Bloggiesta Mini Challenge: Bring the Hits: Building a blog audience

Happy Bloggiesta!!!  (If you have not connected yet with Bloggiesta hurry over to the starting line now!)  This is going to be fun!  I hope everyone is ready to do some fun bloggish “to do’s” this weekend!  I know I am. 

My name is Sheila and I created this little world you are seeing here called Book Journey.  I started blogging in June of 2009 with a book review and no idea what I was doing.  For my Bloggiesta mini challenge I am going to give some tips I have learned along the way to help build an audience to your posts.

1.  So you have written what you believe to be an awesome post.  You hit publish and you excitedly await for people to visit and comment and join in your thoughts.  Everyone loves comments.  They are, as my friend Amanda said once, the bread and butter of a book blogger.  So knowing this, instead of waiting for people to find us, we should also be going out and finding them.  Set yourself goals – maybe visit 5 or 10 new blogs a day that you have not checked out before.  I find many new blogs to check out on the sidebars of the blogs I enjoy reading.  Visit.  Leave a real comment that would make that blogger want to see who you are and what you are about.  You may be surprised how many of those bloggers will come and see what you are blogging about right back.

In the early days of my book blogging, I visited and visited and visited… by doing this people knew I was out there, and many of my readers today have come from those early days.  Once you have them as regular readers, you tend to pick up some of their readers as well.

2.  So….. now you have people visiting, what are you showing them?  When the visitors come to your blog, you want to have your best post us front – after all, this is company!  😀  By saying the best post, I mean write posts that are informative or fun, whatever you are writing about.  Think about a first timer to your blog, is what you have written here going to cause them to follow you, or come back and visit again?   When I write a review that has a lot of passion for a book I really enjoyed or something crazy in my life, I want people to read it – laugh with me, share their thoughts with me – even be frustrated with me. 

3.  Blog layout.  Take a moment and look at your blog with an objective eye.  Does it have curb appeal?  Are the colors easy for visitors to read.  Is it easy to find where to comment?  Is the sidebar(s) if you have them, neat and current? 

The Mini Challenge

My Challenge for you , if you choose to accept it, is to go and visit 10 blogs today that are either new to you or you have not visited in a while.  Leave a good comment that contributes to the post.  Come back here and let me know in the comments that you did this and if you discovered a cool blog that you enjoyed and will probably check out again, let me know that as well.  You can enter this mini challenge once each day of Bloggiesta – in other words, you can visit 10 blogs or more each day of Bloggiesta and let me know each time here and I will enter you for each f the three days you participate.  Yes, up to three entries per person.  After Bloggiesta I will draw a winner using random.org for a $10 gift card to Amazon that will be emailed to you.  If the comments reach over 75, I will add a second winner of a $10 gift card. 

Throughout this weekend by doing the mini challenges you will find all sorts of awesome tips from some amazing bloggers!  Your blog can come out the other side of this weekend all shiny and new and tweaked to awesomeness!  Have fun!