Promoting Your Media
Once you’ve started building media, like a podcast, or a new videoblog, the very next thing that happens is that you want people to actually see it and experience it. One of the most common questions I’m asked by people who blog or podcast is how to grow their audience. Audience does make a difference in making media, at least if your goal is to build conversations and relationships. Here are a few tips to getting the word out to prospective new people.
Your Email Signature
Stick a link to your blog or podcast in your email signature. Here’s a hint, though. If your email signature looks like the titles at the end of a movie (7-15 lines long), people are going to glaze over them, not pore through them in great detail. The second thing in my signature after my name is a simple text pointer to my website. Everything else, including my title and phone number, are downstream from that.
Subscription Tools
If you’re not using FeedBurner, you’re missing a ton of tools that help people get your media the way they want it. FeedBurner is a tool that enriches your RSS feed. But it does more than that. It adds ways for people to subscribe by email, ways for people to get your media on their reader of choice, and tons and tons of other add-on services like republishing widgets, and more. If you’re not comfortable editing your blog’s template and files, you might ask around for help (Twitter would surface a lot of willing helpers- or go to a PodCamp and someone would help), but swapping out the built-in RSS feeds on a website for FeedBurner’s even-more-detailed feeds would be helpful.
Blog and Podcast Directories
There are tons of places where blogs and podcasts are listed. Rather than recreate the wheel, I googled for some directories list posts:
I recommend subscribing to a bunch, though I’ve yet to receive a message or comment from someone saying, “I found you on Super Blog Directory dot com!” But hey, it doesn’t hurt.
Oh! One point to make sure you’ve done it. CLAIM your blog/podcast with Technorati. It looks like you need to get an account, and then you can claim it here .
Comments are Your Friend
Reading big blogs and podcasts that you admire, and commenting appropriately is a great way to build some awareness of your blog or podcast. I’ve had lots of people surf over from a comment I’ve left on a big and amazing site, only to retain that person as someone who thinks what I’m blogging about is of interest to them. Never spam a blog. Never sound overly self-promotional. But if you add a conversation point or two that people resonate with, there are tons of folks (like me!) who will follow through, and consider adding your blog to the feed reader for a while.
Use Social Bookmarking Tools
Most blogs allow you to add on 3rd party applications, and one that I *highly* recommend is AddThis. If your blogging software supports AddThis, I’d say use it. (You might use a similar tool, and it’s probably okay). Add This gives you 36 social bookmarking sites all in a teeny tiny button. Thus, if your audience uses a bookmarking tool on ANY of 36 sites, your post can be added to their information quite easily.
Some of these sites are GREAT traffic adders. The #3 referral mechanism to my site is StumbleUpon, so I can tell you for sure that these tools drive awareness.
I was just about to scrap using Facebook entirely, but then Steve Rubel sent me a quick message telling me that he first discovered my blog through Facebook. The minute he said that, I realized that Facebook’s big value to me would be to redistribute my blog so that even more people might discover it and come back to the mother ship.
I’m using an application called Flog Blog, and also Blog Friends to promote my own stuff. I also use Feed Heads and some other tools to discover other people’s work. (Remember, this SHOULD be a two way street).
A Short Note on Digg
Not sure why, and not sure if it’s just me, but Digg has never really done much for my blog. I’ve made the Digg front page a few times now, and the folks who usually come over from Digg don’t stay, and often tell me what a piece of crap my site is. Not that I mind critics, but I also don’t rush out to invite them in. Your mileage may vary.
Value Matters
At the end of the day, the reason why people will or won’t subscribe to your media is that they find some value in it. In a few small cases, they might subscribe because they know you and just want to stay in touch. But for attracting people that aren’t your friends or relatives, you need to offer something of value. I’ve had people ask me how to promote their blog, only to read nothing but random posts about why they liked last night’s episode of Dancing with the Stars, a YouTube video of dogs singing, etc.
