“Social proof” is the idea that people look to others for cues on how they should behave. Using a virtual assistant to leverage social proof is a powerful way to increase the popularity of your blog. Once that happens, social proof will take care of itself (popularity breeds more popularity) but getting the ball rolling can be tricky. What follows are 4 ways social proof can increase blog readers and how your virtual assistant can help you get it done:
1: RSS subscribers:
If someone comes to your blog and sees that you have “2″ rss subscribers, they will be much less likely to subscribe to your feed than if they saw that you have “21,436.” If they see you have very few subscribers they think, “Well, if no one else see value in this blog, maybe I don’t either…” If they see you have many subscribers, they think, “Wow, I must be missing out on something.” If your blog doesn’t have many subscribers, it may be a good idea to not display the number of subscribers until it naturally builds to some number greater than one or two hundred.
Task for VA: Sign up for a Feedburner account and install a plug in that places social media chicklets after each post.
2: Commenting:
There is another indication of the number of people reading your blog that may have an even stronger pull than the number of subscribers and that is the amount of comments your posts are receiving. This is an indication, first, that people are reading your blog and second, and perhaps even more important, that after they have read it, they have found the content noteworthy, interesting, and/or provocative enough to take the time to write out a comment.
This is where a virtual assistant can be a lot of help. By posting comments to your blog, they can encourage conversation and get others to join in. People may need help getting the conversation rolling but once it does, it will take on a life of it’s own.
Task for VA: Post thought-provoking comments about blog posts that encourage conversation from visitors.
3: Advertisers:
The third form of social proof is ads on your blog. This is an indication that your blog is of high enough quality and thus receiving enough traffic to attract advertisers – very few blogs are popular enough that businesses are willing to pay for space. Even if you blog receives a paltry 3 hits a week, there is no reason you can’t place ads for your friends and families businesses, charities that you care about, etc.
Task for VA: Design small ads for X, Y, and Z business and place on blog.
4: Post frequency:
Inactive blogs are perceived as discarded and neglected – and few would discard or neglect anything valuable. If the writers don’t value their blog enough to post to it frequently, why should anyone else value it enough to read it?
Task for VA: Ghostwrite one article a week. Do general research for me on X, Y, and Z topics focusing on the opinions of well-known experts and/or government spokespeople.
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