Building a network for your blog is not an easy task. It is a mix of a number of things including marketing, advertising, and networking with a lot of hard work thrown into the mix. Why, you ask, do I keep mentioning hard work? Because blogging is just that. It is not to be taken lightly and is the reason for such an over-abundance of irregularly updated weblogs. I am here to tell you now, that as I mentioned in "Trying to Sell Your Blog - Not So Fast", hard work can pay off. While I continually mention that content is king, and will probably mention it again, there is a whole other world of expanding your blogs reach.

Networking your blog, just like networking with any "traditional" business is important. It is, in a way, the lifeblood of building and maintaining relationships with clients, customers, and partners. A blog network can work the same way, but online, networking can be more important than in the real world. Networking your blog (and your content) could possibly be the only way to bring your blog to a large audience.

Yaro Starak discussed networking and its importance to online marketing of your blog. I would love to have some up with some of these ideas myself because of their simplicity, but Starak has already done so. I will not attempt to reinvent the wheel, just make it a little more useful. Starak’s first networking tip is to "get a big site to link to your article". This part is a hard, but is a key factor in networking. Starak calls this "network effects"

The point here is that network effects are absolutely vital and one of the best ways to get a network effect happening is to have a popular site link to one of your articles. You have probably heard of Slashdot, the most popular site for news on IT related matters. The site is massive. The traffic the site gets is even massive-er. The site has so much traffic pulling power that there is a term used whenever a site receives a link from Slashdot - "You have been Slashdotted". Darren from Problogger was recently Slashdotted for a second time, bringing in over 40,000 visitors in under 48 hours. That’s some traffic power!

As you can see from Starak’s example, getting linked (networked) can bring huge amounts of traffic your way, and even if you only keep 1% of the traffic as regular readers, that is nearly 400 visitors per day. I would assume significantly more than your current traffic. Starak continues his discussion of "Network Effects":

So how can you benefit from network effects after writing an article that you think deserves some attention? There are no guarantees however there are things you can to do encourage network effects.

1. You can be blunt about it and directly email the large sites mentioning your article and hope they will read it, find it interesting and then post about it. This is a risky practice because you don’t want to become annoying, pestering other sites about your work to the point where they ignore you. You also better be damn confident that what you have written is good because you are not going to be selling your article to a warm prospect if you are some random stranger with a blog no one knows about that just emailed out of the blue.

You need to keep it casual and in fact it’s probably better to not start off talking about your article and instead foster a long term relationship with other bloggers so when the time comes and you do write a fantastic article you only need to contact your mates for some extra exposure. Of course as with most relationships it should be give and take so be prepared to return the favour now and then as well.

2. Comment and link to a lot of other bloggers. What is the golden rule to get a person’s attention? Pay some attention to them! The same rule applies online. If you comment on a lot of other blogs and websites, and when I say comment I mean intelligent, conversation participation comments (express your opinion folks, it’s not hard), then you open up the doors for other people to get to know you and your site. Write some content on your blog that mentions some of the big blogs and you may just get the attention of the author. The more bloggers that know you, that track you through RSS, the more likely you will get a link back when your brand new article goes up.

Networking is certainly not a science. The bigger you get the better each post can and will perform for you, provided you keep writing good stuff - that’s the hard part.

Written by Scott Goldblatt AKA: "The Parental Olympian"

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