I have been building up a bit of a following on Facebook to one of my pages. It's in the politics niche, and I've noticed this is easier to do than in others such as online marketing. Political Facebook page likers are extremely engaged. I think this has much to do with the subject being so emotional.

And just as they are very engaged, they are also very loyal. Quite a few of them keep coming back and commenting regularly. So of course I've got to keep them happy by acknowledging their input, showing that I appreciate it. 

This can be tricky sometimes because of course I don't agree with everything they say. And they can be offensive at ties. For example, this page is critical of political correctness, including false accusations of racism. But I'm certainly not advocating real racism! On the contrary, I find it utterly abhorrent.

But every now and then one of the page's fans will say something that is in itself borderline racist! Thankfully, they haven't gone over the line, requiring me to delete the comment. But they do occasionally write things that make me roll my eyes. 

Hard to know what to do when situations like this arise. I don't want to scare them away. But then I don't want them to keep pushing the envelope and end up posting vile stuff that basically abuses my effort in creating and updating the page, either. 

Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. If it happens again I might add a post asking people to restrain themselves a bit ...

In any case I'm glad I've got this page going and building a bit of momentum. It's taught me heaps apart for anything else. 

The best way I've found to get new likes for it is to log in as my page and then contribute to other popular pages in my niche. As long as I keep commenting thoughtfully on their updates and liking them from time to time I find the new likes for my page trickle in. 

I think repetition and consistency are crucial here. The trick is in constantly appearing in front of that audience. And you must always add value. After a while that page's fans start to think, oh there's that guy again. They read your comments and if they're consistently interesting then they'll keep an eye out for you. Sooner or later some of them look at your page and a certain proportion are sure to end up liking it.

So, you've really got to see this as a long term activity and just keep at it. This goes for Facebook pages in all niches of course ... I think the mistake a lot of people make is they go hammer and tongs at it for a few days and get nothing. They decide that maintaining a Facebook page is just not worth the effort and give up entirely.

It's taken me a while, but I'm getting into the habit of writing blog posts with subheadings. It doesn't come easy to me, though! This is because I started out blogging about politics and still spend a lot of time writing in this niche. And if you look at blogs focused on this subject and related ones they very rarely use subheadings.

Basically, in blogs like these you tend to elaborate on a point, investigating its nuances at length. It's like writing a newspaper column. You'll tend to include lots of text with long paragraphs that are not separated by subheadings. 

They save time 

But marketing and business blogs have a different requirement. Readers are often time poor, and are looking for useful key points and insights that they can implement immediately. So they want to be able to scan content easily. Therefore a chunky, punchy style is much more suitable.

They aid selling

And it has real benefits if you're using your blog to sell products and services. In that case you'll want to make your posts not just verbally compelling but visually so as well. Subheadings, along with bolded and italicized sections, bullet points and the like can give a blog a much more striking, lively appearance.

They improve clarity

Just as this style is appreciated by readers, it also has advantages from a writing perspective. If you use subheadings, they make you think about what each part of your post is really getting at. So they help you improve post clarity. 

They suggest other ideas

Subheadings can also help generate other ideas. If you look at several subheadings, the list will often suggest related concepts. You can include those in the post. So subheadings can help you expand a short basic post into something longer and more substantial, without any fluff.

If you have a blog it's very easy to get obsessed with the mechanical, technical aspects of traffic generation. You find yourself constantly thinking about backlinks, keywords, anchor text, and Alexa ratings etc. Odds are you'll also be checking your stats regularly, wondering how to lift those visitor numbers. These activities can take up a lot of time and make blogging seem like hard work!

It's important not to fall into this trap. It is putting the cart before the horse.

If you focus on what you enjoy, then follow that, it's a much more pleasant approach. And you end up with better results in the long term. (Well, perhaps that's not entirely true. You do have to promote your blog to some degree, particularly on social media. But you should try to keep that enjoyable too. Ease up if it's becoming a chore!)

You can find enjoyment in writing your posts, of course. You can also do this when reading other blogs, and commenting on them. 

As any blogger knows, comment backlinks have long been a ranking factor. Even though most of these are set to "nofollow" by default, having a lot of them linking back to your domain still seems to help with SEO. So a lot of bloggers continue to spam the crap out of squillions of blogs, or pay others to do this. This doesn't work nearly as well as before, and can result in the linked to site being penalized. Yet it still happens a lot. That constantly amazes me!

Really, it's so much better to forget about the link you're getting when leaving a comment. Do it because you like the content and have something interesting to add to it. 

Rather than think "I should do some commenting" go looking for blogs in your niche that you'll enjoy reading. If you find ones that are stimulating, informative and interesting then commenting will just come naturally.

You'll write much better comments because you've got the right attitude. And the odds that you'll strike up a friendship with the blogger go way up. If they develop these relationships can be enduring and keep delivering benefits indefinitely, particularly if the blogger is influential. 

They'll link to your blog in the body of posts from time to time. Or they'll share your content on social networks. SEO benefits aside, their endorsement of you will be seen by others, and add credibility and authority to your name. 

Blog commenting remains one of the best ways to forge meaningful connections with influencers. But this will never happen if you're just doing it for the backlinks. Do it because you genuinely like to read them. If you have this intention it will be much more pleasant, as well as beneficial over the long term. 

It's been well established that certain tactics on Twitter result in more retweets. One of these is simply to ask for them. Do that, and you're sure to get some people who will oblige. 

So it's definitely worth a shot. But I wouldn't overdo it. You'll could easily across as being too demanding then. 

The reason I've come to this conclusion is because there is one blogger in my network who now includes the request in pretty much every single tweet he sends out. It's just so tiresome. And it makes me feel resentful and annoyed. Frankly, I'm even thinking of unfollowing this guy. And that's saying something because he is a good blogger. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thinking this way ... 

The reason I find it so annoying is not just that it's so predictable. It seems to fly in the face of the whole spirit of Twitter. The microblogging site is all about freely helping and informing others.

Sure, everyone is on there to promote themselves, a businesses or a cause. But the best way to do that is to be as generous as you can. Give without expectation of reward, and it will all come back in spades. So if someone is always asking for something from his followers, it really stands out. 

That's not to say you shouldn't ever ask for retweets. Like everything, moderation is key. Just include this request from time to time. Then it will not seem onerous, and people will be happy to oblige more often than not.