Creating a Following

In order to promote my blog (besides sharing with my proud parents…) I did a number of things:

• First, I added gadgets to connect it to some of my profiles and allow people to easily share. I have “Follow Me on Twitter” and “Tweet” buttons and Facebook “Like” and “Share” buttons for my overall blog. I also added coding that will add a “Like” button to the end of all of my posts in addition to the automatic share buttons that the Blogger Platform makes available for each post.

• Second, I created 2 pages to help build an online presence for my blog on Facebook and Google+. By inviting my friends to ‘like’ and ‘join’ these pages, it created a lot of traffic for not only those pages but also my blog.

• Finally, I used Twitter Feed to automatically feed my blog posts to my Twitter Account and Facebook page. This will be a convenient tool for me so that I don’t have to manually share my new posts on all of my various social media sites. I couldn’t, however, find a way to automatically feed my blog posts to my Google+ page (I saw that option isn’t available yet without combining my Google+ and Blogger profile, something I didn’t want to do).

Using these tools to promote my blog was so fun – I’ve even felt a little addicted to checking and hoping for an increase in my follower and page view numbers ever since!