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{Smaller Bloggers} Let’s Grow!

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Does true contentment as a blogger mean we don’t try to grow? Absolutely not! As Christian bloggers, growth should definitely be one of our goals, though how we pursue that goal will look different for each of us.

Some prefer to let growth happen naturally as God leads people to their blog. And there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as we have been good stewards by willingly laying a foundation for growth, it’s ok to let your blog grow at its own pace.

But perhaps you

  • need a platform from which to launch a book,
  • have the vision to supplement the family income through your blog,
  • or God’s given you something so great you just have to spread it far and wide or you’ll bust!

In that case, you will want to actively engage in growth. Growth-oriented tasks should be given priority on your to-do list and you should pursue a variety of strategies. Keep in mind that aggressive growth can be exhausting and can’t be sustained indefinitely without the danger of burn out. Set a specific goal for your stats or decide on a time frame for this season of growth and when you get there, take the time to adjust and get your bearings.

Also, as Christian bloggers, we ought to avoid prideful forms of self-promotion and using controversy to gain attention. We are called to humility and an attitude of service. The great news is, putting other bloggers before yourself and willingly serving your readers is actually a successful and enduring strategy for growth!

Serving Readers

Give Something Away. Product reviews and giveaways are a recognized strategy for growth, but they can involve a lot of preparation and follow up. Even if it’s simply an ebook, there’s still a half dozen emails to exchange each time. If you’re looking for an easy yet effective way to grow through giving, try creating a printable that’s only available to people who subscribe to your blog. Take a popular post on your blog, format it into a one-page PDF file with some graphics, and offer it to anyone who subscribes to your blog via RSS or email. It won’t cost you a thing, and once it’s set in place, your guests can help themselves.

Host a party! Twitter and Facebook parties are a great way to create buzz, and they’re a whole lot of fun. You can host one on your own, or team up with a few bloggers in your niche or network. Choose a date, drum up some giveaways, and invite your readers to join you on your favorite platform. Share tips and links, ask questions, give prizes, and interact with your followers in a public place where others can notice the fun and join in.

Serving Fellow Bloggers

Guest Posting. Providing quality content for someone else’s blog is truly a selfless act! Yet guest posting can be a very effective way get your words in front of a wider audience. Serve larger bloggers by providing them a well-crafted post, and often many readers will follow you to your blog for more. Just be sure your new friends will find what they are expecting when they visit you—if you guest posted on the subject of photography but your own blog is mainly about homeschooling, they may visit, but few will return.

Social Media Sharing. We’ve all heard it—promoting yourself on Twitter or Facebook is only palatable in small amounts. The majority of your tweets or updates should be sharing great content from other sources. Again, serving trumps selfishness for effective growth (<—Tweet This!) Learning to maximize social media takes time and commitment, but the ability to use this tool to help promote others has wonderful fruit. Being known as a generous person is the best plug you can give yourself.

How about you? How do you promote your blog? What works for you? Feel free to share your blog link and a brief description of how you endeavor to serve your readers. Then practice serving your fellow bloggers by tweeting or facebooking the link to a fellow commenter’s blog!

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Comments

  2. I wish I had seen this when I was a brand new blogger! These are great suggestions.
    It is all about building relationships, whether through social media, guest blogging, or commenting on other blogs.

    I make a point to comment on at least 3 blogs a day, leaving something thoughtful and, hopefully, helpful.
    Your tip to be generous in sharing and promoting others when on social media is right on the mark. Not only are you helping another blogger, you are highlighting great content for your followers.

    I am part of a small group that encourages each other and helps to keep each other accountable towards goals. We also have an area where we put up ready made tweets from our own content, so everyone can just grab one to easily share.

    Right now, I am working on finishing up a new free offer for subscribing: An faith-based path to happiness that will be delivered in installments over 7-8 weeks. This will actually be parts from a book I’m working on. I am so excited to help even more women find greater contentment, thankfulness, gratitude and joy in their lives, as that will lead to much stronger and satisfying relationships.

    Thanks for your post today, and the offer to have us post our links so we can help lift one another up. You can find ideas and tips, encouragement, optimism, faith, hope, and love—sometimes of the tough love variety :-)—at my blog, Too Darn Happy: http://www.toodarnhappy.com.

    •  Great idea on the “ready made tweets” – I’m part of a small group of bloggers that encourage and promote one another, too, and that would be a great thing to add to our group!

