Bloggers Journal

Everybody has heard about etiquette at some point in their life.  The unwritten rules of social engagement, I guess.  You know the ones I mean.  Be polite, and remember your pleases and thank yous.  Be grateful, and courteous.  Yada yada yada…

What’s this got to do with blogging?  Simple – blogging is another format of social media.  The key word being social – interacting with other people.  If you’ve reached this site, you have either come here directly, by accident or have been referred.  However you have ended up here, I hope you stay around and have a read over what I have to say.  Please feel free to leave comments.  For now, please read on and I’ll discuss why etiquette from your day to day life can benefit your blogging and help build traffic.

In life, how you approach others is often going to determine how they respond to you.  When you are polite and courteous, people generally are the same back to you.  If you are blunt and rude, you may find yourself with fewer people spending time with you.

When we are blogging, the exact same thing happens.  Your content is ultimately what has drawn people to your site.  This is a shared interest.  It happens daily in our lives.  Now you’ve attracted people, you want to engage with them.

What is sociable about blogging?

Blogs are different from normal websites.  They allow readers to communicate easily with the author of the content.  Rather than emailing the author directly, blogs allow you to communicate through comments.  The comments are associated with the article, and show up below it.  The purpose of the commenting is to open avenues for conversation and discussion of the topic.

Many bloggers recommend blog commenting as a valuable source of traffic and backlinks to your own website.  This is achieved by posting comments on other peoples blogs, and leaving your name and website link.

Comments on your site

So you have been out posting valuable comments on other blogs.  Valuable in such a way they are useful to the post.  You generally find good comments add to the original post, or answer questions the author has posed to their readers.

By now you will have received some new readers on your site.  Check those analytics for your traffic sources.

Now you have got some traffic, I mean, readers – they are people, and hopefully you can help them, you want them to stay on your site.  You also want to make them want to come back.  How?

This is how etiquette from everyday life can be used in the blogging world.  It’s important to remain polite and courteous to your readers.  Try and provide them with prompt and helpful responses.  It is important to make your readers feel valued.

Go and read some of their posts on their blog.  Learn a little about your readers.  If you can, try and engage them by thanking them for their comment on your site.  Answer any queries if they have any.  If you can, try and relate the article you have written to something on their site.

Managing twitter followers

Twitter is also a fantastic means to developing traffic.  You follow people, and many will follow you in return.  It’s great!  You can also use twitter to publish your articles, so your readers can check out the link you provide them.

It is popular that readers will “re-tweet” posts that they like to their followers.  What they are doing is recommending to their readers that what you have written is well worth checking out.

You can make this followers feel particularly valued by thanking them for re-tweeting your article.  As a courtesy, you could follow up by reading on their blog, and tweeting something of their’s which worth sharing.

So what now?

From here, you can go and put into practise day to day life skills that many of us take for granted.  It is important to remember to be yourself.  Let some of your personality show.  Readers love to read something that comes from a person, rather than a neutral boring article.  I’m always very grateful that I have readers, and particularly grateful to those who comment and recommend my site.  At the end of the day, the best traffic you can get is traffic which has received recommendation to visit you.

Image – Aiden Jones