# Blog cross-promotion idea



## Chilari (Aug 15, 2013)

Quite a few of us having writing blogs or fantasy blogs, or a combination of both. Some of us even have links to one another's blogs in our sidebars. But according to my stats, these never get clicked.

I just read an article about recommendation sites. You know how when you've finished a movie on Netflix it recommends some others? And at the end of a post on The Mary Sue it suggests some more posts? Well, I want to do that. Now, I don't know if this can be automated and frankly, I don't want to automate it, I want it to be a community thing we choose to support, but here's what I propose:

Those of us with blogs post a list of blog posts we've published, with a brief summary of the content of the post. Once a few of us have done this, we can start reading each others' summaries and then, if there's something there relevant to or related to one of our existing blog posts in the lists of others' posts, we add at the bottom of the blog post "Related: [link] (by [author])".

So I've got a Show vs Tell piece on my blog. I might therefore in the related section at the bottom link to three other bloggers' Show vs Tell articles. I've got a post about why monarchies are so popular in fantasy, so I might link to a post by one of you listing the five coolest monarchs in fantasy novels, or one looking at fantasy novels with other forms of government.

What this will hopefully achieve is to give mutual support between us writers with blogs where we share our readership and promote one another passively. It also provides lots of cross-links which, if I recall how these things work correctly, will boost our Google search rank or something.

So who's in? And does anyone know of some software or a website we can use to organise it?


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## wordwalker (Aug 15, 2013)

Promising! I'm in.


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## Asterisk (Aug 15, 2013)

I would absolutely _love_ to do this, but I don't have a writing blog, just a singing blog.


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## Chilari (Aug 15, 2013)

Asterisk said:


> I would absolutely _love_ to do this, but I don't have a writing blog, just a singing blog.



Then maybe try and find some singing bloggers to do it with?


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## Steerpike (Aug 15, 2013)

I like the idea. I wonder if you could do it with a social media platform like G+? I noticed there is an experiment going on there where a number of bloggers with good followings are moving their activity to G+ to see how it works out.

Personally, when I had a Wordpress blog it had little activity, and not many page views. On G+ I'm pushing 800 followers, which isn't a whole lot relatively speaking, but I find that sometimes people in my stream who have thousands of followers will share one of my posts. 

So my question is this - for those of us using something like G+ instead of a traditional blog, could we participate as well? For example, you link to certain posts that you recommend. In our posts, we link to other G+ posts or blog posts that we recommend?


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## Asterisk (Aug 15, 2013)

I've been looking, but I prefer to use my time in the writer family.  I'll see what I can do!


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## Chilari (Aug 15, 2013)

Steerpike: I don't know how G+ works - like whether I can read stuff without logging in like you have to on Facebook - but potentially, I don't see any reason why it should be excluded. I don't see this as a Wordpress project but rather as a cross-platform project.


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## Steerpike (Aug 15, 2013)

Chilari:  For anything that has been posted publicly by a user on G+, you can link to it and/or read it without being logged in. I think it offers a much faster way to build an audience than a traditional blog, so I'm going to focus there. May go with a traditional blog at some point too, though. Or combine the two, and have a traditional blog with the posts linked to my G+ stream.


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## shwabadi (Aug 15, 2013)

Sounds like a great idea! Not that I have a blog, but it would be useful for the reader as well as the writers, I think


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## Chilari (Aug 17, 2013)

I've made a start on the system using a wikia site, so we can all add to it, but I'm not sure it's quite what I was looking for. Please add to it with your own blog posts under relevant headings and pages, and if there's not a relevant page, please add one. At the moment I'm using pages for overarching themes and headings followed by bullet lists with links for more specific topics - so I've made creative writing advice and technical writing advice, where technical is things relating to things like grammar, show vs tell etc, and creative contains topics like cliches and protagonists. However, as this grows I think it will need to change to more specific pages like characters, settings, etc, and use categories for the broader topics.

The wikia is here: Writing and Fantasy bloggers network Wiki

So go ahead, add pages, edit pages, move things around, link your relevant blog posts under whichever topics work. And I'll keep doing the same.


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