When you first start a new blog, and no one knows about it, it can seem a thankless task crafting beautiful blog posts. Having no-one to read them but your mother and your cat, let alone throw you the life line of a nice psot comment is a hard feeling, that is why so many blogs are started then dropped after a few months.
Here’s a little tip there are seams of readers on twitter always on the lookout for new content just waiting to be mined
What is Twitter Mining
It’s about looking for places on twitter where large numbers of potential readers congregate. It’s about knowing who is big in your niche with lots of followers and then introducing yourself to these people.
You introduce yourself by following these people.
Here’s An Example
I write about the blogging niche, with a particular bias towards WordPress. I know who the big people in my niche are, they write about similar things to me, so I would go to their followers page, this is the seam. As an example the Darren Rowse from the Problogger site’s followers can be seen at:
http://twitter.com/problogger/followers
Look at the people there, check out their profiles, see what they are tweeting about and if they look like a good match for what your blog is about follow them.
There will be a temptation to follow thousands of people, but my advice is to only follow a few and build a real rapport with these people. This is far more likely to make them loyal readers. A thing to note if you start to mass follow you will be marked as a spammer.
Once you have followed someone, there will be an inital sizing up of you to see if your are worth following back, so make sure you are adding value to twitter whilst you are mining for new readers.
Follow is Like A Handshake
You may think this seems a little spammy, but as the great Gary Vaynerchuck says “It’s not stalking it’s a darn handshake” http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/78972633/its-not-stalking-its-a-darn-handshake. A follow is like shaking someones hand and having some small talk, if you are interesting (in your tweets and blog content) the converstation will become deeper.
Building on The Follow
Once you have followed someone, you may picque their interest. They will visit your twitter profile.
Make sure you are linking back to your blog from your profile. I recommend that you link to a sneeze page on your blog rather than the front page of your site.
A sneeze page is a special page on your site which tells new visitors what your blog is all about, in that hope that they will be propelled deeper into your site like a sneeze.
Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote an excellent article on a sneeze pages at, something that will propel people deeper into your blog archive http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/04/23/create-a-sneeze-page-for-your-blog/
You can see the page I link to from twitter at wpdude.com/welcome, note I don’t advertise this along the top navigation of my site, this is not for everyone only people coming from other social media sites.
Start Mining
Grab your miner’s lamp, heft your pick and shovel and go looking for those readers, they are unlikely to come to you when your blog is a fledgling.