How much time and effort do you devote to Outreach – connecting with others, leaving blog comments, responding on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn? This is an essential key to successful blogging, and essential to making your content marketing efforts profitable.
If you're like me, not enough, I'll bet. We (I mean me!) are so driven and task oriented that it's easy to forget to reach out to others.
I'm really writing this for myself, you see, but maybe you can relate. For example, I have a list of things to do, and I plow through those things, checking off as I go…and I'm pretty good about getting most things done.
But the one thing that often gets left til last is reaching out to others, finding out what they're doing, reading their blogs, commenting, and checking their tweets on Twitter.
I should take that back, it's not entirely true. I visit Twitter daily, sometimes 2-3 times. I get several emails a day from a service SocialOomph which gives me all the tweets in certain keywords I track.
The reason why this is so important is because without others, your products and services will remain a "best kept secret." You can create all the content in the world, have the best marketing strategies, but if nobody knows you, you won't get read, won't get found, won't turn your content into dollars.
Nobody cares until you care about them.
I'm not spending enough time with others. It's not that I don't care, I do, but I tend to lurk and read at social sites without speaking up, without connecting, without truly being social. What good is it to use social networking if you're not really social?
When I was in school, I was the kid reading a book during recess. Later, when we had dancing at lunch time, I was an observer, but I never felt cool enough to join in. (I made up for all that when I spent years in Paris, many nights in clubs, and at all the cool European hangouts. But that's another story for another time.)
Last week when I was interviewed by Joan Stewart, aka The Publicity Hound, about Time Saving Tips for Smart Business Blogging, I shared my CODA system: there are 4 major keys to successful blogging:
- Content
- Outreach
- Design
- Action
The most overlooked key to successful blogging is Outreach, all the things you can do to get your blog and your business well-known. You do this by participating in social media, and by connecting in a helpful and generous manner with other people.
Here are my tips for reaching out to others on the Web, essential for getting more traffic and making your content marketing profitable:
Content Marketing & Blog Outreach
- Find other blogs to read and comment on: This will keep you informed, build partnership possibilities, & get you new traffic
- Use Alltop.com to find blogs in your niche; Build your own Alltop favorite blogs page
- Make sure you're monitoring the conversations & keywords on your favorite social sites
- Twitter: Track keywords, use SocialOomph.com, do searches
- Facebook: participate, respond
- LinkedIn: use the Answers feature
- YouTube: Do a 30-60 second video tip clip, refer to your blog post
- Other sites: special groups, forums, membership sites, Amazon reviews
- Subscribe to and read other people's e-newsletters, reply to them
- Do web searches for your keywords, find out what others are doing; when you see something cool, email them to say so.
Just writing this post has inspired me to go over and respond to a couple of smart people over on Facebook and LinkedIn! What about you, do you have anything to share about reaching out to others?
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