Building Genuine Relationships for Blog Growth

Hi there and welcome to episode 36 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and today, we’ll be looking at two techniques to find readers for your blog. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/36. 

Before we get into today’s show, I just wanted to give you a little update. Today is Monday, the 17th of August as I record this and literally, just last night, I got home from the ProBlogger event for 2015. We had 700+ attendees come up to the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia where we got together for two whole days to talk blogging. There’s a whole heap of people there, it was quite amazing.

The previous year we had I think I was close to 540–550 people so it was quite a bit larger than the previous year, almost 200 larger and we had a great time together. We did a few new things, we had a few more networking events at this particular year, we had a great party on Friday night, but the main reason we were there was for some great content. We had, I think, it was over 24. It might have been closer to 30 sessions this year.

We had speakers fly in from around the world: Jadah Sellner from Simple Green Smoothies, Heather Armstrong from Dooce, Pamela Wilson from Copyblogger, and Ruth Soukup from Living Well, Spending Less. Then, there was a whole heap of amazing Australian bloggers there speaking as well. We had Dan Norris, Claire Healy, Nat Kringoudis and many more. You can actually find them all listed at probloggerevents.com, but it was really just a fantastic time.

I’m, right now, feeling simultaneously, incredibly energized and incredibly exhausted as well, physically exhausted but mentally really energized and really looking forward to what comes next for particularly the Australian blogosphere. This year, we also had people flying in from India, quite a few from New Zealand, and even attendees flying in from other parts of the world including the Middle East and America. It was quite a diverse group of people, all kinds of niches. We had quite a few younger bloggers this year as well as older bloggers. As usual, a lot of women. It was in the 90% range of male to female ratio but it was just a fantastic time.

Despite my croaky voice today, I’m feeling really great about the state of the Australian blogosphere and also blogging around the world, and looking forward to what we’re going to do next. Now, I’m going to actually use some of the snippets from our recordings of the event this year in future podcasts. The full recordings are just for attendees, we do provide them but we’re going to use a few snippets in future episodes and I look forward to sharing some of the key messages that we had this year.

I want to get into today’s episode and we’re continuing our series today on finding readers for your blog. If you haven’t listened to the last three episodes, I really would encourage you to do it now. This series started in episode 33 of the ProBlogger Podcast. The first podcast from this series in that episode 33, we talked about identifying who you want to reach for your blog and building a reader avatar which wasn’t directly about how to find readers but it was one of those foundational things that you really do need to work on. If you haven’t listened to that one, I do encourage you to go back to it because many of the things we’re going to talk about today build upon knowing who you’re trying to reach.

The second episode in this series was episode 34 where we talked about the type of content that you want to have on your blog if you want to find readers. Obviously, you need to have content that’s going to serve your readers when they come but you also want to create shareable content and I share some ideas on how to create that kind of content for your blog.

In the last episode, episode 35, we talked about building a sticky blog, so how to actually hook your readers in once they come. Again, this is something else you need to do before you go hunting for readers really because, otherwise, I’ll just come and then bounce away from your blog. I do encourage you to go back and listen to those three episodes before you get into today. I will say that in the next episode, I’m also going to continue this series by sharing with you a few more techniques for building your readership.

Today, I want to look at two kinds of themes. One will be quite quick and the other one, I’m going to dig in quite a bit deeper. Let’s get into it.

The first thing I want to talk about is building your readership through prolific usefulness in commenting. Now, the reason that I don’t want to talk for too long on this one is that we have already touched on this in a couple of episodes of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, but I do want to touch on it here.

The reason I actually am bringing this one up today is because I’ve actually had some really good conversations with bloggers in the last few days at our event who built their readership through this very technique; commenting prolifically on other people’s blogs, forums, and other places as well. This, I would say, is a really great place to start if you are just starting out with blogging and you are looking to find your first readers for your blog.

It will not bring you thousands of readers overnight. It’s something that is going to bring you a few readers at a time. That’s particularly good as you’re getting going, as you’re establishing yourself, as you’re gaining your own confidence. This is a lower level strategy. Over the rest of this episode and the next episode, I’m going to get into some higher-level things, but I think this is a good place to start.

