Why do you think anyone cares?
Posted on November 10, 2007, 8:30 am, by ABaN, under
Blogging.
You’ve just written THAT article. You know the one I’m talking about… The “launch my career and make me the next
blogging superstar” article. The one that will cause money to spill out of the heavens into your lap. One problem… Who’s going to read it? More importantly ask yourself, “who cares to read it?” A big fat chunk of no good it does to write such a bad ass article but not have anyone read it. I have some suggestions which have worked out great for me as far as
promotion goes. Here’s a few of them –
Write a GOOD promotional piece
Spend 10 or 15 minutes and write up a short (500 word) promotional piece for your upcoming article. Save it on your desktop and NEVER LOOK AT IT AGAIN (until you’ve posted the article of course). Reason being is that you don’t want to have your article and your promo piece sounding like each other. After all if you’ve just shown me 95% of your content in the promo why should I spend my time reading your article? Think of it like movie trailers. Almost all of the good scenes are ruined because you’ve seen them so many times before you ever get to the movies.
Decide where to promote
You really have two viable options at this point.
- Blanket promotion to anyone and everyone willing to listen
- Laser targeted promotion to a very specific audience
The blanket option will get more eyes on the promo you’ve written (the GOOD promo…) in step one but it will result in a very poor conversion. On the other hand the laser targeted promos will get seen by less people but will result in a much better conversion rate.
Decide how to promote
Once you figure out where to promote it you need to decide how you’ll promote your article. Spend some time considering this before you ever begin to write and keep on considering it through the entire writing process. It will make things much easier if you have this step planned out.
Get your timing down
Everything needs to be timed properly when it comes to promoting an article. Certain times of the day and week are better than others. Weekends are generally poor performers for getting content viewed. Same with really odd hours of the day. It’s also important to not release and promote too rapidly. In other words as soon as your article goes live resist the urge to submit it to every social networking site on the planet. I know it’s hard, but it is well worth it.
Promote your ASS off
Suppose you just spent 20 minutes writing a promo, 45 minutes researching possible promotional paths, and another 45 minutes writing and editing the article. That’s a lot of time invested for no return. So you might as well promote, promote, promote!
But back to my question. Why do you think anyone cares? I have my own theories, but I’d like to hear yours first.
