Cast a Wide Net: Promote Your Blog With Social Media

Image courtesy of Flickr user dewmuffins

All of your friends subscribe to your blog, right? What about your coworkers? Your family members? Your classmates or former classmates? People who don’t necessarily know you, but work in your field? People who don’t know you at all, but like to mock the same celebrities you do?

Chances are, your social network is larger than you think it is. Luckily, these days, there are more ways than ever to reach people who share your interests, your pet peeves, and your sense of humor. Done well, social networking is the single best way to make friends and influence people on the web.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

In this week’s Community Pool, we noticed lots of you asking about how to grow traffic to your blogs. Participating in the Community Pool is a great first step, along with commenting on others’ blogs. Another way is letting your social networks know what you’re writing about, which WordPress.com lets you do easily with Publicize.

Elizabeth is going to be taking a wide-angle look at promoting your blog on social networks tomorrow, so today we thought we’d focus on one platform that seems to confound many people: Twitter. To tweet or not to tweet?

Weekly Writing Challenge: Tweetizens

No matter how long you’ve been blogging, there is always more to learn. As part of the Weekly Writing Challenges, once a month, we’ll be highlighting a feature in the WordPress.com Dashboard and challenging you to incorporate it into your blog. We want to help you take full advantage of all the tools available on WordPress.com to make your blog the best it can be  — and to make your friends jealous of your web wizardry. 

To participate, tag your posts with “DPchallenge” or leave a link to your post in the comments. Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight some of our favorites on Freshly Pressed each Friday.

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Last week, Michelle encouraged us to get out there and participate in blogging events. Whether the blogging events you’re contributing to take place online or in person, Twitter often plays a large part in tying participants together. Conferences, monthly blogging challenges, or even meetups often have their own Twitter hashtag so that participants, or potential participants, can stay in the loop on all of the discussions and general awesomeness that happens when bloggers work together.

Summer Bloggin’

Last week’s Photo Challenge got me thinking about how much I love the summertime. For many of us, the summer means extra time outdoors, time with friends and family, and traveling adventures. These summertime experiences are great fodder for seasonal post ideas. If it’s summer where you are, consider these summer-themed posts for your blog.

For parents, summer usually means that the kids are home from school, which makes summer the perfect time to blog about your family adventures. Taking a special trip to a park or zoo? How about a family reunion or get together? Taking pictures of these family outings is a great way to document memories and keep your out-of-state friends and family updated on your lives. Similarly, consider a summertime project for a family blog where your kids can learn about the internet, blogging, and making a website.

Summer for students may mean a special internship, project, or travel plans. If you’re embarking on a new summertime adventure, keep a weekly log of your experiences. This way, you can go back and write a summary piece on what you learned from your latest job or volunteer opportunity. For travelers, you can even share with others how to travel on a student budget or develop a personal travel guide.

As the weather warms up, there are often more outdoor festivals and activities. At the beginning of the summer, plot out which events you’d like to go to so they’re on your radar. When the time comes, try live-blogging any festivals or conferences that you go to. Live-blogging means publishing new blog posts while at an event. For example, if you go to a local WordCamp, you can post reviews and notes from each session you attend throughout the day. Live-blogging is great for connecting with other bloggers and bringing traffic to your site. To make the most of your live-blogging experience, make sure you publicize your posts through Twitter using the relevant hashtags and tag your posts.

If you like to relax and enjoy those lazy summer days instead, why not try to make a summer reading list and review each book on your blog?  Whether you’re a beach bum or a camping addict, bring a book with you, take notes, and let others know if it’s A+ beach reading material or if that novel was better off left at home. You can even do this with movies, local summertime events (such as a music series), and art shows.

Do you have any summer blogging tips? Do you cover different topics seasonally?