It will help you to grow in your confidence as you begin to express yourself and grow your profile. It also helps you to learn about your niche because you’ll be commenting on other blogs in your niche and forums and in doing so, you’re actually starting to hear how other people blog and see how they interact with their readers as well. You also begin to see some of the needs in your niche. It will also help you to get to know others in your niche (which is something that I want to expand upon in a moment) and also begin to build your profile while driving and use some smaller amounts of traffic.

Now, I’m not going to go in a whole heap of detail about how to do this, but if it does interest you, I encourage you to go back to episode 9 of this podcast. It was part of our 31 Days to Build A Better Blog series. In that episode, I talk about using forums and commenting at other people’s forums but also commenting on other people’s social media groups, so finding Facebook groups and finding LinkedIn groups that are on your topic, and just being a useful participant in those groups.

Also in episode 20, I talk about how to comment on other people’s blogs in a way that grows your profile and drives traffic back to your blog. That would be a great starting place for you if you’re just starting out.

Another similar tactic that I’ve seen a number of people use quite well is to be prolifically useful in other social media channels and really this is similar in some ways to commenting on blogs, in Facebook groups, or forums, but it’s about watching out for conversations that relate to your niece. Again, I talked to another blogger and I’ve had a whole heap of conversations in the last few days with bloggers so these are fresh in my mind. 

One blogger that I talked to at the event said that she has some keyword searches set up on Twitter. She uses a tool called Sprout Social that allows her to set a keyword. I won’t tell you what the keyword is because I don’t have permission to share it but she watches a keyword that she knows a lot of people use when they’re searching for information that relates to her niche.

Anytime she sees anyone using that word or asking a particular question, she’s able to jump in with an answer. That often opens up all kinds of conversations with people and some of those people then go on to check out who she is and what her blog is. Sometimes, she’s able to answer the question they’re asking with a link to a post that she’s written on the topic as well.

Again, this doesn’t drive her thousands of readers at once. It actually finds her one new reader at a time, but because she started that relationship with a conversation with someone on a social media channel, sometimes they go back and forth for up to 10 times. That reader is already engaged before they land on her blog and they’re much more likely to subscribe and keep coming back.

They’re also much more likely to recommend her and her blog to other people and she sees that constantly after these conversations. People tell other people, “You should check out this particular blog.” Not a high-level strategy. It’s not going to drive you thousands, but it’s going to drive you people who are engaged, people who you have significantly helped in some way.

Another blogger I’ve met previously to this year’s event does almost exactly the same thing on YouTube where she watches a number of other YouTube channels that relate to her niche. When people ask questions, she’s able to respond to those questions. Now, she’s not spamming the question and the comments with her links but she’s commenting as her brand name. She has a YouTube channel that that brand name links back to and people go and check out what she does. She’s also got a YouTube channel there. From her YouTube channel, she is able to link back to her blog.

It’s all really about trying to work out where your readers are engaging⁠—whether it be another blog, forum, YouTube, or a social media channel⁠—and then being useful in those places. It’s not about spamming them, it’s about being useful but having a way that people can find out more if they want.

I’ll just emphasize this again. When you’re useful to people, when you’re answering their questions, when you are helping them to achieve something that is a challenge for them, they’re much more likely to want to know who you are but come to your blog in an open state wanting to connect with you, wanting to give something back to you, and wanting to share you and who you are with the people that they know.

The key here is to be useful and it’s to be regular. So, don’t just comment once on a blog and never go back to it. Actually, have a few blogs that you want to comment on regularly. You might not do it every day, you may do it two or three times a week but if you do it two or three times a week, other readers will begin to get to know who you are and the blogger will also get to know who you are as well. The same thing is true in forums and in social media. If you’re regular, people begin to notice you over time and that has a snowball effect over time as well. 

Technique number one is to be prolifically useful by commenting, whether it be on blogs, forums, or social media challenges.

The next thing I want to talk about, I want to go into a little bit more depth to it. This one, I’ve seen a number of bloggers, particularly here in Australia over the last couple of years, use very well to grow their readership. It’s a bit of a slow burner, but like the last one, it actually has an accumulative effect. It’s all about networking, it’s all about building relationships with other key influencers in your niche.

