Teach Your Fans How to Promote Your Blog

Palantír © by Mr. Muggles

OK, I’m not a mind reader, nor do I have a crystal ball telling me what to do. Odds are, your fans and readers aren’t either. They come to your website, find cool content, want to share and tell others. They’d love to help your cause. Possibly they aren’t familiar with social media and blogging. Have no idea how they can help. With good intentions they leave your site, and the thought to help is gone in the busy rush of daily life. Thus it is important to encourage and teach your fans how to promote your blog.

I remember the first time I posted a comment on a blog. I’d read a book by the author, it was of immense help in a current project. I took some time to say thanks in a comment, wondering if the author would even see it, or deem it worthy of a spot on his website. I posted my comment. It didn’t immediately show up. Week later I check again, still not there. Months later I bump into the site again, and voila! there is my comment, and a reply, it’d been sitting there for months and I didn’t know it .

Several years ago, a group I belonged in on Ryze (and early biz social network) shared much helpful tips and discussion. Sadly their archives weren’t so searchable. Great content lost. I started to turn my content into blog posts and encouraged others to do the same. Posts were shared among the group, but I knew that didn’t get our content out to rest of the world. I recommended commenting on each other’s blog, tweeting, sharing with others, linking to related blog posts by other group members in your own posts. I was surprised how many didn’t know, and again surprised when links and shares started coming in.

Lessons Learned:

Don’t assume your fans know how to share, comment or like your posts

+G
Facebook like
Tweet
Comment
Other social media

Make it easy for your fans to support your work

Consider your audience. Know your readers, are they very tech savvy or newbies? If they don’t know how to do something, educate them. If they’re in the know, (or even if they aren’t) make it fun to help out. Have a contest, respond in a timely manner to comments, thank people. One example is a store front site which had a drawing for some nice gift certificates from those who submitted questions for their FAQ page, or a drawing for liking, tweeting, commenting etc..
Add Social share buttons. Much easier to share, like or +1 a post when you as the blog administrator use social sharing wordpress plugins to do the work for you.
Subscribe to comments Thinking back to that first comment I made, I never knew when my comment was responded to, I’d go back and check day after day, no response. I moved on. How much better it would be to get an email notification with the response. Now we have plugins which do such. I’d think twice before subscribing to comments on a high traffic site, I mean who wants 100 emails each day from blog posts. Get a smarter plugin if you have a high traffic blog, one which threads comments and only sends replies to individual comments.
Consider a support page/group for your fans. This will depend on your readers, who they are, what they want, etc. Let them know how they can support your work, possible educate on how to do such, what helps you. Also include something you can do to support your best fans, whether it is to become a member of a special elite group or giving away an ebook, support your fans. Here are a couple of examples: Adrienne Smith has a Promote Yourself page where readers tell a little about themselves and link their their sites. Jack Spirko did things differently by creating a Member Support Brigade where fans of his podcast can join a paid membership site which gives them many ebooks, downloads of past episoids, discounts from vendors, etc which value exceeds the cost of joining. Be creative.

Hmmm. now I need to put my thinking cap on and put these practices in place. Now that you know how, go ahead and share, like, +1 this post and in the comments share what you’d like to do for your readers to help them support you. Or better yet, tell me how I can support you.