We all want readers/followers/friends/fans/hits/page views/unique visits. After all if you are a writer looking to promote your book then what is the point of building an online platform if you don’t have people paying attention?

You can spend hours reading blogs, websites and books about how to attract and keep followers, but in the end there is only one thing that will keep people coming back and that is adding value.

The key to building an online platform is to add value to the lives of the people who pay you their attention. The trick comes in finding out what value you can offer. Take BubbleCow for example. On this blog we try to offer advice that will make your book a little bit better or bring you one baby step closer to being published. On twitter we spend time finding and tweeting out links to other blogs and sites that will be of interest to our twitter followers. Our stumble account and delicious bookmarks keep track of all the sites we tweet out, adding value to anyone who pays attention.

I am interested to hear, how do you add value to those that pay attention to you?