Building Followers

I have been blogging for a few years now, and I have noticed several trends in building followers. This being my newest blog, I thought that I would test out what I have known to be true in the past. You see, in the wonderful world of writing, I constantly hear that new bloggers need to optimize their blogs for SEO, that they need to spend hours researching keywords for their niche and load their blogs with them. But I have a much simpler method that has proven to be true in the past for me. Before I knew anything about keywords, or even the definition of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

So what is it?

Blog hops, meme's or parties, whatever it is you choose to call them. It's simply where lots of people get together and write about the same thing, and then share their posts with one another. When I had my homeschooling blog, I got pretty much all of my followers through things like those. That's where I built my audience for my other blog as well. You find meme's in your niche, participate, and people will come. I did notice a few memes that didn't work that way. The people didn't come, so I moved onto memes that worked the way that they were suppose to. You see, most memes require that you visit at least three other blogs that have been linked up. Some are more specific, saying that you should visit the three that linked before you, but not all. The joy of this is, that each week (or month) that they have the link up, more relevant traffic is being driven to your blog. If you have a good post, chances are that each week you will have at least one new follower.

How meme's don't work:

You don't just link and leave. If you take the time to write your post and link up so others can find it. You must take the time to visit some of the other blogs listed. It's also common curtsy to return comment love by following up on comments left on your blog by leaving comments on the author's blog.

You should never, ever link to a meme that you did not actually participate in. The only thing more frustrating to me then linking up to a meme and not having anyone stop by my blog was when I took the time to visit blogs that didn't write about the topic they were suppose to. Sometimes people would even link up when they hadn't written a post in over a month. I beg of you, don't do that. If you can't play by the rules, don't play at all.

Writing Meme's


While I'm sure that there are dozens of writing meme's out there in blogland, here are a couple that I know of that you could participate in if you wanted to:

MamaKat's Writer's Workshop
The II Writing Challenge

Christian Meme's

I don't know what genre of writing you do, but I'm a Christian author, therefore, I love Christian meme's. Here is a couple of my favorites:

Word-filled Wednesday
Thankful Thursday

Other Meme's

Works For Me Wednesday

No Ordinary Blog Hop

Do you know of any other great memes that you can share?