How to Develop a Reputation for your Blog – A Quick Guide
Who doesn’t want their blogs to shine? While some do, others are relegated to the dustbin of history. Now, here’s the thing. Your blog definitely needs to be well written for it to succeed but, just a well written blog is not something that is going to help your blog achieve the kind of success that bloggers usually want.
There is much more to blogs than just their content.
What works for a blog is its reputation and this isn’t purely built by delivering engaging and quality content to readers. What actually gets the blog’s popularity soaring is the fact that its reputation is unblemished by any negative feedback.
But this isn’t enough. Yes, to get your blog’s popularity right up to stratospheric levels, you will need to take proactive steps to develop a reputation for your blog and make sure that you are able to maintain this reputation that you have so carefully developed.
So, let’s take a look at how you can develop your blog’s reputation:
Leverage Social Media
Why not use the most popular social phenomenon in recent times for your benefit. You can use platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to market your blog. Any new blog update, just Tweet the link; or share it with your Google+ circle, or paste the link onto your Facebook profile.
By doing this, you are not only promoting your blog, but you are also sowing the seeds for improving its reputation. For e.g. if the followers on Twitter find your content worthwhile, they are going to ‘retweet’ it; your Google+ circles will share it with their circles, the same is the case with Facebook, your fans will share it with people on their network and so on and so forth. You can ask people in your Google+ circles to +1 your post or you can ask your followers on Facebook to press the ‘Like’ button if they like your blog post.
In no time at all, your blog will go viral and so will its reputation.
Another way of using social media is to monitor what people are saying about your blog. It’s important to understand that social media is very much like your neighborhood barber shop. This is the place where you get the latest news, especially news that you can use. You can keep track of all conversations taking place about your blog content and know whether the content is a hit or a miss. If it’s the former, good for you, but if it’s the latter, you can take immediate steps to rectify any mistake that you have made; or you could see to it that you do not repeat your mistake/s in your future posts.
High Quality Content
Now somewhere right at the beginning of my post I have mentioned that content is important, but it’s not the only thing that is important. Now, I am not going back on my statement, but want to dig a little deeper into the importance of content.
A blog is nothing without content. More importantly, it’s nothing without quality content. The keyword here is quality; it stands for interesting, relevant, readable, precise, usable, accurate and factual content. These are the parameters that define successful content. Your reputation is made or broken on the anvil of your content. It is the foundation of your reputation and as we all know, you need a rock solid foundation before you start building anything.
[box type=”info”]Compromising on content, but using innovative reputation building tricks will only get you so far. If you want a long term innings for your blog, focusing on quality is an absolute must.[/box]
Create a Brand Name and use it everywhere
You need to call your blog something. This can be your domain name or something else. Say the domain name for your blog is www.example.com , but you address yourself as ‘Speak Easy’. Think of which is the name that is going to help your branding efforts. In order to ensure that your brand is unique and has recall value, you need to use a name that not only sounds unique but also feels unique. So, in this case, if you choose to go by ‘Speak Easy’, then this name inherently becomes the personality of your blog.
Your readers are going to remember this name rather than your domain URL.
Whenever you are talking about your blog on any platform on the internet, whether it’s social media or something else, for all purposes, you will need to address it as ‘Speak Easy’. This is your brand. Don’t think of it as your blog. Even if you are putting up a banner advertisement for your blog, don’t use some other name on the banner. This will be your blog’s identity.
You will find that it’s easier to market this identity than your blog as a whole.
There is a very thin line of difference between branding and reputation building. One could call ‘reputation building’ a subset of branding. It cannot exist without branding.
Spread the Word through Forum Participation
A reputation building exercise with respect to your blog is all about spreading the good word about your blog. You have an opportunity to do so by becoming a member of various forums that belong to the same niche as your blog.
This helps you interact with users of the forum, who can be potential readers of your blog. You can share the link to your blog while you participate in discussions on these forums.
Most people who are discussing various topics on such forums are either looking for expert advice or want to share some latest development in the niche with other like minded people. So, it’s important to showcase your expertise in the forum. The equation is very simple, if you are regarded as an expert and have a reputation as problem solver, your blog will be highly regarded as well.
[box type=”info”]Remember, when it comes to forum participation for improving your blog’s reputation, it is how people see you personally that moulds their perception of your blog.[/box]
If they believe you are an expert, they will believe your blog is an expert too.
Never Underestimate Comments
The cardinal sin of blogging is that bloggers tend to ignore all the comments that their blog post attracts.
Agreed, there are comments that are spam and there are other comments that are just posted for the purpose of getting a link; but there are serious commentators who actually are making relevant comments about your post, as well. They either agree with you or don’t or have some doubts that they want solved.
So, you need to be able to filter the wheat from the chaff and reply to the comments that make sense.
If you don’t, you come out looking unprofessional. People might think that you are not really interested in either defending the assertions made on your blog post, or you don’t give much importance to allaying the doubts readers might have regarding your blog post. This is one of the ways that the blog’s reputation can spiral downwards. So, you must never ignore the power of comments to enhance blog reputation.
Email Connections are Important
Overtime you need to develop an email list of people who are most likely to read your blog. Send them emails regarding your blog and the latest posts that you have written. Very often, bloggers ignore the email as a channel, because they think that the email more often than not, will end up in the spam folder of the receiver or they might just delete it without giving it a second glance. The problem with this thinking is that it is founded on a negative assumption.
When it comes to the reputation building of your blog, you must understand that each and every avenue matters and there are plenty of people out there who will open your email. They are willing to give your blog a chance. So don’t miss out on such readers. This is a step towards reputation building because it will help you attract a loyal readership to your blog.
In conclusion
Some of the pointers given above might look like theyare more marketing centric rather than something that will help you build your blogs reputation. And you will be right in thinking along those lines, but the truth is that when you are building the online reputation of your blog, you are marketing it. You want to keep getting as many readers to your blog, so that you can help achieve your predetermined objectives with the help of your blog.
At the end of the day, you can even use the phrases ‘marketing your blog’ and ‘improving its online reputation’ interchangeably. The differences between the two blur if you keep working towards making your blog more popular.
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