Do you need to promote your own content? If you are NOT Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan or Gary Vaynerchuck, the answer will be yes.
Will you ever get to the point where others share your content and you can forget about self-promotion to focus on other, more meaningful stuff?
Of course, in the meantime we gotta hustle. Creating great content means nothing if nobody can see it, in fact, great content will work for you but only if you put it in front of the right people.
Do you feel funny about promoting yourself? You should if that’s all you do. Let’s get that out of the way from the start, if you only have time to promote yourself, print yourself some flyers at your local Office Depot and pass them around.
Here is a 10 step process for self-promotion. Participate and share your experiences and thoughts in the comment section.
AND… Make sure you visit the links I posted at the end of the post.
1. Make Your Content Easy To Share
This is a topic that should probably have its own blog post but let’s at least touch on a few items:
- Get the focus out of yourself, think of how to write something that is useful for your visitor.
- Write stuff that people like to share, for this you probably need to listen and pay attention to content in your industry.
- Have the necessary tools in place so people can share this content from your posts.
2. Have A Strategy
Don’t go out there blind, know exactly what you’re going to do, when, where and how. Write a quick checklist of all the activities to complete on the day you publish a post. Where are you going to post your article? are you going to do it in the morning? how many times? Is it worth trying to be in as many places as possible or are going to focus on only a few? This will help you have a clear picture and achieve better results.
3. Schedule Everything
Everything should be scheduled. Do your homework, you should know what are the best days to publish content, I find that Mondays and Wednesdays have been better for me but this can be different for you. Be specific, get it down to times, it might be better to post in the morning or afternoon. Consider other time zones.
Your social promotion should also be scheduled, some people say it’s better to tweet between 3pm to 4pm, I’ve seen better results. Depending on the number of tweets per day you might consider posting your message twice that day. Consider using scheduling tools to spread your messages during the day.
4. Your Main Social Networks
A must. If you’re not promoting your content on the main social networks, you are missing out on the biggest traffic sources out there. Make sure your post is at the top of your wall, your Twitter and make sure you don’t ignore LinkedIn. If your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles are not connected and feeding each other automatically, do it manually.
5. Bookmarking Your Post
Bookmark everything. Your checklist should include submitting your blog post to Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and even Google Bookmarks. Also, take in consideration other services that might be relevant, you can include Mixx and others, just don’t go crazy about this, some networks will not do anything for you.
You should also get familiar with the etiquette on some of these services.
6. Join Blog Networks
Some blog networks such as Blogged or NetworkedBlogs can also provide additional visitors. These two I’m mentioning here can also be integrated to your Facebook as applications. You don’t need to spend too much time here, just set them up.
7. Niche Communities And Additional Networks
Identify additional networks and smaller communities within your niche. Every industry has one or two dedicated networks, if you are in the food or design sectors for example, there are plenty of social platforms and communities you should be involved with.
8. Get Out Of Your Blog
You already did the work inside your blog, spent a few hours preparing your post, getting a nice picture, etc. Now it’s time to come out, the only reason to comeback to your blog is to respond to comments but most of your efforts are to be allocated somewhere else. Make comments on other blogs, interact with your community on other platforms, get out. Now!
Share others. Yeah, I said “others”. Don’t look at me like that…
9. Be Very Active
Plan to spend more time online on the days you’re publishing content, be more active, tweet more. Be present. Have your Twitter client open.
10. Create A Support Group
One thing that can help your content with a little push is having others share it with their networks, if you can have previous agreements with a few people. In some cases this is kind of unspoken and it just happens organically, it has to be a small group. In my case, I know I can count with at least a few Tweets, Facebook shares and a couple of Diggs. I do the same for these people.
Reciprocity.
Elsewhere…
This time I thought I would share a few blog posts I enjoyed on the topic of self-promotion…
- The Myth of ‘Great Content’ Marketing Itself from @problogger
- The Art of Shameless Self-Promotion from @copyblogger
- Content is not King. Self Promotion Is from @lisabarone
Enjoy!
How Do You Promote Yourself?
Share in the comments sections if you do some of these or if you have your own way of doing it…
