Experienced people need not apply

I have shamelessly caught both the blogging and twitter bugs and spent most of this weekend writing and following and learning (who says you can't learn from social networking sites). Anyway, I emailed all my friends and demanded they follow me or I would cut them out of my birthday list and then received this reply from my mentor Rachel - I think it's really good advice for first time bloggers and twitters. If you know all this stuff already you can fast forward and go straight to the comments section.

Anne

WAYS TO GET A BLOG FOLLOWING:-

Use the little 'chain' tool to link keywords to other people/sites in your blog posts, that way the authors of those sites get alerts and will come to your Blog and make their comment eg 'In looking into this I came across an interesting blog on alcoholism.' The more links you include and the more people that link to you the bigger your following will grow- Set up Google Alerts on all topics you are interested in. This sends you an email every time an article is published on that subject; you can then comment on it and link to it. Tip: make sure you use a specific search term or you will be inundated! eg I set up an alert for Dragons Den which provided lots of useful fodder for comments about the show.- Cover as many topics as possible and BE CONTROVERSIAL! eg my Obama & Bush Blog post was my most successful ever - it attracted something like 200 comments- That said, if the intention behind the Blog is purely commercial, I would suggest you focus purely on your art/art topics - look at what Hani O'Keefe is doing at http://wwwhaniokeeffeartistcouk.blogspot.com/- Shameless plug now... Get hold of the Marketing Magicians DVD and you can hear the story of Thomas Mahon from the horses mouth about how he went from not being able to afford a chinese takeaway to establishing himself as an international tailor with royalty as clientele simply through his blog English Cut Amazing stuff!

WAY TO GET A TWITTER FOLLOWING

I learnt this tip at Mark Attwood's SEO & Internet Marketing Clinic last Friday... Find people in your space (ie artists) and look at their followers - then follow them all! You will find many will reciprocate. I did this with 250 of Peter Jones' list of followers on Saturday and immediately picked up over 50 new followers. The downside is of course you get flooded with tweets !!! But you can then unfollow ones which aren't on topic.The great thing about getting a big Twitter following is when your book is published you have an instant market to buy itHope this helpsRegardsRachel