How to Build Relationship With Other Bloggers
They say that no man is an island, and this is also true of blogs.
Of all the strategies to increase your readership, no method gets better results than building relationships with bloggers in your niche.
Imagine trying to build a Twitter following without interacting with other Twitter users. Pretty stupid, right?
From blogging, to forums, to social media, to email marketing, the entire online space thrives when users connect with one another.
Here are five strategies you can use to build relationships with other bloggers, each of which includes personal examples of how it paid off for me.
Building Relationships with Bloggers by Commenting
Almost every blog has a section for comments, and it is a fair assumption that most bloggers would like to see more comments come in.
I learned a long time ago that we have to take an interest in others before we can expect others to take an interest in us. As a result, I make it a best practice to comment on 3-5 different blogs every day. Certainly I could be doing more, but even a small number of comments can be meaningful if done consistently.
I focus on blogs that have a following larger than mine, but not exponentially so.
As it turns out, many bloggers who are focused on relationship building use this strategy.
Bloggers take note of who comments on their posts, and others take note of people who regularly comment on blogs in a particular niche.
Building Relationships with Bloggers through Social Media
Identify other bloggers in your niche and follow them on social media.
Share some of their blog content with your audience, making sure to tag them in your posts.
You can also comment on or share what they post directly to social media.
In so doing, you start to become familiar to that blogger. You may find that he or she begins to take an interest in what you are doing, as well.
You can also attract other bloggers to you by regularly sharing high quality content – not necessarily your own – related to your chosen niche.
Building Relationships with Bloggers on Forums
Internet forums are great places to meet new bloggers.
In fact, many bloggers spend time on forums daily in attempt to build their following, discover possible topics for future posts, and further establish their credibility.
Forums are also an excellent to build relationships with bloggers in the same niche as you. One thing you should keep in mind is that, every answer should help the poster’s concern.
Building Relationships with Bloggers in Groups & Communities
Be it Facebook, Linkedin, or whatever social media platform that is relevant to your niche. The method is actually the same with forum participation.
However, the difference is that there are only a handful of people you can communicate with in groups or communities. So make every opportunity to contribute and help others in that group.
In my case, after doing proper group and community participation, a lot of the members of those groups are now my subscribers.
Building Relationships with Bloggers by Contributing
As the saying goes, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Once you have started to build relationships with bloggers in your niche, reach out and ask if you can contribute a guest post, a quote, an infographic, or something else of value to their blog. I can tell you from experience that there are precious few bloggers who will turn down the opportunity to publish high quality content they didn’t have to invest time in creating.
- The benefits to contributing to other blogs are endless, but here are just a few:
- You get exposure to a new audience, thus increasing your online presence and following.
- You further establish credibility and expertise when published on another blog.
- You gain traffic back to your own blog through your author box or backlinks.
- If the publisher does not add nofollow to your backlinks, Google may give your blog a little boost in the search results.