Bloggers looking to retain followers and increase traffic need to know two main things:

• It’s all about networking
• Social media is your best friend

Networking

As mentioned in previous posts, one of the best ways to get links to your site is to build relationships with other bloggers.  Comment often on their blogs, email them, etc, and get them to link back to your site.  Creating an online presence adds to your credibility, and when you create a friendship, then you can get introduced to other bloggers who will also want to add you to their network.

Social Media

I’ve also discussed the benefits of using social media to promote your blog posts and drive even more traffic to your site, and how bloggers can do this by including those little “Share” icons at the end of a post.  These social media sites are great for reaching potential visitors that you otherwise might not have. People are interested in what their friends have to share.

How to Utilize them Both

There are a few widgets for blogs that actually help you do both of these things. Social media is already about networking online, so the two already go hand in hand.  But this widget* is an easy way to network not just with other bloggers, but with your readers well.  You can be connected with just a few simple clicks.

You can put a widget on your blog home page that allows visitors to connect with you on various social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, technorati, digg and LinkedIn, just to name a few.  This one in particular also has a link so readers can add a blog to their RSS reader (which I can say, from a perspective as a reader, is pretty awesome, since I like to use a Reader for all my RSS feeds, so I can read them all in the same place).

It’s always a great idea to cover as many bases as possible, as you don’t know what kind of reader will stumble across your blog.  It never hurts to be prepared for everything.  This type of widget easily allows readers to connect with you on whatever social media outlet they have, so they can easily follow your blog and anything else you might doing.

*What is a widget?

Widgets are small applications you can add to your blog home page. Typically they appear in the side bar.  They can perform any sort of function.  Check out some of your favorite blogs and take a look at what they have in their side bar.  They can be about anything, show anything and do anything.  You could have something that shows how many visitors you’ve had, or what you want for your birthday, a countdown to your birthday, a list of books you’ve read in the past month, or a list of your most recent posts.