I’ve seen a number of bloggers do this particularly well and really broke through with their blogs over the last couple of years. These bloggers are looking for win-win opportunities with other people in their niche, that will help them to grow their exposure and their profile but also to grow traffic to their blog. I’m going to give you some specific things that they’ve done here, but I want to start with a fairly unspecific one and that is just informal networking.

This is about getting to know other bloggers in your niche and that’s a good starting point for many of the other things I want to talk about over the rest of this podcast. The reason you want to do this is that many of the types of readers that you want to reach with your blog—we talked about this in a previous episode, building an avatar for your blog—will be reading other people’s blogs. A little exercise that you might like to do is to identify who are the key bloggers that your potential reader is already reading.

You can do the same thing with Twitter. One of the key Twitter accounts that your potential reader is already following, one of the key Facebook pages, and the list can go on. YouTube accounts, Periscope accounts, podcasts, one of the key places that your reader is already engaging in, reading, and listening to. Once you know that, you can then begin to think about who should you try and get to know, who are the main players that could help you to grow your readership to that type of reader.

This may sound a little strategic and it is on some levels but as I’m going to say over and over again in the next little while, this all works best if you genuinely reach out to people and you genuinely look for win-win collaborations with people. Who are these people? Who should you try and get to know?

You’re probably going to come up with a list that includes some very well-known people and some very popular people. Some might turn these A-listers, the A-list bloggers. I don’t particularly like that term but I can’t really think of anything that’s better at the moment so let’s use it.

Some of these A-listers are getting approached all the time and they are going to be hard to get on the radar of, they’re going to be hard to build a relationship with. Although, some of them will be quite open to that. I want you, in your list, to also include that second-tier down again. We may call them the B-listers, the C-listers, or the D-listers but they’re the less popular bloggers, perhaps the more recent bloggers into that field. 

Here I’m also talking about other fields as well so it might be Instagram, it might be YouTube, or it might be people with Pinterest accounts. By identifying who you want to get to know, you can then begin to work at getting to know them and building relationships with them.

This could happen in all manner of ways. It might be shooting them at a friendly email to introduce yourself, it might be following them on social media, just commenting and responding to the things that they say. It might be commenting on their blog. It may actually be about going to a meetup to meet them if they are speaking at an event, to go and line up, meet them, and introduce yourself.

There’s a whole heap of ways that you can do this and I will say it takes time to do that particularly if that blogger is on the radar of lots of people if they’re an A-lister.

The other thing to say here is that relationships take time to develop, so don’t expect too much too early. Don’t expect that your first tweet to someone is going to make you best friends with them, it takes time to grow these relationships. Another thing you can do to begin to deepen that relationship is to be generous to that person; share their links, retweet their tweets, comment on their blog posts, help them to achieve their goals in some way as well. This sometimes will open up reciprocation, this sometimes will help them to take notice of who you are and want to check out who you are and get on their radar.

I want to give you a really practical example of this. Again, I’m talking about one of the bloggers from our conference and again, I don’t have permission to share this story in great detail, so I’ll keep it fairly general. I talked to one blogger at our conference this week who told me that, when she started her blog, she put together a list of 20 bloggers, Instagrammers, and YouTubers that were already more established in her niche.

She was just starting out so she didn’t know any of them. She had no relationships with anyone else in her niche at all. These included the A-listers but it also included some smaller bloggers and bloggers that had—some of them—just started in the last few months. She went right from other newbies of bloggers and Instagrammers right through to the more experienced ones, but these were 20 people she wanted to get to know. Her goal wasn’t just to get traffic from them, her goal was to learn from them, her goal was to watch them and to see how she could help them in some way.

She decided that she’d set the goal for herself, that she wanted to connect with each one of them in some way every 72 hours. Every three days, she wanted to have some kind of interaction with them. She actually set up a spreadsheet to do this. This might sound a little dry and strategic, but it helped her to keep on track and she just made a note of how she reached out to them every 72 hours.

She wasn’t emailing them every 72 hours, calling them, or anything really annoying. It included things like responding to tweets, it included things like commenting on their YouTube video, on their blog post, or their Instagram accounts. Occasionally, she would actually email them. Occasionally, she told me that she even went to meetups that they were running to meet them or to meet their readers. It was a whole variety of things. Some of them quite involved and some of them very simple.

