Nigerian Entrepreneur

As a newbie blogger, it is natural that you may have little or no audience with the big shots in your market niche. 🙁 Instead of running around the big shots trying to catch their attention you will be better off building relationship with your peers 🙂 . Start making friends with bloggers who are newbies like yourself, they are in need of friends just like you, so you will not need so much effort to catch their attention. They tend to be more friendly and willing to reciprocate love.
When I first started blogging (Saved By Jesus), I wanted desperately to establish links with well known bloggers. I embarked on what is commonly refer to as “bootlicking”(I visited the famous blogs daily, and put so much effort in dropping quality comments in a bid to catch the attention of the blogger). After some months, I got angry because all the effort brought no result whatsoever. Later, I read some tips given by Yaro Starak, I applied it and lo and behold, I discovered that it works. Now I have friends online who relate to me as their peer. They show me so much respect. Every visit I make to their blog is reciprocated eventually, if not immediately. And you know what, the circle is growing. I even have someone who wants me to be his mentor (quite interesting, considering the fact that I am a newbie myself) 😉 .
Networking is all about building relationships that promote friendship, confidence and loyalty.

Here are some suggestions on how you can build your own network of online friends/business associates:

1. Write down what your goal is. What kind of online friends or business associate do you want to have in your network? What niche do you intend to focus on? The more explicit your goal is, the better.
2. Draw up a plan on how you will go about building your network, one step at a time. If I may suggest, start from those who visit your site and drop comments. Reciprocate by visiting their blogs and drop quality comments. Be genuine in your effort to contribute to the progress of their blog. (Do not ask for anything in return, give first, the reward will eventually come without your asking).
3. Distinguish yourself from the multitude. Let your blog be focused. You will find it difficult to establish quality relationship with fellow bloggers if they cannot easily distinguish your blog from the millions of blogs existing online. While it is okay to have diver interests, you need to concentrate on one of them per blog. That will give you a definite identity (anyone visiting this blog knows within a few minutes that it is not about Pets – even though I have a pet and I love my pet)
4. Treat your friends the way you will love to be treated. Put much effort into contributing sincerely to the progress of their sites. Give useful tips and suggestions. Compliments their effort and politely point out their errors. Put them at the top of your priority list.
5. Try to connect friends with similar interest together. This will strengthen your network.
6. Limit the number of groups that you belong to. This is to ensure that your effort at building a quality network will not be watered down. It is better to start with just one or two groups first. At present, I concentrate my effort on just two groups.
7. Be persistent, be patient. Concentrate on the long-term result you will get if you do not give up. Do something daily towards the building of your network.

Please note that I am not advocating a closed group (some sort of cult). Members of your network should be free to join other networks. It is by so doing that they will even have positive contributions for the network. See you at the top.

Tags: Blogging, Tips & Tricks

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 6:25 am and is filed under Blogging, Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.