How Humor Writers Can Build Up Their Blog Following

I’ve been a humor writer for over 15 years, a blogger for 9, and a social networking junkie for 3. It’s in the last few years that I’ve been really able to focus growing my non-print readership. Even though my print and Internet readership is over 30,000+ per week, I’ve spent a lot of my energies focusing on bringing readership to my blogs.

I belong to a community of humor writers called the NetWits. We started out as an email news group 8 or 9 years ago, and have grown into a community of more than 200 writers from around the world. This post is based on an article I wrote specifically for them.

There are three areas any humor columnist needs to focus on to improve their readership: their blog, their domain, and Twitter.

Starting your blog

If you’re not blogging, you need to be. It’s all well and good to send stuff out to an email list, but if you don’t have a web presence, you’re not going to get new readers.

1) If you’ve got the cash (and even if you don’t), buy your name as a domain name. You can get cheap domains at GoDaddy. for less than $10. And if you google “GoDaddy promo code” you can find a discount code that will save you about 25% on your purchase. I’ve bought domains for less than $7 before. You want your name as the domain name because you’re promoting yourself as the brand.

2) Host your blog on WordPress.com. They will let you “mask” your blog with your domain name on their server. Otherwise you’ll get http://erikdeckers.wordpress.com. The cost is $15 per year to do this. Once again, this will help you promote your name/brand in search engine marketing. (If anyone wants, I can teach you about search engine marketing too. Let me know.)

Twitter

I loooove Twitter for a promotional tool. For one thing, it’s a great way to communicate to people. For another, it helps you pick up readers. You can find people in your city, who share your interests, or who talk about certain topics. As far as I know, there are only three other NetWit Twitterers. (Does that make us NetTwits?)

1) Join at www.Twitter.com (use a non-work email. Get Gmail if you don’t have it.) You can follow me at www.twitter.com/edeckers.

2) Find people who live in your city at NearbyTweets.com.

3) Find people who share your interests at Twitterment.com. Search for keywords. For example, if you’re interested in restoring muscle cars, search for various terms your blog is about: muscle car, car restoration, mid-life crisis, “oh God, where did my youth go?!?!”

4) Download TweetDeck. It’s a Twitter browser, like Firefox is a web browser. You get Twitter messages from the people you’re following. You can respond to them right from TweetDeck. It’s a great way to keep track of your conversations. Do NOT use the Twitter.com page. It’s a royal pain and hard to use.

IMPORTANT NOTE: A lot of people will give up on Twitter just a day or two after they try it, because they don’t get it. You MUST STICK WITH IT!! Give it a few days. Give it 10 days if you can. Just keep TweetDeck open, and as you see a comment you want to respond to, respond to it. People will respond back. Once you get into some conversations, this becomes easy. Almost second nature.

Promoting your blog with Twitter

This is where it gets REALLY cool. Your followers will read your stuff if you’re interesting, AND you’ve been engaged in conversations with them. If all you’re doing is talking about your blog, you look like a one-trick pony, and they’ll get bored of you and never read your stuff.

1) Starting out, whenever you write a new post, copy the URL and paste it into the Shorten Tweet window of TweetDeck. Write something like “New humor post: The Problem with Apostrophes http://bit.ly/xRqm4″ That jumbled-looking URL is automatically created by TweetDeck. Your followers will read that tweet (a message is a tweet), and follow it. Boom! You’ve got a reader.

2) For advanced users, go to TwitterFeed.com and set up an account. You can have TwitterFeed visit your blog every hour, 2 hours, or even 5 minutes. When it finds a new blog post, it will automatically post it to Twitter for you. Then, you don’t need to take the extra steps of doing #1 above.

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