Managing Your Time

Blogging and social networking do take a commitment of time. To be effective you really need to be posting and interacting with your communities at a minimum of once a week. I have read that every-other-day is optimal. I'm still working on that.

For efficient blog reading, you'll want to set up a blog reader which will "collect" all the latest posts from the blogs you follow into one place where you can scan through them quickly. I use Google Reader Feedly, though others are available.

I have a filter set up on Google Reader Feedly to group my favorite blogs together. I "follow" hundreds of blogs. Obviously, I'm not able to keep up with reading that many. When I log on to Google Reader Feedly, I first read through the recent posts on my favorite blogs. (My favorites include blogs of personal friends, family, and a few that I read regularly just because I find them especially helpful or inspiring.) When I have time I scan through posts on other blogs I follow. You can also set up your filters to sort the blogs you following into categories-- so you could group all the homeschooling blogs together in one group, and maybe another group would be homemaking blogs, or gardening blogs, or whatever you are interested in.

Linking Your Blog to Other Social Networks

Related to building a following, I have found it helpful to have my blog linked to other social networks. Every time I post on my blog, both Twitter and Facebook automatically announce my new post. Many, many more people are hanging out on Facebook and Twitter than are going around reading blogs, so that garners more readers for me than if I just depended on my blog followers alone.

My first recommendation is to sign up for Networked Blogs and have it linked to your Facebook account. You can then set it up to feed to your blog's Facebook page (if you have one) or your personal Facebook page. It usually posts title, the first picture, and the first few lines of text from your post. I have found that often people will leave a comment on Facebook instead of my blog, so be sure to follow up on those comments, too.

You can also set up a TwitterFeed account to have your blog posts automatically feed to your Twitter account. This posts the title of your blog post and a link. Use catchy titles. I've noticed in my Feedjit box that Twitter does bring in readers.