Last year I wrote a post exploring how I use Social Media to promote my blogs – the post looked at the idea of creating Home bases and Outposts (a metaphor that I picked up from Chris Brogan).
In this video I extend the idea a little and talk about the importance of not only develping a presence on social media sites but also making connections with and developing a presence on other people’s home bases. You can see the full sized version of this video at How I Use Social Media to Promote My Blogs.
Here are the screen grabs from slides I’m sharing on this today at the MarketingNow conference in Melbourne.
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I definitely like the concepts presented here. I really like how you emphasize that it’s not enough to get out into your own outposts but that it’s also highly important to get out into other people’s home bases.
I’ve found a huge number of readers and built a rather large following through interacting with other bloggers and webmasters.
I’m a visual learner and need more of these posts, Darren. Thank you!
Great video thanks for making and sharing it.
Great post Darren. Promotion is relationship building through as many channels as possible. Don’t get attached to the channels, get attached to the idea of providing value and meeting people. When focused on these core ideas you’ll naturally hit as many outposts as possible.
RB
As most of us know, promoting a blog is NOT easy. Great content alone won’t do it–you gotta promote it.
Thanks Darren for sharing this useful information about social media and how to bring quality traffic to website.
Social media is one off the great marketing technique in internet marketing.
Alam
Thank you Darren for posting a very insightful comment on promoting your blog.
I’ve been thinking for a long while on this subject matter since I started blogging a few months ago and everything you said in the video is in congruent to my thoughts on using social media networks as catapult to get your blog out there in your own niche market and make it ‘well-known’.
It’s not easy at the start, but I’m hoping in the long run, it will pay off, if doing properly.
The key thing behind this blog promotion is about building relationships with people. Good relationship-building leads to having good online reputation naturally.
LOVED your presentation at Marketing Now yesterday Darren. Much of it I’ve already read on your blog, or other blogs, but you did a great job of putting a lot of information together in an extremely concise and practical way. You’ve given me fresh inspiration, in particular toward rolling out 2 new blog ideas that I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind. Persistence is the plan!
PS – thanks for the new-blog monetisation advice.
Great stuff, Darren. Man, you sure bring home the point that I need to get on the video trail pronto.
Camtasia Studio seems like an awful lot to learn, but I’m beginning to see the danger of confining myself to the printed word.
Many thanks for the smack in the head; it was just what I needed! Best regards, P. :)
There are a lot of social media network (I have a long list on my blog) but it seems only few of them are effective for me. If every visitors were bookmarking my posts, I would no doubts reach the top of some social media networks’. The problem is that only few of my readers bookmark my posts comparing to the amount of comment I receive everytime. I have to find a way to interact much more with my readers and make them bookmark my posts more often.
I am doing my best for promote my blog. My blog is all about legitimate work at home jobs. I am trying to help people by informing some best legitimate work at home jobs.
One things I really appricated from this post to remember to stay focused on my home base. When I first started my site about 2 months ago, I got really caught up in all the social networking and didn’t pay as much attention to my home base as I should have.
Recently, I’ve become much more content focused regarding regularity and quality of content.
It’s easy to argue that Twitter/Facebook aren’t going anywhere, but 2 years ago people might have said that about myspace too.
I recently started blogging more seriously, and mostly use commenting and social media and bookmarking to promote my site, it worked pretty good for my first site, I recently started to use classifieds and video so I hope this works as well.
Agree. I also done that.
Interesting post, and I definitely like the video and visual aids to help show your readers exactly what you’re talking about. It’s always interesting to see every individual’s specific strategy in promoting their work.
I believe the law of average got something to do for Social Media to work. I eman whats the average percentage of peole will click on your Twitter link if you post one? Usually I find it about 1 percent. But you can up this percentage if you target the people you follow (with the same niche) and hoping they will follow you back.
Anyways I guess the bottom line is, to be effective you need a lot of followers on Twitter, a lot of friends in Facebook and so on.
I believe that you should create a special account for promoting your blog in social network site like Facebook or Twitter. Split it up between your personal account and your business account. This will make your jobs much easier without being confused.
This is known as a linkwheel. What you should also do is link all the 2.0 together creating that wheel. Then from there use one of your 2.0 properties to then create a wheel around that. Soon you will then have a big network.
It was encouraging to hear your passing reference to “over the years,” as it relates to building your blog readership. You remind us it takes time to grow a blog.
Cool! Thanks.
