Why follow?

[Laughing Ninja]

What's the benefit of having more followers? Is it one of the things Google looks at for ranking? Is it good for SEO? Just wondering.

[alantay]

What followers? Twitter? Or email/RSS subscribers.

Well it gives you traffic and not ranking. But if you are looking to earn money from buysellads.com, you need those numbers to get your site approved

[greatbrumby]

Word of mouth. If your followers actually read your posts and they like them, they may be so inclined to either share them through their own social network accounts, or pass them on word-of-mouth to friends.

[tricialicious]

yes it's all about the traffic.. i use alexa, analytics plus awstats for generating my traffic report.. try it might help you

[Laughing Ninja]

Ok, so just to be clear, it's not like having followers for the sake of having followers helps any? Meaning that followers only help if they actually visit the blog?

[JakeSmithOZ]

having lots of followers doesnt rationally mean that youre getting good standing in Google but it "might" help you get traffic if they actually read each update you do...

[JensenL]

Having followers is like having subscribers to your blog, if they follow you most likely is that they are waiting for any updates that comes from your blog thus visiting the new post and reading it. In short, it gives you traffic and your readers stay up to date with your blog.

[Betsyanne]

Followers usually follow you because they like you or your content, or both. They have a good chance of opening up your postings if they subscribe, and may talk about it too or recommend it to others. It is good for SEO in that if somebody happens upon your blog and sees it is popular, chances are they will stop to read at least part of it too.

[randall]

Originally Posted by Laughing Ninja

Ok, so just to be clear, it's not like having followers for the sake of having followers helps any? Meaning that followers only help if they actually visit the blog?

I know everyone is just trying to be helpful here, but I truly understand your question. Followers for the sake of followers is useless (for the most part) if they never come back to read the posts. I don't know why they would follow you in the first place then, but then again some people love numbers, evidenced by twitter.

On Blogger, followers can see your post updates on the Blogger dashboard and Google friend connect news, so that's a plus.