I’ve been trying to work out a pass it forward type of thing for promoting blogs. One idea was if your blog gets picked to get promoted, you’re honor bound to follow the blogs that were promoted before yours/alongside yours. (Unless you have some reason not to)
I’ve also thought about including a link to blogs that people should follow.
My only thing is that I hate promoting and being promoted because my opinions on a quality blog are going to be radically different than someone else’s. Not to mention I don’t have as many followers as people think I do (judging by the amount of messages I get from people asking me to promote them)
If you’re trying to get more followers, I have a few tips from personal experience.
- If your blog has a theme or you stick to guidelines with what you post, try finding other blogs with similar trends in content and ask them to check out your blog. Be kind. If you find yourself reposting everything that person does, don’t expect them to really follow you. I don’t really like seeing the same 4 images post on my dashboard all the time
- If you know anything about css or html, you could try your hand at designing a theme. DON’T take someone’s blog theme for your own and call it yours, but try taking elements from different themes you like and implementing them.
- Have a queue and keep it updated. If you’re posting constantly, that keeps people interested. I tend to unfollow people who don’t update often (why follow someone who posts once or twice a month?). Having a queue allows for you to constantly be posting, even when you’re not at your computer/device.
- POST ORIGINAL CONTENT. I can’t stress that enough. This doesn’t necessarily have to be your own, but post things people haven’t seen hundreds of time before. Sites to think about are flickr, deviantart, artwanted or others of community based pages. I don’t recommend weheartit as things posted there are rarely that of the creator and stealing art isn’t cool. If you post original content:
- If you do post art that is not your own, give it credit. Post the title and artist in the body post and put the original link in the content source.
- Tag the art appropriately! Keep in mind some tags are extremely popular so the things you post might get caught in the shuffle, the photography tag, for example, probably gets 10-30 posts a minute. Tags that are more specific might draw more people paying attention to your post and who might in turn reblog it as well as check out your blog.
- Keep track of where you got the art. If someone wants to know where you got a specific image, it’s nice to point that person in the right direct. Same goes for if an artist comes to you complaining about you posting their work. Take it down immediately and apologize. While it may not seem like piracy or anything illegal, there are licenses that prohibit the spread of works by the artist.
While it may seem going to every person who does promotions and asking for a promotion might seem like a novel idea, or reblogging all of those “reblog this to win blog of the x, y, or z” posts, people don’t genuinely like seeing them. If I go to someone’s blog and 40% of it is you trying to get more followers, I’m probably not going to follow you. This isn’t my unique opinion, as a lot of people feel the same way.
Hooray for a text post that started off as a few sentences and is now on its way to becoming a book.
