Blog Parties and Blog Hops 101

If you’re blogging and you’d like to grow your website traffic (some people don’t) then blog link-ups are an incredibly powerful thing.  Linking up  to other blogs can be time consuming so take these tips to maximize their effectiveness.

•     Link up with the blogs you like and that are similar to yours.  Although anything goes blog parties are out there, they won’t bring you consistent readership if the blog hosting is dissimilar to yours.  You don’t want people to just click on your blog once, you want them to visit your blog, stay awhile, and then become a follower, fan, or subscriber.
• Follow the rules.  A lot of hosts will feature blog posts that linked up the following week, the host is a lot more apt to choose your post if you’ve linked back to them. 
• Title your posts differently between the blog hops you enter, choose different pictures too.  You’ll never know what will draw a person.  Blog parties tend to have a lot of the same visitors within the same niche, so if someone skipped your post on one hop they’ll probably skip it on another, unless you do something to change it.
• Link a few posts, most parties don’t have a problem with this, in fact I really like it when partyers do this at my link up.
•  Visit some of the blogs at the blog hop or party and COMMENT.  When people put a voice to your blog name they’ll be a lot more apt to visit in the future.

What did I miss?  Feel free to list a blog party or hop that you host in the comment section, and be sure to tell us who it’s geared towards.

And by the way I host a blog party geared towards Christian Homemakers every Tuesday over at Lessons From Ivy. And here are the blog parties where I hop.