22 Dec
SITS
Everyone once in awhile I get a message from someone who wants to know how they can expose their blog to a larger audience. Comments are addicting, as any blogger knows, and for some their exists the desire to expose their work to a larger audience and gain an audience that can be interacted with. I completely understand this, as it’s you guys that make me love writing for That Wife so much! Think I would post daily if it weren’t for you? No way!
Unfortunately there is no secret/easy way to build up an audience base. Regular posting, well written posts, and consistent content are all essential if you want to grow outside your friend/family audience base. However, one of my craftiest e-friends, Jennifer (aka the bluebonnet bride I photographed) recently introduced me to a site that might help a few of you get a little bit of a jump if you’re looking for a larger audience and willing to put in some work to make it happen.
The site Jennifer introduced me to is called SITS which stands for “The Secret is in the Sauce”. Their motto is “The Secret to Success is Support” and that’s what this site is all about, creating a support network. From the Join Us page:
Welcome to the Sitstahood! We are a group of women bloggers dedicated to supporting one another by leaving comments. Lots and lots of comments.
Whether you are new to blogging and looking for blogs to read, or a veteran looking to expand your readership, a mommy blogger or a single gal, SITS is for you!
The steps for participating seem really simple (although they do take commitment as I said earlier):
1. Add their badge to your site
2. Check in daily
3. Comment on the SITS daily post and on the blog of the featured blogger for the day
A quick scroll through her archives has me thinking that Jennifer seems to average somewhere around 30 comments/post, but on the day she was chosen to be featured by the SITS site her comment count jumped to 169. As you might expect many of the comments are going to be quite fake, from people just trying to obey the “rules” and get their own feature eventually, but traffic is traffic and comments are fun to receive no matter how genuine they are. The biggest benefit to participating is that Jennifer had over 150 people view her blog who might never have otherwise. Who knows how many of them are going to keep coming back for her fabulous tutorials in the future?
I don’t use the SITS site, as That Wife is growing at a pace I’m quite happy with all on its own, but I thought that some of you (especially those of you who I know are working so hard to build an audience but not having the kind of success you would like) might be interested in looking into it.
Fellow photographers might want to look into the I Heart Faces network as I have certainly seen positive results from participating in their contests. Are there other support networks out there like the SITS site that you think fellow commenters might be interested in?
Also:
I'm a farm-raised almost-crunchy stroller-pushing picture-taking lifestyle-blog-writing gastronomy-obsessed divine-seeking thrift-store-combing cheese-inhaling pavement-pounding laughter-sprinkling lover of individuality and taking chances.
I started visiting and posting on SITs a while back. I find that there a lot of very interesting people there, and I’ve come across a lot of very heartfelt bloggers that love to network there. They are warm and welcoming, and I really enjoy that.
I joined CC Blogs (Christian Century) awhile ago, which has also introduced me to some great people.
My blog started as a journal for my spiritual and/or retreat leading musings, so I’ve tried to find places that would be a good fit for that. I found that the readers and friends I’ve found on CC Blogs are more apt to be my core readers than more broad based forums.
It’s hard narrowing down what groups to join, but I find the more specific you can be, the better. For me it’s tough since I’m not outwardly very Christian and tend to be more liberal than some religious bloggers.
But yes, SITs is great!!
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1Thanks for sharing, I’m definitely going to look into this!!
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2Hey Jenna, I didn’t even know you were reading!
Although you’re right, and I did receive some “fake” comments, I’ve found that a lot of visitors were very sincere and sweet. I actually received more than 600 comments that day on various posts, and gained over 60 new subscribers to my feed.
Networking sites like SITS can be whatever you want them to be. If you want to make new e-friends and find great new blogs, it’s so easy to do with a site like SITS. If you want to do nothing but follow the motions to generate more traffic, you could do that too. In the end, there’s no easy way to gain followers/subscribers other than to write content that grabs them and keeps them coming back. I could show my site to a thousand people, but if it doesn’t interest them, why would they come back for more?
I guess what I’m suggesting is a two-step process: 1) write great content that you are passionate about - it makes your writing interesting no matter what the subject, THEN 2) spread the word about your blog. I still believe in the old-fashioned, “leave a comment, get a comment” rule. If you are sincere and leave a kind comment for someone else, chances are they’ll return the gesture.
Congratulations on Baby, too!
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Jenna Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 1:28 am
Jenn, I most certainly didn’t want to imply that everyone on the site was fake (that would mean you are fake, which you are most definitely not!
)
Thanks for commenting and sharing a bit more of your experience. In the end when it comes to blogging, any kind of exposure is good exposure, and I’ve made so many online friends from people I commented on the blogs of!
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I just discovered SITS a few weeks ago. The “hi” or “yeah it’s Friday” generic comments irked me at first, but then I realized it was a sort of roll call to say that you are checking in. When they have a featured blogger of the day, I try to leave a genuine comment on content and in the past two weeks have already added one person to my reader after they were featured. Apparently (I haven’t been on long enough) they have posts about blogging and improving your blog.
Two questions - what do you (and commenters) thing about Blogher? Do ppl post on there too or use them for networking?
And finally, one of the things I’ve always liked about ThatWife is that it is uncluttered. I don’t like when I got to blogs that have 15 badges and 3 different sections of adds, and this and that and clutter everywhere - makes it hard to read. So the only thing that can be difficult about SITS is you need to add their badge. I had trouble figuring out how to do that so it didn’t clutter up my design. I wish I could make their badge yellow so it matched my design… but these mandatory badges (clutter) are one of my least favorite things about these blog networking sites.
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Jenna Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 1:29 am
To be honest I don’t understand Blogher. Maybe I just haven’t looked into the site enough? I see the ads and I hear about the conference but I really don’t get what it is.
I like my design (except for that awful header, I can’t figure out how to make it stretch across the top properly!) but someday I am going to have to do a redesign and add some ads. For the amount of time I spend on the site I need to start making some money!
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Jenn Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 7:19 am
Hey Jenna,
I recently redesigned my site myself, and it took forever for me to get the header right, but would you want me to take a look and see if we can make your header and nav. bar full page width? I’ve learned a little about CSS coding and might be able to help…
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Erin Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
You need to add some ads. That should definitely be a blog goal. With your traffic, it would be silly not to. And they wouldn’t be clutter, they’d be ads.
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This is a great suggestion! I’ve actually been thinking about this the past couple of days because it’s been driving me crazy that I post and get little to no response from even friends and family. That could say something about my writing, but honestly I’m not so sure. Mostly, I think people are just lazy. I agree with Jenn on the “leave a comment, get a comment”, but it hasn’t worked well for me so far with the people I follow. Now, I’m just ranting. Stopping.
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Jenna Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 1:31 am
I’ve found that I don’t get an increase in comments when I spend time commenting on the blogs of those whose blogs are bigger than mine, because they get lots of comments so they don’t have time to add more blogs to the list and spend time commenting. I confess I scroll through your posts, but like a lot of blogs, I never comment because I just don’t have the time! Maybe try finding people who are at a similar stage with you and you can grow together?
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Jenny Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 11:28 am
It’s understandable. Even if I have time, I can just plain be a lazy bum too. Haha. I’ve resolved to change that though and comment on as many as I can, since I’m able. I did join the SITS group just to see how it would go and I’ve already received more comments than normal, but it’s still at a sad rate. That’s a good idea though to get a group together of people who I know who are at the same stage. Maybe I can cultivate some kind of comment support group of my own. Oooo, what fun!
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