Monday 26 November 2018

How to support your favourite bloggers

As a blogger, I love supporting other bloggers because I know how it feels to be in their shoes – and I also know how happy it makes me when I get a bit of support too. My friends and family are so supportive of my blog, which is amazing and I can’t thank them enough. But if you’re a regular blog reader (not of mine specifically, just any blogs!) then you might want to know exactly how you can support the person who’s putting all these hours into writing stuff on the internet for your enjoyment. With that in mind, I thought I’d write a post full of things you can do to support your favourite bloggers – we’ll bloody love you for it.


Reading someone’s blog is, of course, one of the easiest ways to support them. But beyond that, sharing their posts on social media (even if you only have a small following yourself or it’s just to your friends and family) is a lovely thing to do, because it shows that the post is ~literally~ engaging and it opens it up to a new audience who may then go on to regularly read that person’s blog. I always feel so warm and fuzzy inside when I get a notification that one of my friends has shared one of my posts on their Facebook page, and it genuinely does help my stats. Telling your friends IRL works, too; my mum and is always telling people about my blog and that’s just really really really nice.

Commenting on posts is a similar thing – not a lot of people comment on the actual blog post itself, but I always have a little smile to myself when I see that someone’s taken the time to do so. Again, it shows that the audience is engaging with the post and really, that’s what it’s all about. Just like the hokey cokey. 


A really specific but very easy thing to do to support your favourite bloggers is to help with their bounce rate by clicking on another page on their blog after you’ve read the specific post you’re reading – for example, once you’ve read this post you could just click my blog logo at the top of the page which will take you to the ‘home page’ of my blog. Et voila, you’ve not bounced straight off my blog and therefore Google will be nicer to me. It takes you one extra second but can be really helpful for bloggers!

If you’ve read a review of something on someone’s blog and then you go on to buy it, try to go through the link in that post because it may well be an affiliate link – it won’t cost you a penny extra when you make the purchase, but the blogger will get a teeny tiny commission. It is literally tiny, but it all adds up and most bloggers do this work for free 99% of the time. Bloggers will likely have a disclaimer somewhere on their blog that lets you know that the links are/could be affiliate links, too, so it’s all transparent. You can also bookmark creators’ links – for example, if you were to access Amazon through a link I’d posted it would open and take you straight to a page on Amazon, from which you can then just use the site as normal and access everything on it. If you were to bookmark the page when you’ve accessed it through that specific link, and then use that bookmark every time you head to Amazon, I would get a commission each time. Obviously I’m just using myself as an example in this post but if there is a blogger you really love and want to support financially without having to spend any extra money yourself, this can be a brilliant way to do it.


Support sponsored content! A lot of bloggers will tell you this, but #ADs and sponsored content don’t go down that well with our respective audiences; whether it’s the algorithms hiding them even more than they hide every other post, or whether it’s stubborn people refusing to like or share a post where someone’s been paid to talk about their favourite shampoo, they just don’t seem to perform quite as well. Honestly, as long as someone has disclosed that they’ve been paid to talk about something, there is NOTHING WRONG with sponsored blog/social posts. Like I mentioned earlier, bloggers do 99% of this stuff for free so the odd paid-for post is such a win. I upload on average 3-4 blog posts per week, and I think genuinely less than 5% of them earn me any money. That’s fine because my blog is my (beloved) hobby and I’m not doing it solely to make some cash but it’s nice to get some extra pennies every so often for doing something I love. So next time you see a post with #AD or the ‘paid collaboration with…’ disclaimer, give it some love – it’ll help the blogger in question get more work in the long run, and it’s just nice to be nice.

If you’re a small business owner and there’s a blogger who sort of fits in with the vibe of your business, ask about advertising with them. I personally offer sidebar ads, and I know other bloggers do too; we don’t charge a fortune, and I’m always happy to work out a price that suits us both when it comes to local and small businesses. It’s a win-win, because you get to support a blogger you love and you get to show your business off to a whole new audience.


So this post ended up being a fair bit longer than I expected, but I hope you found some easy things you can do to support your favourite bloggers both emotionally and financially; blogging isn’t all about money, but we do have overheads to pay and it can be a lonely hobby at times, so the emotional support is nice to have too! If you can think of any other ways to support the bloggers you love, pop a comment below. Thanks for all YOUR support on The Lilac Scrapbook, too – you all honestly will never know how much it means to me when you share my posts, click my links, tell me you’ve been keeping up to date with my blog. Love you all to bits my angels.

1 comment:

  1. Good tips! I'm an avid blog reader so it's great to know how I can be in a more fair exchange vibe with these lovely content creators.

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