Welcome to day 6 of Start Your Own Blogging Business! Prior to today’s lesson, we’ve been doing the heavy lifting of creating a blog. So far we’ve discovered our niche, found our domain and set up hosting. From there we installed WordPress and chose a theme. We also created our social media sites and designed them to look like our blog. Yesterday, we learned a little about SEO. Now, things start to get fun. Today, we’re going to Get Social!

As always, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments or post your questions in the Facebook group. If you haven’t already joined the Facebook group, please do so you can participate in the community.

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**Disclaimer**

There may be links in this blog post, some of them might be affiliate links for which I earn a small amount if you click on them, a really small amount it turns out. Still, full disclosure and all that…

Followers

Today it’s all about growing your audience. Thankfully, many platforms have a feature that helps you do just that. On Facebook you’ll find this feature under Community on the right hand side as you scroll down a bit. Click the button and it will invite your friends to like your page. This is a great place to start because your friends are likely to ‘like’ you page which gives the page a nice boost of activity.

Twitter has the same kind of feature, also located on the right of the screen (usually under Trending) called ‘Who to follow’.

After I’ve used these features, I like to start following people who are in the same niche. Doing a search will yield all kinds of people to follow who are in the same niche as you. Start following people you like and they will usually follow you back.

Tools to Gain Followers

Following people individually can be really time consuming, especially when you start engaging with them and you lose all track of time because you’re discussing the pros and cons of mask wearing for dogs. Thankfully, there’s a tool you can use to get your tweets and updates out to all of your social media outlets – Hootsuite. Hootsuite puts all of your social apps in one place so you can easily schedule your posts and respond to those who have engaged with you. You can share others’ posts (highly recommend this) and catch up all in one place.

There are other tools that you can use, but none that have been around as long as Hootsuite. You’ll need a large following to be considered for many affiliate programs and sponsored posts or campaigns so cultivating and growing your followers is an important part of blogging, especially if you want to make money from blogging. Thankfully, there are many ways you can encourage people to follow you.

Plugins

Be sure you’ve installed a social sharing plugin like Shareaholic. This plugin makes sharing your content really simple. It adds the option to share your content to any of the social media platforms you belong to. You can see them at the end of this post where it says: Share this story. When other people share your post you gain new readers and those can be turned into new followers.

Ask

It’s about the most simple thing and yet bloggers often forget to simply ask their readers to follow them. Ask your readers to follow you on all your different social media platforms.

By now you should have started writing some content on your blog. Go to the Facebook group and post a link to one of your posts. Ask other members of the group to click on the link, leave a comment, and follow you on your platforms. Be sure to do the same for them. When you’ve commented and follow someone leave a comment in the thread that you’ve done so.

Freebies/Giveaways/Lead Magnets

We’ll be talking about Freebies, Giveaways and Lead Magnets in much more detail in a couple more days, but you can incentivize people to follow you by having contests, doing giveaways, and highlighting other blogger’s content.

Blogging is all about community. If you support other bloggers they will support you.

If you have any questions about today’s lesson, please feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below, on the Facebook page or you can email me directly at jen { at } redheadranting.com (use the @ sign and no parentheses or spaces).