How To Make ‘Friends’ & Influence No One – A Guide For New Bloggers
Every man and his dog will at some stage produce a helpful ‘how to’ guide for new bloggers. Titles will generally be along the lines of:
‘How I increased my traffic by 127,000% in just 4 days’
‘How I got more readers to my pigeon blog than the entire circulation of The Sun’
or ‘How you too can increase your Twitter followers by 1 million in 7 minutes’
Not one to shy away from bandwagons to jump upon here is part one of my super helpful guide for new bloggers. If you follow this guide you too can have a bog standard, barely viewed blog. Today we look at social media and the ways it can be used to get you ‘loads of views’ of your blog:
Making ‘Friends’ & Followers
Blogging is quite a social affair. At least it can be. I’ve made some good friends from blogging already and have the occasional chit chat with them. You can discuss things like how little time you have since you started blogging, how little sleep you get and how little success you are having. Quite inspirational.
You can also build up mahoosive social media followings full of strangers on Twitter, the majority of which have zero interest in you. Fortunately though you likely also have zero interest in them! Win win.
You may actually interact with 1% of them occasionally. 0.5% of them might even read one of your blog posts from time to time. The rest are just there, somehow managing to avoid any contact with you like a London commuter on the underground. So why did they follow you? Probably the same reason you followed them.
To save you some research time here are the main social media sites and how they can benefit you as a new blogger:
You can get lots of followers quickly, but almost all of them will ignore you. When you send a tweet it will appear on your followers’ timelines for 7 microseconds before disappearing forever. You need to tweet the same thing 7000 times per day for anyone to actually read it. But if you do that everyone will mute you. So they still won’t read it.
Twitter is good for reading snippets about what fun and developmental activities other parents have been up to with their little ones whilst you’ve been too busy on social media to do any of them with your own little ones.
If you enjoy being followed and then ignored by strangers and shouting repeatedly into outer space you’ll love Twitter.
If you set up a blog page you will get ‘followers’ at the rate of 1 per year on average. To further piss you off, Facebook have designed an algorithm meaning that it will only show your posts to your 2 closest family members and 4 random strangers in Asia. For £10 a day it might also show it to a further 4 random strangers in the UK. If it feels like it.
If you have a post that does well on Facebook by getting ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ your ‘reach’ will be high. While it looks nice, in reality it probably means that as opposed to normal days where your FB post has appeared on the feed of 4 people and only 1 has bothered reading it, today it has appeared on the feed of 400 people – and a massive 2 people have actually read it. So today 398 people have found it too shit to click on as opposed to the usual 3. Woo.
If you enjoy shit memes, virtually no followers and your posts being shown to no one and clicked on by even fewer you’ll love Facebook.
A site for posting photos of things. Useful if you really want a stranger to see what you had for dinner. Also useful for posting pictures of things from your latest blog post. Not so useful for getting people to read aforementioned blog post because you can’t actually put a link to it. It’s the equivalent of telling a friend you’ve found an awesome new bar but rather than telling them where it is you just vaguely point in its general direction.
To get anyone to see your photos you’ll need to put at least 1,000,000 hashtags in the description or first comment. #annoying #describe #every #single #pissing #detail #blog #funny #toddler #babiesofinstagram #hand #foot #sun #summer #flange #moist #squelch #hotwomeninbikinis #bradpittnaked #pleaselookatmyphoto #LOOKATME!!!! #LOOKATMYDINNER
If you enjoy photos of strangers’ dinners, gym photos, perfect parenting snaps and 50 random hashtags per post you’ll love Instagram.
Pin a picture from your latest blog post and a load of pictures from other things that look pretty and you might get a handful of page views over the course of the next 7 years.
If you love pictures of pretty things displayed in a grid so that you can only see half of each picture you’ll love Pinterest.
The Following / Unfollowing Game
If you like playing games and pissing people off this section is essential reading for you. To really get people riled up you must:
1. Follow lots of people on Twitter
2. Wait for them to follow you back
3. Unfollow them
4. If they subsequently have the audacity to unfollow you simply repeat steps 1-4.
Yeah you might get the reputation for being a massive wanker but you’ll end up with more followers who can then ignore your tweets. Well done. Give yourself a massive punch to the face as a reward.
