31 Jan Are You Getting Tumbleweeds on Your Blog Posts?

Have you ever written about a topic with authority that your ideal readers are dying to know more about?

Even though you may contact all of the top players in your industry pointing them to the post, no links come back to you. No replies from those you emailed. You receive hardly any clicks on your post.

Your posts are skillfully crafted and offer a great angle. So why isn’t anyone reading them?

Is content really king like everyone says? We are led to believe that if we produce a truly great piece of content, we’ll get all the links we could ever hope for.

That used to be the case! The Web used to be a fairly uncluttered place compared to what it is now, and it was easier for people to notice great blog posts.

And now?

Now great is no longer good enough. There really is so much remarkable content that bloggers don’t have enough time to read it all, much less link to it.

If you want links now, you need to be more than great. You need to be connected.

It’s not what you know… it’s…

…who you know. Sort of.  Bloggers link more often to their friends than anyone else. If you write a reasonably good piece of content that interests their audience, they’ll link to you, mainly because they like you.

The secret to building a popular blog isn’t just writing great content. It’s also having well-connected friends.

How do you get connected? Here are a few ideas to get started:

• Write a guest post for another blog that receives a lot of traffic and comments
• “Vote” for any posts that others in your industry are pushing on social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
• Post an interesting question on a relevant LinkedIn group and spark a discussion
• Leave unique and memorable comments on other blogs
• Interview other experts in a post or a podcast
• Give first

The biggest key is finding ways that you can be genuinely useful to others in your industry; make yourself relevant and then use that opportunity to start building a relationship.