Over three or so months, she noticed that some of them began to respond back to her. It didn’t happen overnight but it gradually grew. She said that after about three months, about half of these 20 people had engaged in some kind of conversation with her. So whether that be a comment’s conversation or a social media conversation, she’d begun to get responses from them. She wasn’t stalking them, she was just being friendly with them. Over time, opportunities began to grow.

Some of them shared her content, some of them invited her to guest post on their blog. One of them interviewed her on a YouTube clip through a Google Hangout, and gradually over time, she became good friends, genuine friends with a couple of them as well. That also opened up opportunities to collaborate. That blog is now two years into her blogging and she’s quite well-established in her niche and she really puts it down to this relational growth, and just informally getting to know other people in her niche.

This is a great place to start but what I’ve actually seen over the years is that many bloggers, once they get to know other bloggers, maybe they meet them at a conference and spend a couple of days with them, maybe it’s through purely virtual forms of getting to know other bloggers. Many bloggers, though, take it to the next level and this can take some time to get to.

Over the years, I’ve come across a number of bloggers who form slightly more formal relationships with one another. Some people actually would call this forming a blog alliance. Some people would maybe call it a mentoring group or a mastermind group. I’ll give you a really good example of this and this came out of our event. Lots of these examples are at the moment because they’re so fresh in my mind.

I was talking to a group of three bloggers. They came up to me at our networking party on Friday night and they told me that they met at our event three years ago. Three years ago, they’re all newbies at our event and they got to know one another and realized that they were all writing about very similar things, they were all very new bloggers writing about similar things. They decided to start a little group.

It started as an email group. They just decided that once or twice a week, they would email each other and have a discussion about keeping each other accountable for some of the things that they decided to do at our event three years ago.

It started very informally, it was relational, but then over time, they decided to get a little bit more serious and so they started a Facebook group. In the Facebook group, they decided they wanted to have daily contact with one another. One of the things they did in that Facebook group was to share links to the posts they were writing each day.

At first, it was so that they could comment on each other’s blog posts which helped to build a bit of social proof but over time, they also began to share each other’s blog posts, they began to add further reading to each other’s blog posts. If one wrote about a topic that another had already written about, that would include the link to that other blogger’s post at the end of the article as further reading.

They continued to comment on each other’s blogs, they began to brainstorm ideas for content for each other’s blogs, they began to tackle the same topics as a series of posts but on different blogs. One would start the series one day, the next will continue on the next day, and then the last one would finish the series on their blog the last day. Then again, they would interlink their posts.

They also began to monetize their blogs together. They wrote an ebook together, the three of them, and then they jointly launched it on all three blogs. They also did a joint campaign with a brand. They each wrote a sponsored post for the same brand and were able to get the attention of this larger brand by the three of them working together.

You can see here that they did all kinds of things together and it’s becoming more and more formal, I guess, this relationship that they have. When they told me that this little alliance that they had formed three years ago when they were very new bloggers, has been the number way that their blogs have grown since that time. Each of the three blogs has had moments in the spotlight where they’ve had bursts of traffic but they’ve committed that they want to bring each other along on that journey. When one grows, the other two grow as well. When the other two have their moments in the spotlight, that first blog grows as well.

I just love this because it’s very easy for bloggers to become competitive in their niche and to compare one another themselves with one another, for animosity to build up, jealousy and that type of thing, but these three bloggers have really decided that they’re not going to let themselves go there but they’re going to work together. They’ve grown quite quickly as a result because they’ve worked together.

They haven’t done a whole heap of other activities to promote their blogs. The main part of their growth has been through this relationship that they’ve grown. I would encourage you, as you do get to know other bloggers in your niche to reach out to them, you may not get as far as these three bloggers have in terms of you know the structure of the group but even just some sharing of each other’s posts can really help you to grow.

We’re talking today about these relational ways of growing your blog. Another way that you can do this and this is perhaps slightly less relational although it can be quite relational is to pitch other influencers, pitching them your links. When I started blogging, this used to happen mainly where you would email another blogger in your niche and say, “Would you consider linking to a post that I’ve written?”

