If you want to increase your influence as a blogger, you have to make sure people know about your blog.

A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. Matthew 5:14-15

When you promote your blog to others, you are setting it up as a brightly lit city on top of a hill, making sure it can be seen for miles. You are placing it on a stand and removing the shade so that the the whole room is illuminated.

Put Your Blog on a Stand. You can put your blog on a stand by letting the world know about it. The world is a really big place, so I recommend that you start with your personal network of connections.

You may want to wait until your blog has been active for a few weeks, or you may prefer to let your friends and family know about your blog right away. Once you decide to go public, my advice is to use every possible method you can think of to let others know.

In the next few posts of this series, I will share several ideas you can use to make sure your blog is visible to the people in your personal network. For today, I will start with one suggestion. I will follow up with more in the coming days.

Facebook

If you are not on Facebook at all, or not actively relating to people there, this may be the time to increase your involvement. Start by connecting to as many people as possible: the friends you went to elementary school with, the colleagues from your first job, people  you know now, local friends and friends far away. Become friends with as many people as you possibly can. Spend as much time as you can looking for connections and getting reacquainted with people.

Maybe you’re already an active Facebook user with a long list of friends. If so, you have likely spent a lot of time there playing addictive games reconnecting with friends from different stages of your life. You may be friends with people you see every day and friends with people you have not seen in 30 years. Some connections are strong, while others are weaker.

Any or all of those people may enjoy your blog. So, share about your blog on Facebook. And, don’t just share about it once — post about your blog routinely. People may not visit Facebook as regularly as you do, and they probably don’t read ALL your updates. By continuing to talk about your blog, you will increase the likelihood that people find out about it.

You may even want to start a fan page so that the people in your life who are most interested in your blog can connect to you there. When you give them a chance to like your page, you allow them to raise their hand and self-identify as people interested in what you have to say. Once they do that, you can make sure that you communicate with them even more frequently as you share each new post on your fan page.

I hope you will reflect on these questions. Answer here, in the comments, or answer in a post on your blog and link in the comments here so we can all learn from your ideas.

How visible is your blog to your personal network?

Do you use Facebook to promote your blog? If not, what concerns do you have about using Facebook?

What questions do you have about using Facebook to promote your blog?