      •  Glad you like it! We find it so helpful, especially if we are pressed for time and can’t read through the entire post and distill it into a good tweet.

  3. Kim’s suggestion to comment on other blogs is good. I keep track of my blogger friends with Google’s Reader, so I can see when they post. Makes it easy to read their content, then pop over and comment:
    http://www.blogmamasusan.blogspot.com/2012/05/tips-on-using-google-reader.html

    Something else that’s good to do is retweet your friends posts on Twitter, and that’s EASY and takes no time!

    Another great post, Trina. Thanks for helping us smaller bloggers!~Susan

  4. I really need to get busy growing my blog. I’ve been thinking of having a giveaway, now I just have to do it. I have all of these crazy, wonderful ideas in my mind (and yours are wonderful too), but I need to take them from my mind out to the world. Sleepovers with other bloggers? Sounds like a blast!

  6. I don’t get on Twitter and facebook too much but let my posts feed into them…never thought of that as selfish…food for thought!

    •  Actually…I remembered this this afternoon just now as I got my babies to sleep and looked at my twitter profile/page and actually I’ve tweeted more other folks’ stuff than my own! Yay! I feel better now. Lol. 🙂 I will be intentional about it in the future though :). Thanks for opening my eyes to this :). By the way, I have been meaning to do a review for your book! I’m finding it really helpful. 🙂

      • Yeah! I’m proud of you! We do what we can–especially if our computer time is subject to babies naps. Sounds like you’ve had a servant’s heart all along, Amy.
        Oh, and I’d love to hear what you liked about my book. Thanks!

  7. i’ve been blogging since 2001 {gosh that’s a long time} but i feel like i’ve only recently started to learn the ins & outs of “savvy blogging” – serving and not self-promoting, offering my space for others to share their heart, and one of my favorites, providing reviews for friends who’ve stepped out and written books and need promotion. 
    recently, i just left my job as an instructional coach to pursue full-time writing. i’m hoping to be able to engage more on other blogs, build relationships with my readers, and develop a broader community on my facebook page.
    thanks for giving me some food-for-thought this morning. 🙂 
    {www.eloranicole.com}

  8. I am not a new blogger (I’ve blogged for 8 years), but I just started a new blog yesterday. This was a great reminder on how I need to grow my blog, because I have failed miserably before.

    • aww—please don’t call your past work a failure! An artist calls her mistakes ‘finding lines’ – your past experiences are part of what will help you find what works for you with your new blog. The past is all part of the blogger you are becoming. Congrats on not giving up! We are cheering you on! 🙂

  10. As always, this is completely practical and useful information that I can apply today. Thank you for your relevant instruction! 

  12. Love your point on guest posts needing to showcase what readers will find when they come to your own blog.   Hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s so true!  Of course, the flip side can also be true: guest posts allow you to write about something that wouldn’t “fit” on your blog but is perfect for another one. 🙂 

  13. Tomorrow I will have been blogging for a month! Yay! I have recently tried to “promote” myself and others in a 1:1 ratio. So if I tweet about my blog once, then I tweet about someone else’s next. I’m not perfect at it, obviously, but that is my goal. That is at least my minimum goal.

    I’m blogging at http://www.newlifesteward.com

    Thanks for this series! I look forward to it each week!
    Mary Beth 

      • Would that be considered info overload? I plan tweets 4 times a day (buffer) 2 are me and 2 are others. I retweet and reply during the day as I find interesting things. Then I generally share 1 or 2 posts from others in addition to mine on FB page. I don’t want to annoy by flooding feeds. Maybe I’m over thinking. Thanks!!
        Mary Beth

        •  If you’re interacting on Twitter w/ @s and RTs, those count as “others” in your 1:10 ratio, so it sounds like you’ve got a good mix! 🙂

  14. These are all really good ideas and bits of advice. I especially appreciate the encouragement to use your promoting for others as well as for yourself! Here’s a question for you all: any ideas about how to guest post? I mean, how do you ask those larger bloggers if they would allow you to write a guest post? It seems that many of the larger bloggers don’t usually use guest posts…they write all of their own material. 

    I blog over at madesacred.blogspot.com…although I just recently bought my own domain and will hopefully be switching over soon!  🙂

    •  Elizabeth, the best thing to do is ask. 🙂 Sometimes a site has guest posting guidelines posted, but in my experience, it is info they make available on request. If they do indeed accept guest posts, you can respond with a brief outline of the article you propose to write for their approval. Or, if you’ve already written the post and it fits their guidelines, you can just send it off!

