I don’t really like to spend blog time giving advice because advice can often be subjective, but I’ve noticed fellow bloggers out in the blogosphere struggling to receive more followers or struggling to receive quality followers who leave meaningful comments that allow a discussion to commence. Especially as writers it’s important we have quality followers because those are potential customers for our books. Here are some tips that might help:
1. Sell yourself first. I know I am more interested in you as a person than I am in your product, whatever that may be. I want to read about your life as it relates to your writing, or even just your writing in general. I am a very people person and just find people in general interesting. But you’ll attract more people to your blog with blog posts that aren’t trying to sell your product (and this includes excerpts of stories because we want to know the person’s life first before being interested in the story because it’s like, really, why should I stop and read your story on the internet when there are all these other blogs to read?).
2. Go to your audience. Don’t expect them to come to you. Your audience does want to know that you have a vested interest in them as people. They expect quality comments from you, intelligent discussion, as it were. Even if you tag all your posts and write hundreds of posts, that isn’t going to increase your following any more because people are going to wonder why they should care when you don’t take the time to care about them.
3. As stated above, when you engage in someone on their blog, make the comment about them, not you. Do not write the comment with the expectation that the person will follow back. Remember this person poured his/her heart into the post, and you want to acknowledge that with a strong comment that can start a good conversation.
4. Write strong posts yourself. Try to be original. I hate writerly advice posts. There are so many out there and it is all so subjective. I ignore those ones. My favorite writerly posts are from people who clearly love their craft and love to write about their struggles to publication, or their struggles with writing in general, or their triumphs, or even their experiences with the writing world. I love those kind.
5. Try to keep your posts short. If you’re going to make them longer than 500 words, start breaking them up with interesting pictures to re-claim your audience’s attention. Blogging is not article writing. Blogs are meant to be kept short and interesting.
6. Keep producing quality content and keep engaging your audience.
Hopefully some of these tips will help strengthen your blog so that you have awesome followers that you engage with and who engage with you. I know I appreciate all my followers!
amberskyeforbes.wordpress.com 
Very helpful blog post Amber. I think you are spot-on with these. What do you think is a good blog posting schedule? I tend to write longer posts but less regularly (once to twice per week usually), but not sure if shorter posts more often is better. In saying that, don’t want to bombard my followers with new posts daily either. I want to keep the quality there.
I think I will take on board breaking up longer posts though using pictures (maybe even bolding too).
I tend to blog twice daily, but you can blog twice a week and still gain a good amount of followers. Blogging twice a day just works for me because I have a continuous flow of viewers and the readers have a myriad of posts they can choose from. But it’s whatever you think is going to work for you, especially for your lifestyle. Me, I’m trying to build a fanbase ASAP because my publisher is thinking of a late summer release and I just started this website two weeks ago, so blogging twice is a day is a must for me.
VERY helpful. THANKS! Good point about going to your audience. I think if you are genuine and just enjoy writing it will show and eventually you will sell your book or gain lots of followers as a result.
Thanks for following my blog! I look forward to taking a look at yours!
*counting the rules he broke with just his last post* Well, I guess I could have broken more.
I’m still working on my social media skills. Kind of hard for someone who has questionable social skills in meatspace, but it’s my challenge to myself.
This is some good advice, I think. I might have to read more of your blog. 🙂
I just know a lot about blogging because I used to blog for my university and did some blogging for a teen section in my area’s newspaper. Art classes and my book production class helped too (in regards to making the reading of the text more attractive).