're really deadly, offer a weekly or monthly email to your audience. For a lot of the professional bloggers, an email newsletter is one of their key marketing tools. If that's the space you're going to play in, you should give it some consideration. You can sign up to a freemium (free for the basic membership) newsletter service like MailChimp, and see how it works for you.

Behind the scenes, I do get asked for advice, and seem to have a bit of an "advice" column that lives "off-the-wall". If you have any questions, ask away and I'll see if I can help.

Any other subscription methods I should include in this post? Let me know and I'll add them to the list.

* As silly as it sounds, I wouldn't have written this, if it didn't happen.


10 comments:

  1. Thanks heaps for this info Leesa - It is a handy spotcheck. I applied it to my blog and could see what I was missing.
    I think I have enabled the sharing capacity, and the subscription thingy.
    I flicked the switch to google+ but realised I need to reformat my profile so I ran back to the blogger format, and I will update my google+ profile before I try it again.
    I like the 'Find us on facebook box" and the "Google Connect on the bottom of Not Quite Cooked's blog. I am guessing I will need to activate google+ before I can also have that on mine.
    I'll keep at it.

    I am not a tech person, like most people who give blogging a go - it's been a fairly torturous process and some things I just plain fluked. eg, like how to find an individual post's complete URL on my blog.
    I'm in a special type of hell ... a Mac user in a windows world. The internet is more windows friendly, and so takes a little longer to translate blog-stuff into Mac-world.
    The email newsletter has got me thinking about how I structure my blog, which at the moment is a random repository of all things OnDusk, but I think I have a while to work this out.

    Thanks again for all your help! :)

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    1. Thanks Siv. I reckon an email newsletter wouldn't go astray - particularly when your book comes out. Perhaps think of the newsletter in "sections" to help you plan it. Eg. What I've been writing? (Pull your posts in) What I've been up to? (book events, community events, publicity etc)

      What's interested about your posts right now, is that each post has two or three sections to them. I've never really seen anyone do it that way before. And I really like it. As a now regular reader, I know what to expect. It's almost how you might divide up a newsletter. You have an intro, a writing exercise, images etc.

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  2. Thanks! I'll definitely see what I've got on my blog, I know how frustrating it is trying to subscribe to a blog and not finding anything.

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    1. Cheers Sarah Jane. And happy birthday for this week. :-)

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  3. Wow - thanks so much for your suggestions- great feedback. The newsletter is a def go when I get my head around how and when to launch in that direction.

    one lesson I learned from my 'concept' radio shows is to have a concept, that is sustainable. radio is creating a world in thin air. blogging is all that with pictures and words thrown in.

    I looked at a LOT of blogs and it's taken a little while to design (scheme) my blog. I call it 2+ bites of the cherry - I can have a bit of a natter on this n that, before going into a yarn. I have a lot on my mind, which no one would read if my posts/blog weren't structured in an accessible way. I also have to be mindful of how I pitch, and I am very exposed - I blog as me but I don't want a sanitized version of me - ok, I take out the really bad words I am prone to using irl :)
    Again, there's a fair bit of strategy involved there.

    Some of the most successful bloggers have exposed themselves warts and all. I wont be doing that - because that's not how I roll.
    Re the multi-tweeted piece last week from a woman who is dating again after the breakup of her 14-yr relationship. I think you know the one I am talking about. Really quite exquisite, astonishingly good, it held you to the last word (me with my mouth open for most of it) and I thought I would love to write as good as that, though I'd take out the bad words, the sex and the everything really because I have my own voice. But her piece was 'Wow' - no other word for it.

    Some posts I set myself the challenge of weaving them altogether, and I like having a topic to spin my words around. Once there is a body of work, I feel I can play around with the structure a bit.

    Posting is a mental limbering up and also burns off some adrenalin so I can settle down on working my book. That's the fun part, cos lord knows I am not short of words - dear god, is she commenting/blogging again? ..But seriously, this is part of the deadly bloggers conversation :)
    My next Everest is to make my posts shorter :)

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    1. One of my goals this year was to get a bit "naked" on my blog - not literally, but dig deeper. Super challenging, but what's life without a challenge.

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  4. p.s. but one pic can be worth a 1000 words - as can a handful of words arranged in a clever way - there are some deadly bloggers who have proven that a few times :)

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    1. You're right about that. I need to get more deadly with taking good pics. I use my iPhone all the time, but I do have a good camera it's just so big that I don't remember to take it with me everywhere. It also has sooo many buttons.

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  5. Thanks for your useful post : Help me subscribe and share your work! Thanks - DHL, Fedex Express Services , Counselling Services

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  6. An instructive post. People to really know who they want to reach and why or else, they'll have no way to know what they're trying to achieve. People need to hear this and have it drilled in their brains..
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    ReplyDelete