      •  I agree with Trina’s points, Elizabeth. I am gearing up to start guest posting in a few weeks.

        Pointers I have learned:

        *have my site ready for visitors: neat, appealing, organized, and a way to ask them to subscribe to your content if they like
        *realize that in the beginning don’t be surprised if no one comes to visit at first, as it takes a while for your name to get recognized
        *pick blogs quite a bit bigger than yours with whom you would share an audience
        *see if you can find blogs have overlapping audiences
        *offer to write content that adds value to the blog’s readers
        *be open to editing and rewrites; it means the blogger cares about the quality of your content
        *do your best to build up to having a substantial number of guest posts come out in the same week or two. Do you notice a company when they run an ad once every 2-4 weeks, or when you see their name on a lot of your regular blogs?

        Good luck!

  16. Generosity is so key…thanks Trina:) So far I’ve tried to make it a priority to comment on 3-4 people’s blogs/day. I truly want to get to know other bloggers and turn them into friends…what fun 🙂 Since I started blogging in January…I’ve only guest posted once a couple weeks ago…so this is new to me…but I’m loving the new friends and learning so much. I love your helpful tips on this post Trina:) Great reminders to keep giving…

    I share about identity and hope at my blog http://www.surfingforshoes.com/wordpress

  17. Thank you for this post.  I have been blogging for awhile, but I am just now starting to branch out to make relationships with fellow bloggers.  I enjoy it so much, but I feel very overwhelmed.  I want to read blogs all the time, but of course, I also need time to write my own, and tweet (and retweet 😉  and comment, and, of yeah raise 6 kids and love on my wonderful husband!!  How do you all do it all?????  I need blogging 101!!!  I blog at thelanggangloves.com.  

    •  Christina, I’m with you–in the battle of balance. I don’t do it all, and whenever it looks like someone does, they’ve made sacrifices. I made sacrifices even to write this post. You’ve got to be sure of your calling as a blogger. If you aren’t, step back till you get perspective on things. I’ve done this over and over (I have to reevaluate frequently!).

      I don’t have 101 tips, but I do have a few that have kept me sane.

      Don’t let computer time steal the time you would otherwise be reading books. Well written books (fiction and non fiction) will balance out the urgent nature of so much of our online input.

      Don’t try to read it all. I got to a place where I was completely overwhelmed and guilt-ridden trying to keep up with all the great content out there. I had to face the truth: I can NEVER read it all – so why was I trying so hard? I don’t even have the time to SORT it all so I can read some of it! I decided to let God bring me to the articles that were what He wanted me to hear. I unsubscribed from a lot of blogs I loved, and trusted that the best stuff would surface again if I missed it the first time around on fb and twitter. Sure enough, God seems quite capable of sorting my input for me. I know He is watching out for me when I’ll have 3 different online buddies send me the same link telling me I’d ‘love this article’. Sure enough, I usually do.

  18. I am just getting into this and I enjoy it a lot. My blogs are
    http://letshomeschooltogether.blogspot.com/
    http://theblessingandgraceepiphany.blogspot.com/
    http://happimommie.blogspot.com

    I am working on one of mine as we speak. I would love to know more bloggers 🙂

    My facebook is https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lets-Homeschool-Together/135972846520261
    and my personal is https://www.facebook.com/chimeria.gonzalez
    please email me at happimommie@msn:disqus .com
    and my twitter is @happimommie:twitter

    I hope you do not mind me following your blogs 🙂

  19. I love the balance here. If you want to purposely grow, here are tips. If you prefer to let it happen with less deliberate effort, that’s okay too. There’s a place for everyone.

  20. I love this! Especially the part about guest blogging, I’ve never really seen it as serving, only felt I’d be imposing on someone else’s party! I’m going to look at this differently from now on, thank you!

  21. Great advice for growing one’s blog!
    I guess one way in which I promote my blog is by putting myself out there via comments on other’s blogs.

    I try to serve my readers by doing giveaways, because I know I enjoy having them and others enjoy receiving gifts. I also, again, make it a point to follow and comment on their own blogs, so that those who come to my blog know that I am invested in them.

    I blog at http://www.lifeinthewhitehouse.com/

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