If you won’t promote yourself who will?

Several days ago I received an email from someone requesting I goto a particular website and do a short interview about this blog. After putting it off for a few days I took the plunge and filled out the interview form spilling my guts for all to see.

That was a few days ago and just this morning I received another email telling me that the interview was now live on their site. If you’d like to read the interview click on the graphic below and you’ll be taken to it where you will also have an option of voting for this blog. I haven’t bothered to find out what happens if I were to win the vote.

All that to say that you reading my interview and voting (or not) for this blog isn’t actually the purpose of this article though it serves as a good jump-off point. Mind you, I’m not an expert on the subject of promotion by any means and even less so when it comes to internet promotions. I do however have real world experience and observation which, at least for me, translate quite readily over to the digital medium. In this section we’ll take a quick look at the value and importance of self promotion as your project launches.

Have a gameplan in place

Even before it is time to begin promoting you should be ready with a plan. And in case that plan fails you should be ready with a backup plan or three. Once it is time to implement the plan do so and stick to it, but don’t be afraid to pull out if it isn’t working. You can always go to plan B, C, D, E…

There are no maps to your site

At least not until you make them and hand them out. Submit your site to search engines, use your link in your signature on emails, forums, and anywhere else that you can think of. Any chance you get drop your homepage link. In a recent article John Chow advises his readers that simply building a site isn’t enough to make money online. He is speaking specifically to the effects of traffic on monetization, but clearly what he says translates across all online endeavors. Without traffic your site is dead in the water.

Leverage your friends

If you’re like most people you’ve probably built up a decent amount of online contacts that have nothing to do with your blog. Most of them will be more than happy to help you out with promoting your site, but you have to ask for them to help. The danger I’ve found in this is that some of them can become a little over zealous. Be certain they understand the difference between promotion and spam.

Leverage you enemies

No doubt you have these as well if you’ve spent any amount of time online. While you won’t be able to specifically request them to promote you there’s nothing stopping you from baiting them into saying something about you or your blog. From my experience enemies will link to your site not for the purpose of promotion, but so everyone else can see for themselves how bad it really is.

No one gets a huge site by sheer dumb luck. If you aren’t willing to spend some time promoting your brand no one else will either. Take pride in what you have created and let the world know. Eventually they will come, but how many and how fast all depend on how much effort you put into promotion.

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