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.

Blogging Tip, Publicizing Your Blog

If my best blogging tip is to just write something already, it’s not really worth much if you aren’t letting people know that you’re writing something.  I don’t mean taking ads out on huge websites either.  What I do mean is doing things like:

• Linking up to blog parties, choose the parties in your niche and be sure to follow the rules (not only is this proper etiquette, you might just get featured as a result).
• Commenting on other blogs.  Targeting your niche is very important.  Most bloggers don’t have a problem with you including your blog address in the signature of your comment as long as you are sincerely contributing to the conversation.
• Share every post you write to twitter and Facebook.  I used to do this manually every time I posted something, unfortunately I was also always forgetting too.  Save yourself time and use the Networked Blogs App on Facebook. 
• Encourage others to share your posts.  Put a Facebook share or like button, a pin it button, or a tweet this button in your post templates if they’re not there already.  And be sure to invite your readers to share your posts by writing something like: “If you enjoyed today’s post I invite you to share it.”

My first blog I just treated like a journal, I was ecstatic to see 1 or 2 footprints on my page (anyone remember Xanga?). Today, traffic is important to me, because quite frankly I do make a little income from ads, affiliate sales, and eBooks.  In addition I also see my writing at Lessons from Ivy to be a very important ministry.

Stats aren't everything, they're not even a real measure of "blogging success" but if you're writing you might as well let others know about it.  

So, how do you publicize your blog?