Kevin Costner might know a few things about ghostly baseball fields in the corn, but not so much about blogging. 

Audience is one of the most important elements of blogging. It creates an authentic, intrinsic motivation that is difficult to produce in back-and-forth interactions between teacher and student alone. 

However, teachers and students are sometimes disappointed when the audience and comments don't automatically come flooding in. As any dedicated blogger knows, building an audience is a little more elusive than that - it requires no small amount of self promotion and social media savvy.

This is an absolutely authentic skill - to survive and make a living as a professional writer these days requires persistance. Even engaging the digital world in other sorts of professional or academic talk doesn't happen automatically. Building a community takes time and effort. 

Create a central meeting spot. In our school, mostly, kids have their own eduBlogs (although I've seen some excellent group blogs too!). But it can be tricky to promote and share 25 individual blogs, all with their own addresses.  If you create a "directory", linking all your students blogs onto a single page (perhaps your blog, or a class website), you can share a single link instead. Must easier for Tweeting. 

Find a partner. Build a relationship. It is a lot to ask for random strangers to spend time reading your blog, or your students' blogs, even if you were to put in a lot of time promoting them. A great way to get started is to partner with another colleague, and their students. You dedicate some time with your class reading and commenting on their writing, and you return the favor. The great part about blogging is that is could equally be a colleague across the hall, or around the world. 

School Bulletins / Announcement / Letters To Parents. For schools, these are classic forms of social media. Don't forget to share your blogging with the school community. We all want a global audience, but pushing your blogs locally makes sense - your own community are the most likely to be interested. Besides, especially in the international school world, global clicks come from our extended families around the world.

Facebook & Twitter, etc.: Using social media to promote your social media should be part of the plan. First and foremost on official school channels, but also on personal networks. 

For you, I assume many of your friends (in both the real, and Facebook sense) are educators.These are great folks to engage. If can't get your friends interested, engaging strangers is a tough ask. Similarly, students should promote their own writing to their own peers and social networks. 

Some schools get squeamish about this idea, but this is really the key to teaching digital citizenship and creating a positive digital footprint -  giving students the opportunity to publish and put positive stuff out there.

If you want to engage the world at large on Twitter, try the #comments4kids hashtag. Teachers who are looking for folks to visit and comment on student work often use this hashtag. It is courteous to return the favor. 

Also, for my staff, there is this Blogweek thing. Designed to be a good place to start. Just sayin'.

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