Shouting At Strangers In The Street
Last up in our guide for new bloggers, if you’re not tech savvy, or if you don’t have the time or inclination to spend every waking hour glued to your phone / tablet / laptop / surgically-implanted retinal device you could also achieve similar levels of success by shouting your blog posts out in full whilst walking down the street. The benefit of this one is that you can do this whilst going about your normal daily activities. On the downside you may get a few funny looks, banned from shops and arrested. And the only followers you’ll probably gain are those in white coats running after you with a straight-jacket.
So there you have it. If you’ve made it through our super-informative guide for new bloggers you too are just 23 hours per day of hard work away from having a blog that virtually no one reads.
Best of luck on your journey to fame and fortune. This time next year we’ll be millionaires…
Guide For New Bloggers – More Amazing Resources
We hope you enjoyed our guide for new bloggers. For more blogging ‘help and advice’ check out our guide to Blogging Terminology Part 1 and Part 2!
Love you for writing this! As a new blogger iv read way too many of these kind of ‘helpful’ posts! I blog becaue i enjoy it, its not a career for me. Good work x
Yeah definitely should be fun and about the writing. Anything else is a bonus!
This is easily the best blog post I have read 😂
This is easily the nicest comment I’ve had!!
This is easily the best comment I’ve read 😂😂 Thanks.
Lol this is amazing!! So accurate 😀
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading!!
James this is amazing! Thank you for making me smile when I’ve had the shittest day ever. X
Love that comment! Thanks Laura – really appreciate it! 😘
Love this. What a ‘helpful’ post, had me giggling all the way through!
Steph
http://www.pricelesslifeofmine.com
Glad you took something useful from it 😂😂
The Instagram bit made me #rofl. Best thing I’ve read all day 😂
#glad #you #enjoyed #it
I LOLed at least 2.5 times reading this, well done.
0.5 of a LOL?! I’d love to see that 😂😂
Genuinely the funniest and most honest “how to do blogging” post I have read. Ever. #BloodyBrilliant :0)
I’ve just woken up my kids howling with laughter at this post. Thanks a lot. 😉
Apologies for any inconvenience caused 😂😂😂
That’s seriously the most helpful ‘newb blogger guide’ I’ve ever read 😀 hahaha
#flange
I will forever more use #flange on Instagram 😂😂
I. Am. Crying. Most useful blog post ever!!! Oh my good grief. You need to print and frame this (then take your own ‘advice’ and walk down your local high street shouting it out because EVERYONE needs to hear it. Blooming brilliant. Going to put it in my next #BlogStars edition
Wow that’s so lovely!! Thanks 😀
Haha brilliant. This made me chuckle, I needed this today
Glad you enjoyed it! Nearly the weekend…
This post is hilarious and made me laugh out loud! Brilliantly observed. Love the idea of shouting out one’s updates in the street haha! So perfectly absurd 😂
Thanks for the awesome comment! Street shouting is definitely the way forwards!
I thought my writing was fairly amusing, but having read this, I have decided that I’m not the least bit funny and shall be giving up on any attempt at humour in the future. Brilliant post. I hope there are further inspirational posts to come for us newbies?
Your blog is very funny actually!! I only get a short burst of inspiration every few weeks so I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for anything half decent until at least May now 😂😂
This is friggin genius! So true – I’m crying with laughter! xx #blogcrush
Really glad you enjoyed it!
Fantastically spot on. Never really understood Twitter, ‘success’ only happens when @’ing someone famous and hoping they’ll be bothered/humble enough to retweet you. Something about riding the coattails comes to mind …
Great post, and so true in many ways. Why do we blog at all really, who ever reads our posts? Where do they come from? I think I might just give up right now.
#BlogCrush
lol I loved this. I’ve been a blogger for over 7 years and it started very differently on the social media side back then. I’ve never thought of myself as being any good at it, so never wrote a how to do anything post. I do love twitter still and can be found chatting to myself over there. It is true, the whole follow unfollow thing is ridiculous and it seems like more social media channels pop up on a daily basis. Great post and very funny.
Hahaha!!! Completely hilarious and I couldn’t stop laughing. This has to be the funniest #DreamTeam post this week I am sure. The sad thing is, I GET this! Especially with Facebook. Three cheers if more than 5 people see a post! Thanks so much for linking up to the #DreamTeam x
So true and so funny! The million hashtags on instagram thing, that’s so me but half the time I have no idea why I’m doing it! I think it’s because a blogging tips post provably told me too. You have been linked to #BlogCrush by a fellow blogger..congrats xx #BlogCrush
Thanks Wendy! Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for hosting!
Pingback: So You Think You're Funny - Season 1 Finale - James From A Life Just Ordinary -