Solo Practice

What is a blogger pack?  As defined by blog consultant Michael Martine in this very insightful post called, "Create a Blog Pack to Get Blog Traffic and Increase Subscriptions," it is a loosely formed group of similarly placed bloggers providing support, links, comments, and publicity for each other.  But the key to the connection is genuine respect, liking and belief in the quality of the content or product of each of the blog participants.  In other words, one becomes part of a pack where each member is a devoted evangelist for the other because they are true believers.

How to Create a Blogger Pack

1. Find other bloggers to be in your pack. Look for bloggers who seem to be at the same level you are. Bloggers who have far more traffic and subscribers than you may not be interested in joining your pack.
2. Find other bloggers that you genuinely like (more on this in a minute).
3. Contact the other bloggers privately and ask them if they would like to enter a mutually beneficial exchange of attention, where you link to each other?s posts, and bookmark and submit each other?s posts to social media sites, and comment on each other?s posts. Inform the blogger that you want to bring in more bloggers into the pack, so that you can all help each other.
4. Each blogger in the pack subscribes to the feeds of the other bloggers in the pack. When bloggers in the pack post, other bloggers in the pack comment, stumble, bookmark, and tweet the posts.

The purpose behind it is recognizing that building recognition (and your business) through use of the internet isn't a solo journey.  You can only get so far by yourself.  But with the help of likeminded individuals and friendships you can travel as a pack and go much further elevating your status and achieving your individual goals.

What isn't proposed here is mindless or mandatory links, attempts at gaming any system or forced social media. These efforts are transparent to the reader, false and ultimately not sustainable.

While Michael's post is not necessarily tailored for the solo practitioner, the relevance of this concept is clear for all blogging solo practitioners.  You are blogging for visibility, looking to convert readers to paying clients, into referrers of potential clients, journalists into friends and more.  Visibility and publicity are cornerstones of your marketing success and as such you should have real friends promoting you as you promote them.

I do question the same traffic level suggestion, however.  I promote quality content and service providers regardless their traffic.  That quality may come from a blogging newbie who hasn't built traffic yet on the internet but is heavily networked and admired in the profession before ever creating their blog. Or someone who has been blogging a long time but hasn't quite figured out how to really get traffic and needs to learn. 

Work with whomever you know and like and where there is a  genuine desire to create mutual association. And do not be intimidated to ask high traffic friends to join your blog pack, either.  The worst they can say is 'no.'

If you already have a blogger pack, please share your experiences.