The Importance of Social Networking

I’m more fortunate than many bloggers in that I was able to cultivate a very successful blog. Granted, I’m not earning thousands each month with it, but it’s enough for me to hire someone to help out and also put something aside to create other blogs. With a couple of thousand visitors each day, I do much better than most who blog about freelance writing.

I’m often asked how I built up my traffic, what methods worked for me. I always attribute my success to social networking. When I first began, I spread the word through various writing forums and traffic started to slowly trickle in. From there I began leaving thoughtful comments at other blogs. I didn’t drop links or get spammy, but I did enter my details into the signature line. Even more visitors stopped by. I began linking to other bloggers and they showed their love by linking to me in return. Soon I had 100 visitors, a couple of months later, 500. After about a year about 1000 people were visiting Freelance Writing Jobs and I was even starting to earn a bit from Adsense.

When I first began this blog, there wasn’t any Digging. Even then, my lists of job leads weren’t really Diggable anyway. My traffic mostly came by participating in forums and blogs for writers, work at home moms, freelancers and bloggers. The word spread because others began to consider FWJ an important resource for writers.

Nowadays I still visit the same forums and even more blogs. I also encourage others to network on my blog. I offer contests, such as the one going on now for the top commenter, and post a discussion topic every day. I made my blog a place for freelance writers to network. Now others come to my blog to socially network and drop their own links in the signature. As a result, I found some more cool places to go and share the link love. Many writers and bloggers now link to my discussion topics and it can get rather viral.

More than two years later I’m of the impression social networking is the single most important thing you can do to build traffic and create a buzz about your blog. Of course there are social media tools such as Digg and Stumble Upon to help you out, but many times they provide a one time spike in traffic. I’m of the impression that if you visit others, they’ll always return the favor, and if you provide useful input in forums, people will visit you often to see what else you have to say.