five ways to use social media to grow your blogBlogging is easy. Getting people to read your blog isn’t. Thankfully, you don’t just have to sit, wait and hope people stumble across your work — the vast social sphere that is social media offers a number of ways to drive more prying eyes to your blog.

Promote It

Yes, this is the obvious one — no-one’s going to read your blog if you don’t get out there and tell people about it. Use bookmarking sites, Twitter and any other social media network you might be affiliated with to tell people about each new article you submit.

Monitor It

Social media monitoring tools such as Klout and Social Mention can not only help you to monitor how popular your blog is, who’s talking about it and what they’re saying about it — but it can also help you to learn what works. Social media monitoring tools can allow you to track what people are reading and what they aren’t. When you know what your most popular topics are, you know what you need to write more of.

Link to It

Linking to your blog helps in two ways — it helps you to move up the search engine rankings so that (all being well) at some point, readers will find you naturally. It also drives people to your site. As well as the classic social media networks and bookmarking sites, you can also utilise other blogs, forums and free article marketing sites. Read blogs on similar topics to your own and contribute to the comments. If for example, someone has written an article on how they don’t believe global warming exists and you’ve written an article on how you think it does — comment that you think it’s a really interesting article but you’ve written about your differing views and would love to hear what the blogger thinks (needless to say, use this to link to your article).

Learn from It

Social media can teach you a lot. Find out who the most successful bloggers are in your field of interest and research what they’re doing differently to you. Note down what they Tweet about and how they promote their articles. Look at the topics they write about, the stance they take on certain issues and their style of writing. However, this doesn’t mean you should just copy exactly what they do — remember that some of the most successful bloggers are the most original.

Socialise with It

At its core, social media is about socialising. So use it to socialise. Those ‘successful bloggers’ we were just talking about — communicate with them. If you say something interesting, they will probably say something back. Build a relationship with them and not only will you learn even more about what successful blogging entails but you might also find they promote your best articles for you (thus reaching all of their readership with your blog).

They might even offer you a guest blogging opportunity — a fantastic way to link build and drive more readers to your blog. However, liaising with celebrity bloggers isn’t the only way to secure guest blogging opportunities — try using sites like My Blog Guest to find high quality blogs that are looking for writers just like you to contribute.

Outsource It

If you simply haven’t got the time or inclination to promote your blog yourself, you could always seek the help of an online marketing company or social media agency to do it for you.