Building your Blog Audience with Social Media

When you start out blogging, the best way to get your name out there is through commenting on other blogs. It introduces you to fellow bloggers and puts your name on the map. Think of every single comment as a little calling card– they’re a reflection of you and the more entertaining or intriguing they are, the more likely people are to click and be brought to your blog. And become your readers.

Time flies when you’re busy commenting and it’s easy to spend hours on it. After you’ve been blogging a while, though, it becomes harder and harder to keep up with the constant commenting. There are only so many hours in the day and I, for one, really need that daily shower. So, I use social media sites to promote my blog, and also to support the blogs belonging to friends/readers of mine. It’s less time consuming than commenting and can be a great way to spread the bloggy love. And who doesn’t want more of that?

Twitter is my favorite social media application. I love the instant gratification of it. I love being able to keep in touch with people without having to get into long e-mail exchanges. I love finding cool posts others have tweeted and being able to share my own. But to be successful, you need to have a following. Start by following people you like. Interact with them. Follow basic Twitter etiquette. Use the countless Twitter tools out there. Once you get the hang of it, it’s fun! Especially so with a glass of wine.

StumbleUpon is lots of fun and quite addictive. Jennifer from Playgroups Are No Place For Children gives the best StumbleUpon tutorial out there. It’s super easy to get started and I do see a decent amount of traffic from it. I also try and Stumble great posts as soon as I read them. How it works remains a bit of a mystery– some posts take off and some don’t, but it’s always a nice effort to make.

Facebook is another way to promote your blog. You may want to consider creating a separate account just for your blog, and a making fan page. Slap your blogroll on there. Become fans of the pages belonging to your friends. Help spread the word about their blogs and they’ll do the same for you. Facebook can be so much more than your long lost high school BFF.

Kirtsy is known as “Digg for Chicks.” The sites operate the same way, each highlighting user-submitted content that makes it to the front page by being voted up by the community or chosen by the editors. Digg’s traffic potential is higher than traffic from Kirtsy, but Kirsty is geared just towards women. While you may not see thousands of visitors, it’s a really cool site run by really cool women, and definitely one worth playing around with.

There are countless others out there, too. Delicious is a popular bookmarking site, though I don’t personally use it. Linked In is another site that you can use to promote your blog, though it’s a bit too businessy for me (When you make up words, perhaps you don’t belong there.) There are countless, and you need to find the few that work for you. Once you do, connecting with people through them is a breeze. And, at the end of the day, that’s what blogging is all about.

What’s your favorite application? And, have you written anything lately that you’d like shared? Leave it in the comments and I’ll Stumble or Tweet it!