Atheist Revolution: Blogging Tip #14: Helping Your Favorite Bloggers

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Blogging Tip #14: Helping Your Favorite Bloggers

Image via CrunchBaseNiche blogging (e.g., the atheist blogosphere) depends on the strength of the overall community of bloggers and readers for success. Perhaps the most important truth about such a blogging community is this: Promoting other blogs benefits all of us. A stronger community yields more readers which in turn helps to drive growth of the blogosphere. In this post, I am going to give you some tips for how you can promote the atheist blogosphere as a reader.

You found a post on an atheist blog with an interesting-sounding title, so you visit the blog and read the post. You really like it, and you think that more people should see it. Here's what you do:

Vote the post up on Reddit - Atheism and/or Digg. This shows the blogger that his or her work is appreciated, makes it more likely that he/she will write similar content in the future, and makes it easier for others to find the post.
Submit the post to StumbleUpon. You are using StumbleUpon, aren't you? This brings the blog additional traffic and ensures that others will see this post.
Leave a comment on the blog. Sure, most of us like substantive comments more than the generic "great post," but this is actually easy to do. What was it about the post you liked? Now you have given the blogger something truly useful and perhaps promoted discussion in the comment thread.
Have your own blog? Consider referencing the post in a post of your own (with a link of course).

Niche blogging is highly reciprocal in that what we do for one tends to come back to us many times over. Strengthening our community is good for all of us. Fortunately, it is extremely easy for each of us to make a difference.