Many bloggers use social media to drive traffic to their website.
For the first few month’s of a blog’s life, before Google has brought your blog into it’s loving embrace, social media traffic may be the only significant source of traffic that you have.
Social Media Needs Plenty of Content
Social media accounts need content posting on them regularly in order for them to attract readers and grow.
No-one wants to listen to you or to me banging on about themselves all the time, or churning out only their own work.
So an important part of maintaining a truly effective social media account is content curation.
In other words, collecting, promoting and sharing other people’s stuff.
Blog post distribution
Finding great stuff to share can be both fun, and a challenge, but that challenge is made a little easier by a great feature that all blogs share in common
Material posted on a blog has the capacity to be automatically distributed. This is what sets a blog aside from all other types of web page
Blog posts are stored in a database that can be accessed by software with the capacity to distribute it’s contents.
There are three key ways in which blog posts can be distributed
- On a blog page
- In emails
- In an app
Blog pages
Blogs are websites with blog page where blog posts are fed into the page in a continuous stream from the most recent posts at the top. On many blogs this is the homepage of the website, but it doesn’t have to be.
You can read more about different types of blog in this article
Email distribution
Blog posts can also be distributed by email to readers of the blog.
This involves using an email distribution service such as Aweber, or Mailchimp, and giving your readers plenty of opportunity to subscribe to your email list
But there is another way.
Feed reading apps
Blogs can also be collected and arranged by any app that can read your blog feed. There are a number of apps available for this purpose, and one of them is Bloglovin.
We’ve been using Bloglovin for a while now, and we really love it. It works on your desktop, phone or tablet. And it’s free.
The Bloglovin interface
Bloglovin allows you to follow other blogs. It then displays excerpts (and an image) from each of the blogs you follow on your Bloglovin feed
The Bloglovin interface is easy to use, the latest post from your favorite blogs are displayed down the left-hand side of the page – most recent first.
There are some limited choices as to how these blogs are displayed.
You can sort your blogs into groups too.
We have a group for blogs about pets, a group for blogs about blogging, and for our twin blog case study, we added a group for blogs about crafts.
On the right-hand side you have the controls for choosing groups to display in your feed, adding new blogs and so on.
Our Bloglovin routine
Each morning we open our Bloglovin app and click on each group in turn.
We select some of the blogs that have been published overnight, these open automatically in another window if you click on them.
If we are happy with the content, then we add them to our social media scheduler which is called meet Edgar.
What sort of content should you curate?
When you share content created by other bloggers, it needs to be quality, interesting stuff too.
Not just any old rubbish.
And that means keeping up with what other people are posting and writing about in your topic areas, on a daily basis.
Over time, you get to know who is posting the best quality work, and you’ll be able to unfollow blogs that rarely meet your standards
Limitations of Bloglovin?
In theory you should be able to add a blog that Bloglovin doesn’t recognise when you search for it.
In practice, if it isn’t in Bloglovin’s list, adding it tends to bring up an error message. This is probably because the blog in question has a problem with it’s ‘feed’
It doesn’t happen too often
I’d like to be able to have a more list-like display of blogs with smaller images so I could see more of them at once, but apart from that, Bloglovin is a pretty good feed reader, and we’re happy with it.
Other feed readers?
How about you? Do you use a feed reader app? If so, are you happy with it?
Share your opinions in the comments box below
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