**This is a guest post.

Why Upping Your PR Skills Can Help You as a Blogger

When it comes to running a blog, there are a lot of things you need to think about to be a success. Some of them are obvious, like coming up with quality content and marketing yourself well on social media, and yet they can be forgotten by a lot of bloggers. You may have great content but if you don't have good ways of boosting your blog's image, or dealing with the people who engage with you, then you'll be talking into a void.

Here is why having good communication and PR skills, and even studying to improve them using something like an online master of communication management degree from the University of Southern California, is so vital for blog owners.

You Want to Be a Credible Source of Information

When you put content out on the web, you want it to be either entertaining or useful – ideally both. You may work hard on writing good posts or hiring people who can create useful and interesting stuff to keep your blog in content, but how you present yourself in terms of communications about your site is just as important. If you have a very well made article or video, but you communicate badly when you share it on Twitter and Facebook, people won't follow your link. If you have a controversial article and you don't get involved in the conversation when people talk about it on your site, they will get frustrated.

To be regarded as a credible source of news, you must post your content like news and engage well with the people who do read it. This takes good communication skills and while you may not need to know everything you learn in an online MCN degree to run a site, it doesn't hurt to boost your skills with some study.

PR Builds Relationships

Another important thing about having PR skills is that you can reach out to potential partners and build relationships with them, once you are in a position to help each other with your goals. Your blog may be a great place for a given company to reach their target audience and you can both benefit from this, but you won't forge those relationships if your site, and by extension, you, don't have good PR skills.

Return Visitors

How you deal with your visitors in terms of communication can make a big difference to whether people will come back and read your blog again or follow you on social media to get updates. Keeping visitors should always be easier than winning new ones, and so you need good communications skills to leverage this.