TypePad Traffic Tip #9. Follow Others

TypePad's dashboard keeps you up to date with your favorite bloggers. If you want to encourage others to follow you, follow them! Be on the lookout for the Follow Module on your favorite blogs. Simply click to follow the blogger and your dashboard will show their latest posts, comments and favorites.

Power tip: Welcome your new followers. Every few days post an update to your blog welcoming your most recent followers linking to their profiles or blogs (you'll know who is following you since TypePad emails you whenever you get a new follower).

This traffic tip is part of our Top Ten TypePad Traffic Tips series. Check back for our next tip tomorrow or stay tuned by following us on TypePad, joining our Facebook page, following us on Twitter or grabbing the feed.

Comments

[Wayne Senville, Editor, Planning Comm'rs Journal]

I'm totally baffled by how & why to follow folks -- and why this seems to be restricted to people with TypePad blogs.

I just set up a micro-blog -- aimed at quicker posts than my regular typepad blog -- I haven't a clue how to: (1) find; (2) follow; (3) gain followers in areas that I cover (city planning & land use). I saw that you have a list of suggested people/sites to follow; but it looked like a closed list.

I also just used the Chroma template & don't see how I can eliminate the followers/following section of the sidebar; my guess is that the large majority of visitors to my micro-blog won't be Typepad users, and I'm concerned that they will find this puzzling & distracting -- especially if they can't see how to follow.

Would appreciate any thoughts related to the above. Thanks!

[Ginevra]

Hi Wayne: One good way to find new people to follow is in our new TypePad Directory at http://featured.typepad.com. We're working on some other cool ways for people to find, favorite and follow, too.

Chroma's a brand-new theme, so we're still working on how best to make this work for everyone. Thanks for your feedback - it's always good to know that people are a step ahead of the game.

[Louise]

I cannot figure out how to follow people either. I finally found someone who I like as a blogger who is using TypePad, and now I can't figure out how to follow her if she's not "featured."

[Account Deleted]

I also have a similar problem to louise. The blog I like and want to follow doesn't have a follow button on it.

[sunny]

I haven't found a blog yet that has a follow button on it (just added one to mine) BUT I've had great success with emailing individual bloggers when I adore their blogs - and simply asking them if they would mind putting a follow button on their blog.

Other times I've had issues with blogs only showing partial feeds and no photos, and twice I've written bloggers to say I couldn't see the whole feed in my feed reader and they've been surprised and quickly fixed the problem. That showed me that people are unaware sometimes of what the reader is seeing or needs..and a simple email request may help you and the blogger.

[johnny]

Yeah, this is baffling to me as well. I'd like to follow people, but have no idea how to find who I'd like to follow.

[Booleanlife]

i'm very surprised there is no response to this questions. following should be as easy as entering typepad id or url... but there is no way to enter that info. being able to remove this for those with no no intention to follow would be a good idea. also the first post has a very small text area suggesting that the entered text is limited (like twitter) which is not the case. though following is cool, twitter is not cool at all -- i hope they are not imitating it.