Today, it happens perhaps less on blogs and more social media. People tend to share their links on social media and I know a number of bloggers in the niches that I operate and actually love to be pitched ideas because it’s part of their brand, their followers actually follow them because they’re sharing interesting links. 

If you’ve written a piece of content on your blog that you think would be particularly suited to the audience of another person, don’t be afraid to shoot them a note and suggest that they might check it out and even consider linking to it. Now, you want to keep in mind a few things here.

Firstly, A-listers—again that term, I don’t like it, but I’ll use it today—get a lot of this kind of approach. You might not get as many responses from them, so consider doing it more with smaller bloggers or medium-sized bloggers and particularly pay attention to people who are regularly sharing content on their social channels. Some people do it more than others and so if they are, then they’ll probably be more likely to share your stuff.

You don’t want to do this with every single post that you’ve written to the same blogger or the same social media influencer, you don’t want to be spammy with them. You want it to be highly relevant to what they’re trying to do and to the type of stuff that they share, and it needs to be the highest quality work that you’ve got.

Ultimately, you want to pitch your most useful content to these influencers and of course, we want all our content to be useful but some content is more useful than others and some is more likely to be shared and more likely to be helpful to the people who come to your site. So, keep the quality as high as possible. 

Also, you want to pay attention to any benefit that you can bring the person who’s sharing the content. As you’re writing content, you might want to quote them, you might want to link to their blog on something they’ve written on the same topic. If they’re mentioned in the post, they’re much more likely to want to share that. You may actually want to approach them before you write the post and say, “Could I get you a quick comment or a quick quote from you?” and then you include that in the post and then again, they’re more likely to want to share that.

As you’re approaching people, be as friendly, courteous, personal, and short-winded as possible. People respond when you are to the point but you’re friendly as well. Don’t do mass approaches. Don’t send the same email out to 40 people and not use their name. People can tell if you’re doing that, but if you genuinely approach someone in a polite, courteous way, and don’t take too much of their time, they won’t mind those sorts of pitches.

Share their stuff as well. Show them that you’re actually interested in supporting them and if they do share your stuff, of course, follow up with a thank you. Pitching other bloggers works much better if they know who you are. This is one of those things that build upon what I’ve already talked about, actually getting on their radar, getting to know them, being helpful with them.

Another technique that you might like to use—this also fits under this idea of relationships and promoting a blog through relationships—is featuring other influencers. I’ve seen a number of bloggers and particularly podcasters grow quite quickly on the back of featuring guests on their blog. Guests that have some level of influence. Again, this may not be the A-lister. This may actually be just another blogger who is a bit more advanced than you, but actually having them guest post on your blog, you interview them on your blog, on your podcast, or you featuring them in a Webinar, for instance, can actually bring your blog a lot of life and drive traffic to you.

This can be a bit harder at the start. If you have just started your blog and no one knows who you are and you’re trying to approach someone who is famous to appear on your blog in an interview, you may not get so lucky with that. You want to start to think at a lower level here. Who is someone a bit more advanced than you that you could interview? By getting them, that person might be on the radar of someone the next level up.

Gradually, over time, as you begin to interview people, as you begin to feature people in different ways, those who know them would be more interested in appearing in your next episode. So quite often when people ask me to do an interview on their podcast, they’ll say we’ve already had these people on our podcast and some of those people, if I know who they are, I’ll probably be more open to taking that interview.

Think about building a portfolio and again, take your time with this. This builds with momentum over time. There are a few benefits to doing this. Firstly, if someone who’s got some influence appears on your blog, in some ways, you borrow the influence. It makes an impression upon your readers and those who eventually do come to see that person on your blog. It’s also more shareable content. People like to share that kind of content. “This famous person or this person of influence is on this blog, and here’s what they think about this.” That is shareable content.

You might also find that the person you’re interviewing, the person you’re featuring may want to share that with their networks as well. This is where things can really take off. I remember the first time that I interviewed a media personality here in Australia on ProBlogger and that person then shared it with their Twitter following that led to a boost in traffic and that helped me to grow in my readership as well. 

Lastly, this type of content sometimes gets searched for. I know on iTunes, for instance, people search for people’s names there. If you’ve done an interview with that person, you will come up in the search results. The same is true for Google as well. 