This information has been very helpful. I’ve been trying to leverage social media to get more traffic for quite some time but never really sat down to map out a logical plan. This gives me a pretty good start.
I’m using a lot of social media bookmark such as facebook, twitter, yahoo buzz, stumble, etc….
They work well and I receive a plenty of traffic from social media.
Thanks Darren for the video. It is true that social networking is important; the difficult part is taking the time to make meaningful connections; but well worth it!
Great post Darren. Some excellent points about people not nurturing their home base as much as their social media outposts ;-)
I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE A LITTLE THING ABOUT YOUR BLOG JUST KEEP PROMOTING AND UPDATE ALWAYS YOUR BLOG NEAR FUTURE YOU WILL SEE MANY VISITORS.
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51% of journalists use blogs: survey – [Via BlogHerald] Here are ReveNews we get read by plenty of journalists. Most of which I speak to don’t like to fully admit they use blogs as a PRIMARY source of ideas for stories, but they do. Just another reas
I suggest social media and networking to promote a blog. Works great for me :)
Fantastic video, Darren! I very much liked the home-base and outpost concepts, and making sure we don’t forget our home-base by spending too much time on social media sites. Also, I think the idea of being present in other people’s home bases is a great reminder!
Thanks for this fabulous advice! ;-)
Vicky
Hey, this is a great post– one of many, Mr. Rowse, and I don’t just say that to be unctuous– I consistently come up with your site on Google searches related to blog traffic so you must be doing something right. And this has been consistently true since 2005 or so. But this is the first comment I’ve left here.
Does anyone have any ideas for building traffic TO social media and bookmarking sites? I recently started a crowdsourced news site– a little over a month ago– and we’re getting roughly 50 uniques a day but I would very much like to see it growing faster. It’s really not so much a “get rich quick” thing as blogging and sites seem to be for a lot of people– if I knew I was going to be getting good traffic in five years I’d be perfectly fine with the traffic I’m getting.
Any suggestions? We’re a community-driven news site for conservatives and libertarians.
An excellent video, there are so many ways to promote your blog, some of the ones i can think of are:
article marketing
social bookmarking
forums
message boards
backlinks
Darren,
You have an excellent mind for this sort of thing. I really admire your talents when it comes to the internet.
I think the internet opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity to those who seek it!
-Becky
Darren, it’s awesome how you go on with your work… what can i say, keep on going and growing.
Great post..i studied SEO with social bookmark this lately..
Study..study….
it seo it will take times to achieve but the result is awesome,im also use social bookmark to get PR for my blog.
Darren, WOW, this is a great metaphor and visualization that deepens understanding on promoting your blog. Thank you for sharing.
I spent too much time one one site..twitter. This post and the video which I tweeted to my followers opens your eye and hands you down reality.
Whats real is you need to develop your core business and not spend all day hanging around twitter or Facebook or other ” outposts”..
Great article! I’ve seen some junk out there on this topic that doesn’t really give people any useful information. It’s great to see that you have provided excellent information, as well as a well put-together visualization. It’s amazing how Social Media can really drive traffic to your blog, but we cannot forget about “home”.
Great post i have ever seen. The way you have described these things is really good and attractive. I am impressed with your writing style. I really appreciate this post. The graphical representation of ur blog makes the blog more valuable….it’s so useful for all d bloggers……….. Thanks a lot for sharing. Keep blogging.
Recently I started blogging and it has been really a difficult task promoting my blog. I can see clearly from your presentation that social networks are among the best ways of promoting a blog. Some how you made me think social media is some kind of tool for getting links to your site. Thanks for the presentation.
Nice post. Its nice to read a useful article for beginner like me. Some of points from this article are very helpful for me as I haven’t considered them yet. The layout of your blog is really attractive and impressive. I really appreciate it. Thanks a bunch for sharing such a great and informative post with us. Keep blogging.
your blog helps me on how i can promote my site.
thank you!
I’m still a college student, and I only recently got into the whole social networking thing, but your post makes a lot of sense and has good information on how to leverage the social media sites to promote a business. I’ve been considering starting a small business now that I am almost out of school, and I will definitely be looking to use social sites to promote.
Nice illustrated suggestions…. I will definately try to promote my blog http://ngogrant.blogspot.com Thank for your valuable guidance….. Bye…
sorry if i parked the question wrongly. i have twitter, fb, myspace and so many social media available, but i find it quite hard to make people what is in our post (my post actually). i think im posting something creative enough to get people attention. what should i do?