Promoting a Blogpost #31DBBBday4
So I made a post I wanted to promote for my 31DBBB I could have made a new one or promoted an old one but I wrote up a new one. This time, I'll tell you about promoting that particular blogpost. Now I can tell you a little bit of how I accomplished that promotion. I used several tools and ways of doing it.
Facebook.
I spend a lot of time on Facebook. I answer all kinds of questions for people in chat, I'm usually answering something about websites, WordPress, tech or something I know. I'm also part of many groups so I asked some people and groups to share my post if they found it interesting or useful. Who wouldn't? But I was careful to only ask those people I've helped before or those that have shown an interest in what I do and also have mentioned to let them know when something like this is going on so they can tell their friends. I've built rapport with these people.
If you want to use Facebook to bring attention to a blogpost or charity or event or something, you must have built some friendships first. These happen naturally, and at the end of the day it is really your friends that will be supporting your efforts so if you don't have rapport with your friends then Facebook isn't really the place for you to share your stuff organically. As this is a give and take system, when you have an opportunity to help others, do it, so that when they need your help they know they can count on you. It just all goes round and round.
I will also share that blogpost on my own Facebook business page and maybe pay to promote it.
Twitter.
Twitter is my favorite social network. I spend a good amount of time on it and I share a lot of stuff in there. In case you haven't noticed, I have a constant stream of fresh blogpostst you've never seen before. These come from my blogging group members and also from news and articles I've read recently. The previous post will be promoted on twitter in several ways. Automatically when I hit publish on my article on my blog, it goes to twitter. Then I also bookmark and curate my article on my OGLink.it website. This also shares the post on twitter across several accounts. Then after it has been posted in there, it goes into a random rotation for the next 30 days and it will be tweeted out anywhere from 5 - 12 times in 30 days.
I also may point out the article to people individually via mentions or dms if we've talked about it before or if I know they could find the post interesting.
Empire Avenue.
Empire Avenue is the "Social Stock Exchange." You can purchase stock in other individuals and their stock price goes up and down based on various factors. Social network activity, perceived influence and other stuff I guess. Empire Avenue is more or less a popularity contest and social network and scoring system all rolled into one fun game. But it has a cool element called "missions." - With Missions, you can ask a group of people or the entire network to do something in exchange for money. So I made a couple missions to help me spread the word about the special for May. And I paid the participants millions! Oh the calamity! I paid for social media distribution! (you can hear the purists cry right now!).
Now, it's all monopoly money, but it's tough to earn lots of money. It pays to be an early adopter I guess. But the money is phony money. It's not real and it's just for fun, but it still is effective marketing tool. It's a way to reach into other people's networks of influence and it's a lot of fun. Check it out if it interests you, I love it and been in it for 3+ years, this is my profile. So I used and will use it to run missions and promote the blogpost.
Google Plus.
On Google Plus, probably on Monday I'll share the post and make some comments about it. This way people that are only on Google + will see the message but more importantly, I will give Google a signal, that this article is mine, it is about this particular topic and this will help get it indexed and found in new ways. Also, when I post to Google+ my "circles" get a chance to see my post and they may share it or add a +1 to it. The beauty of social networks is that when you have something valuable to offer, the ripple effect becomes really powerful. Sharing and promoting in social media can mean the difference between a handful of views and thousands of views. We know it's all about eyeballs, then the content must be valuable enough for people to stick around. Promotion brings it, but value proposition keeps them.
Comments.
As you may imagine, as a blogger, I read a lot of other blogs. I often comment on them too. This is an indirect way of promoting your blogpost. By leaving comments on other people's blogs, you may entice someone to see what else you have to say or what you're all about and readers or the blog's author may check out your site. In this way, when I leave a comment, they may come back to my site to check it out and depending on the date in which they do this, they may see my blogpost at the top and then get a chance to read it.
Youtube.
I don't usually make a video just to promote a blogpost, but because of the #31DBBB challenge, I will give this a try and later today or tomorrow I will create a video dedicated just to that blogpost. The idea is to promote the blogpost and get people to go from my video over to this website to check out the blogpost. We'll se how that works.
There are many other ways I'll use to promote this but I'll leave those for another blogposts. Mainly I use other networks to make my content crawlable and indexable and make it so other people will re-share it.
The only problem with all this is that it is hard to track. There are tools out there that try to track how many shares something has and how many people looked at this or that, and tweeted that but sometimes they're not very accurate. In the next couple of posts I'll take sometime to show you the numbers that we are able to measure for each of these channels and methods. Some are more effective than others, but you'll never know until you try it.
So that's it for the blogpost for day 4 of the #31DBBB even though I'm posting on the 5th! So go out and have a beer for me. It's Cinco de Mayo!
