The Big, Dirty Secret about Blogging

You can’t do it alone.

I know, I know. Writers are solitary animals by nature, the kind who demand a little alone time to kickstart the creative process. I like solitude. You like solitude. But listen up, my fellow lone wolves: successful blogging warrants a different skill set. Sure, you’ll still find yourself staring at a monitor any given hour of the week, but this new field of writing encourages a different approach.

You have to write, yes. But you also need to connect.

But don’t let that frighten you. Here’s the punch line: we’re already pretty darn decent at both!

Steps to Success

Ask high-profile bloggers how they made it to the top, and odds are you’ll start seeing a common response: they worked very hard for a very long time and spent most nights sobbing by the computer before they earned the first hundred subscribers. And then they did it again. And another time, and so on and so forth until they’d worked their way up to a nice pile of readers for all that incredible effort. It’s a long, sometimes tedious process, but these clever folk lessened the load like only true social butterflies can do: they talked to people.

Seems obvious, right? But the incredibly social nature of successful blogging doesn’t always click for someone installing Wordpress for the very first time. It didn’t hit me, certainly, until I got off my butt and realized there was some pretty telling trends on my Twitter feed. (Quick tip: stalk every single blogger in your niche!)

See, bloggers talk to each other. They comment on each others’ posts, write funny little emails back and forth on weekends, and just love to tweet about that great new article so-and-so put up on her blog. They read each other, essentially, and the network blossoms into something wonderful and financially viable from there. And when they really get friendly? They exchange posts, often leading to big audience boosts and many celebratory tweets all around.

Call it a game, if you want, but remember this: it’s probably the most important game of your blogging career, and you just so happen to be in great position to play it!

Work Your Words

Ideally, folks, you’d write the best damn post of your life, publish it, and your blog would skyrocket from there. But that sparkly new site of yours is just a drop in a staggeringly large bucket, and you’re going to need some help to raise it to the next level.

Good thing you’re an accomplished writer, right?

Start writing. But take the words, this time, into lands far beyond your own realm. Write friendly emails to other bloggers in your niche and cultivate those friendships over the next months. Sign up  for Twitter, if you haven’t already, and get cracking: retweet other bloggers’ comments, tweet about their latest posts, and strike up a conversation just often enough to not get annoying.

It works. In the last two weeks, I’ve chatted with a few high-profile bloggers in my niche, only to see one then leave a comment on one of my posts. That’s exciting stuff for a new blogger, and the exact kind of connection-building so crucial to gaining any headway in an internet already saturated with unique writers. And who knows? If I keep up the conversation, I might get to write a guest post for this popular blogger, inviting a big stream of readers right over to my site – proof, if nothing else, of how valuable social skills can be to the aspiring blogger.

You can’t do this alone, folks. But don’t let that get you down – you’re already well-equipped to rocket a blog to success, so long as you realize that some social support along the way will make all the difference in the world. Blogging isn’t a new game, but it is a different one, and honing your social skills right alongside your writing talent might just be the best ticket to success.

Has social networking changed your blogging for the better? What else do you do to push your blog to the top?

Image courtesy of katie_tegtmeyer.