You could argue that I’ve been shamelessly promoting myself via social media (this blog) for over a year… which is true… but I’ve never particularly done anything special to promote the blog itself. If people found it through searching the net, that’s great… but I didn’t ask anyone to check me out - they did so of their own free will.
I have never really wanted to promote my personal blog (because honestly - who would really be interested), but as I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve recently started an search engine optimisation (SEO) company and I thought I’d try my hand at leveraging social media to gain a little more exposure for it.
So, with the help of a couple of very talented developers - Simon and Talita, we built an SEO tool and then promoted it via my other corporate blog, a prominent SEO blog and an SEO news site.
As it turns-out it was somewhat popular and generated some votes on those other sites, some links from a few places and more than doubled the traffic to our site.
From this experiment I learnt a few things:
- People will link to content / articles / tools that are useful
- Developing something great is pointless unless you can leverage the idea via other prominent, well trusted sites (unless you already have a reasonably sized dedicated readership)
- Our article and tool wasn’t picked-up initially and took a couple of days before people started to notice - so it doesn’t always happen instantly
- Experimentation such as this can develop an unhealthy addiction to social media and cause a considerable amount of anxiety wondering if people will vote and link to the article… then once they start, it’s difficult to stop yourself from checking every 5 minutes to see if anyone else has linked to it or commented on it since you last checked
Hopefully if I start doing more of this, the novelty will wear off and the nervous twitch that I’ve developed whilst clicking on the refresh button will go away.