Blogging is an important part of social media. Blogging gives you space to express your thoughts and opinions. If you want to establish yourself as a thought leader in your field, blogging is an excellent way to do it. As much as I love Twitter, there are concepts that need more than 140 characters.

But blogging is also an important part of relationship building. If you like what the bloggers you follow say, you can link to their posts, comment on their blogs, tweet their content and link to their articles from your Facebook page. And that’s only scratching the surface of relationship building through blogging.

But we can’t build that relationship if you don’t post regularly.

No, regularly doesn’t have to mean every day. Even once a week keeps you enough on someone’s screen. But regular and on some predictable schedule is important.

An example. There is another blogger I want to build a relationship with. He’s a more successful speaker than I am, and he has several books published. He’s farther along my success path than I am. So I want to learn from him. And I want to build a relationship because who knows how we could help each other.

His posts are fantastic, and I comment on them every time they appear. Which isn’t a big time commitment for me because he posts less than once a month.

That’s very disappointing to me. I like his content. I learn something or get a good idea every time he posts. And I promote him through Twitter and my Facebook page. So he gets benefit from the relationship as well. But he doesn’t do it very often. Which runs the risk that I will forget about him and move on to another blogger.

Okay, I’m not saying that failing to build a relationship with me is terribly harmful to him. He’s more successful than I, and obviously something he’s doing is working. But if you are newer to the blogosphere and still building your reputation in the social media sphere, know that regularly updating your content is important.

It’s all part of the know, like and trust aspect of relationship building and effective networking.

And @seowashdc, if you are reading this, can you chime in the comments and tell us how important regular updates are from an SEO perspective? Or if you need more space than the comments, might you be willing to write a guest blog post on the topic?

Tags: blogging, Relationship building, reputation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 11:42 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.