Become a Resource to the Mom Blogging Community

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

When you give something to the blogging community as a whole, the community will remember and reward you for it. Networking with other bloggers is the very best way to get yourself established when you first start blogging. This isn’t just important when you are first starting out, but it’s important for your entire blogging career. Networking is best achieved when you take the what-comes-around-goes-around approach.

What this means is that the more you freely share your expertise and knowledge in a genuinely helpful way, the more you will get known for it. This is easily accomplished by creating informational content such as tutorials, how-tos, and instructional or advice articles. But what if your blog isn’t that kind of a teaching blog? You can still give back and be a resource to your peers.

Link to newer bloggers.
Share your latest Etsy find.
Write guest posts on blogs where an informational blog post would fit in.
Make yourself available for questions and advice.
Be a connector and make introductions between people who have common goals.
Pass along recommendations and praise for people you admire.
Teach what you have learned about blogging at conferences and events.

A great example of this is Elise Bauer and her insanely successful Simply Recipes blog. Her recipes are, of course, a great resource, but that’s not the only reason she has such a loyal following. She has also created a valuable tool on her blog: a custom Google search box in which any visitor can search many other food blogs, not just her own.

Elise Bauer gives back to the blogging community with the Food Blog Alliance.

She also is one of the most popular recurring speakers at the BlogHer conference, where she gives workshops on building blog traffic and search engine optimization. And she even created the Food Blog Alliance, a community resource blog that shares knowledge, advice, and ideas among food bloggers.

With over 1.5 million RSS readers and ranking on page 1 for the highly coveted search term recipes, Elise doesn’t have to be so generous with her time, talent, and resources. But the fact that she does keeps her as a first thought when the community thinks of successful food bloggers, and has certainly contributed to her overall success.