The last thing I want us to talk about in today’s podcast. Here, we’re talking about relational ways of growing your blog and this is just one type of approach. One of the things I’ve noticed is that many of these things I’ve been talking about escalate and they get faster in terms of their impact out of real-life interactions.

This is impossible for everyone but when you meet someone in real life, it does speed up the relationship very often. I particularly noticed this this year at our ProBlogger event. I know mentioning it a lot here, but it’s so fresh in my mind. What I’ve noticed is that people who meet one another and then meet one another in an ongoing relationship are the people who have grown the fastest through these relational ways of growing their blogs.

If there’s some way that you can meet someone by going to a conference or a meetup, that can really cement these relationships and grow things much faster. It’s not possible for everyone, so don’t give up on the virtual relationship, either. But if there’s an opportunity to meet in real life or even to have more personal interactions with people online through video, through a Skype call, and hearing their voice, this can speed up some of the stuff that I’m talking about today.

The last thing I’ll say is that relationships do take time. Reaching out to other online influencers may not have the success that you imagined straight away but persist with it and things do tend to snowball. As you get to know one person, other people will be more open to meeting you as well if they see you interacting with them.

If you’ve got that portfolio of interviews, they’re more likely to take your interview. If they see you interacting with them on social media they’re more likely to want to interact with you as well. It sounds a bit sad in some ways and it kind of is but it’s the way we are as humans. When we see people interacting with other people and we know one of the parties, we’re more interested in meeting the other people, too.

The last thing I’ll say is don’t just look inside your niche, look for related niches, too. When I started Digital Photography School, I was interacting with a lot of other photography bloggers. Some of the best promotions that we did were when we actually pitched our articles to other blogs slightly outside of our niche. I used to pitch my articles to a blog called Lifehacker. Lifehacker, some of you are familiar with, it’s actually a tips blog and it does have a technology spin but it wasn’t just about photography, it was about many aspects of life. It was a broader niche in some ways.

While it wasn’t directly about photography, the readers of that blog were actually interested in learning technological type things. When they did link to us, it sent us some really good traffic. Large numbers because it was a large blog, but it was the right kind of traffic because they taught people how to improve different areas of their life. Don’t just pay attention to the key players in your niche, go beyond that as well. 

One of the problems that I see a lot of bloggers doing is that they only ever focus on people who are like them. That’s good in the early days of your blog, to find your first readers, but if you’re only ever interacting with the same bloggers all the time, it gets to a point where you might be just preaching to the converted. You might find that your blog’s readers are pretty much the same and that may be a ceiling point for you. Then, you want to start to think about other bloggers that you could interact with other set social media influencers.

Always be looking for the win-win. Don’t go into this with selfish motivations. Yes, you do want to grow your readership but you want to also help them in some way. This works best when it’s genuine. People will be a bit suspicious if you come to them and say, “Could you link to my blog? Could you link to my blog?” But if you’re actually looking for a win-win solution where they have some benefit out of a relationship, too, everyone benefits and that’s where real friendship emerges. 

The thing that I’ve loved the most about this kind of approach to growing my blog is that I don’t only end up with readers, I end up with friends. That’s one approach to growing readers for your blog. It’s actually through relationships and this is probably my favorite way of growing my blog’s readers because I’m a kind of a relational person.

In the next episode, I’m going to get a little bit more technical and I’m going to suggest some more strategic things that you can do, some practical things that you can do to grow your blog. Before we get into that, I love to hear your feedback on this approach to growing your readership. 

Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/36. I would love to hear: (1) What are these strategies that you are going to try yourself? How are you going to approach building relationships with other bloggers? (2) What have you already done that’s worked? Have you ever formed a relationship with another blogger in some formal way? Do you have a blog alliance or mentoring group that you do this type of thing with? If you don’t and you want one, perhaps leave a comment in the show notes there and be open to that from other bloggers as well. There’s a whole heap of bloggers listening to this podcast every day. You may just find, if you leave a comment there, about what your blog is, that someone else might reach out to you and who knows where that friendship might lead.

I love to hear your feedback on this and I love to connect with you on our social channels as well. Go to facebook.com/problogger to join with our Facebook community and follow me on Twitter at @ProBlogger. Talk to you in episode 37 of the ProBlogger Podcast in a couple of days.