Top Ten Tuesday: My Best Blogging Tips For Building A Loyal Readership

Recently, I wrote a post titled “The Lessons of Format and Familiarity How To Take Your Blog To The Next Level and Build a Strong Reader Base” which discussed how to improve your blog by creating a more familiar format and sticking to certain key content areas in which you are passionate.  Today, I’m going to give you my top ten blogging tips to take your blog to the next level.  I guarantee that if you follow some or all of these ten items, you will see your traffic, the number of readers plugging you into their RSS reader and comments to the next level and beyond.

1. Blogging is more than publishing content.  It is generating and participating in discussions about important topics.  This means you not only have to publish on your sites, but comment on other people’s site, sending emails to other appropriate bloggers when you think you touched on an issue important to them and encouraging people who follow your blog regularly to provide their thoughts.
2. Blogging is about relationships.  You need to reach out to those people with blogs similar to yours by calling them on the phone and sending them emails introducing yourself.  Don’t spam them.  Request to be on their blog roll or publish your post if you don’t really know who they are.  Once you develop these relationships with others.  They will naturally start linking to you, commenting on your post and developing the synergy necessary to become a leader within your content niche.
3. Use Twitter to accumulate and publish your posts as a feed.  It’ll also allow you to build relationships with other people on Twitter and accumulate their posts onto your Twitter homepage as you continue to become part of your relevant community.
4. Dictate your blog posts if at all possible.  Eighty percent of the content on this site is dictated while I am in the car or at home and published to my blog by staff.  I’m dictating this blog post from my car, which allows me to share my thoughts without taking up valuable time from work.  It also allows me to share those thoughts when they strike me, even if they are not at my computer.
5. Take a position.  Sharing other people’s links and asking questions won’t get you very far in the blogosphere.  You need to decide what it is you think about certain issues and “say it.”
6. Submit your blog to directories relevant to your topic and pligg sites such as www.overflowlegal.com.  For me, there are a number of legal directories out there, which essentially republish snippets of my content under each blog title.  Those directories link back to my site.  In a future post, I will be providing a link of the most important directories for lawyers.
7. Submit your most interesting post of the week to Blawg Review and publish each week’s Blawg Review on your site on Monday mornings.  Not sure what Blawg Review is, check it out here.
8. Keep Blogging!  Blogging is about perseverance more than anything else.  This blog has been around for over four years.  There have been times where I have generated less content and times when I generated more content.  But here I am, still blogging.  Many bloggers give up after a short period of time because they don’t feel like their generating enough traffic.  If you are blogging for traffic, you won’t make it over the long haul.  Blog because you want to and because you have something to say.
9. Promote your blog to your partners and other lawyers and legal professional with whom you already have a relationship.  Get them reading your blog and posting comments.
10. Accumulate content from other blogs relevant to your topics of concern in your RSS reader and on Twitter.  You need to know what other people are saying out there about the issues you care about.  That will allow you to comment on their posts, link to their websites, build relationships, participant in the discussion, use blogging as a way to become the most knowledgeable person about the issues you care about (did I mention how important that point is?)  learn about cutting-edge issues important to you and get as much out of blogging as you give. 

Blogging is one of the most important and rewarding things that I do each week.  Psychologically, it helps me to keep my bearings and stay on track.  Essentially, I am constantly reminding myself about the principles upon which my firm is based.  Educationally, I follow blogs about internet law, cybersquatting, trademark and intellectual property issues, idea protection and other areas of practice important to my business.  I know what’s going on in my relevant world. 

As always, feel free to add to this list if you think I am missing something.