How to: Build a Large Blog Audience on MySpace Part 3

Part 1: Basic blogging concepts
Part 2: Basic page and blog design

Today I want to talk about the initial push to of getting your profile out in the MySpace blogging community. Getting your profile just seen by potential readers is an important first step, I would recommend doing this for the first two weeks of your blog life. Personally I think this is a good way to build a base with very simple techniques.

Join Groups

Getting your profile seen in various groups is a good way to start out, initially you should join all the blogging groups that you can find on MySpace. Here is a list of a few of the groups:

Bloggers Union
Bloggers for Blog Readers
Photography Bloggers
My Poetic Point of View
Edit Red Writers
Justice League of Super Bloggers
The Blogger’s Arms
Blog Hoppers
The Infamous Blogging Crew
Viciously Amusing Blogs & Bloggers
Bloggers&Blogphiles
Bloggers, Unite!

Also if you search for more groups via the MySpace groups page you should join other blogging groups as well as any groups within the genre you are writing. If you are going to write about politics, join large political groups, the same goes for any other subject you are writing about. Take the time and participate every couple of days in these groups, just to get your profile seen.

Spend more time in your genre though than the blogging groups, you want to get new people reading your blogs, not other bloggers. While some bloggers might help pimp you out to their audience, a lot of them are in the group for the same reason, to get exposure for their work. Focusing on your genre will be a better use of your time.
Look for blogs in your genre and comment them

You should be very active within the first few weeks you are on MySpace in the blogging community. Take the time to find other blogs that write about the same thing you do, try and find the more popular ones in your genre and begin to comment them. Go to the blogs menu on myspace and right next to the control panel is a green link that says “view most popular blogs”. From there use the subject category on the left hand side to narrow down to your genre.

Subscribe to these blogs and make sure you leave a comment on their latest posts, try to make sure you are leaving valuable comments that will attract people to your page. Be it something witty or useful information, providing good comments is a good way to attract attention to yourself and your work.

Participate in Forum Discussions in Your Genre

Take time to scope the forums on MySpace and participate in some of the forum discussions, it is a good way to pull different types of people to your profile. People go to MySpace for different reasons: blogging, forums, groups, profile stalking, etc. You want to make sure you cover all the bases and spend some time appealing to these different segments.

You don’t want to place all your eggs in one basket by just going after the blogging crowd or after people focusing on groups or people focusing on forums, a good split between the three is a good way to go. I would advise trying to spend 15 minutes a day going after all three segments for the first few weeks.

Next time: Converting other people’s readers into yours

Technorati Tags: myspace, blogging, building a blog audience on myspace, groups, forums, commenting blogs