Little Blog? Big Benefit! The Hidden Potential of Smaller Sites

This guest post is by David Edwards of A Sitting Duck.

In my last post, I talked about building an audience on YouTube with techniques that you could implement by making friends that work in the same field as you.

Not so long ago, I remember YouTube being a place just for comical, viral videos. Today, it remains a hub of viral videos—but it’s also becoming a strong forum for businesses. It seems that these days, the standard practice for a new business website is to plug in Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube somehow.

We all know there are other places online, but I imagine that most ProBlogger readers are working for themselves—you’re probably pushed for time, and don’t have many free hours to spend on other websites. So perhaps you only focus on these main sites.

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“Other websites” are still important

If you have a website or blog, and you’re looking to inject more life into it, I’m here to tell you that it’s probably worth reaching out to smaller websites, and offering your videos (or other media and content) for them to embed in their pages. I’ve found this technique really helpful.

Many people over look starter websites, because they assume that a site that has 100 readers has nothing to offer them or their blog.

But look at it this way: if each of those 100 readers has 130 Facebook friends (which is, statistically, the average), that equates to more than 10,000 potential views for your video if all the site’s readers hit the Facebook Like button!

Okay, so it’s unlikely that all the site’s readers, and all their friends, will Like your video, but these figures reveal the potential that exists in the smaller sites within your niche. It’s often much easier to get your work published on these smaller sites, too—and that exposure can give you an introduction into the circle of larger players in your niche.

In my first year of launching my video series, I managed to have it featured on ten small animation websites. Each of these sites sent viewers to the videos, and they shared the videos with their friends. This gained us traction both with viewers, and with the entertainment-video niche’s bigger players. Eventually, I hit the jackpot by getting the video featured on Weebl’s Stuff, which is probably the biggest Flash animation site in the UK.

As another example, on Twitter, we’ve started a Follow Friday team of illustrators: around ten to 15 of us tweet each other out to our followers every so often. This group isn’t just good for gaining followers—it’s also helping to build a small community that will gain the trust of, and hook people in from, the larger community.

Finding the right sites

I’ve found some great illustration bloggers through search.twitter, by searching for illustration and animation. You could do the same using keywords from your niche—it can be a really quick way to find relevant people operating in your field.

As you’re probably aware, searching for your keywords on Google will bring back the most powerful results, including directories or large blogs. But, at first, you may not have much of a chance of getting your blog on their radars.

1,000 views a day

Currently, we receive between 500 and 1000 views every day on our animation series, without blogging or paying for traffic. Although I do post every Friday on my website, and I’ve managed to keep this up for 40 Fridays in a row!

If you’re looking for a magic bullet to keep the momentum from your initial exposure going, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you are confident that you own a video that’s worth watching, you should push it to at least ten smaller bloggers in your first year, then reach out to a couple of large websites and see what happens!

David Edwards is the founder of A Sitting Duck, and currently is the SEO Director at Webfactore Ltd. You can follow him on Twitter at @asittingduck and on YouTube.