It’s not that your blog HAS to be about any specific thing, but if you’re looking for tons of traffic, the blog should have some value outside your own interests. If you want to stay blogging about whatever it is that appeals to you, that’s perfectly cool, and I’m not saying don’t. But if you want to take your media up to tons more folks, try to deliver something to others, and try to do it succinctly.
How Are YOU Promoting Your Media?
Guaranteed that I’ve missed some good ideas, and that you’ve got some great ones. What else are you doing to get your media out there and seen? How are you finding your audience? We’d love to hear your ideas. What’s worked for you? What hasn’t?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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Comments
Chris, thanks for the prompt on this.
I think I’m covering most of these bases with my blog, but I need to give some more thought to additional ways to promote my podcasts.
I think it’s partly because I read a lot of blogs (and try and apply the lessons I see others using, or ways that I find blogs myself) but I don’t listen to or go looking for podcasts, so am a bit out of the loop on that one.
Definitely one to start focusing on so I get more from the resource I put into creating them.
Joanna
Great list.
Maybe I’ll add one thought. I dunno about how well this would work for others, but one thing I did when I started my blog is email other well-read bloggers (such as yourself) and get advice and all from them. It really helped to add value to my blog. More than that, it alerted them to what I had to offer, and if they liked what they read, they helped to promote it by linking/referencing it, etc.
So that would be my tip, to get in touch with the leaders of your field. Hope it makes sense.
Oh, and also, you mention about comments. Linking to other people’s media helps. Especially with trackbacks, links can work in a similar way to comments. Even without trackbacks, links tend to help alert the author to your media (because more people are starting to track their name and their own media).
A certain person I know once told me that you live or die on your database. Your house list is everything. Do outreach and make it easy to build up your house list.
Well, I spotted your post on Twitter and I’ve noticed it is a significant referrer to my site. Twitterfeed.com makes it dead simple to add an RSS feed to your Twitter account.
I’d also say having friends who will point your way when you deliver “the value” is a great way of developing audience (friends of friends).
Great post, Chris.
If it’s a videoblog, set up channels at all the most popular video services and upload each episode to those.
There’s also itunes which makes the videos available for download on ipods and iphones.
Think of these services as distribution channels or syndication points, like in offline TV when a show gets syndicated.
One thing to remember when uploading the videos and setting up your channels is to describe the subject matter of each one in ehough detail to allow for easy discovery of your content on the networks.
Slower self-promomotion ideas involve putting your URL in every profile you have online: including LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning, Spock, Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku, Flikr, Orkut, MyBlogLog, etc etc.
Cross-pollinate by using Jaiku or Twitter to re-publish your posts as RSS feeds or Tweets on other apps and platforms.
Chris, great list and reminders, particularly around the auto-sig in emails…lately I’ve seen them getting very long.
StumbleUpon has quickly become the #2 referring site for my blog, so I’m a big fan :)
But I’ve also found that people posting the entries into their Facebook profile has a tremendous impact on not only traffic, but driving engaged readers who reach out to me either through the blog or through the social network.
/kff
[…] [chrisbrogan.com] wrote an interesting post today on Promoting Your MediaHere’s a quick excerpt Once you’ve started building media, like a podcast, or a new videoblog, the very next thing that happens is that you want people to actually see it and experience it. One of the most common questions I’m asked by people who blog or podcast is how to grow their audience. Audience does make a difference in making media, at least if your goal is to build conversations and relationships. Here are a few tips to getting the word out to prospective new people. Your Email Signature Stick a link to […]
[…] chrisbrogan wrote an interesting post today on Promoting Your MediaHere’s a quick excerptCLAIM your blog/podcast with Technorati. It looks like you need to get an account, and then you can claim it here . Comments are Your Friend. Reading big blogs and podcasts that you admire, and commenting appropriately is a great way to … […]
[…] post by [chrisbrogan.com] Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
How about a list of ways to promote your projects to the offline 0.0 world? Probably a whole ‘nother article. I should probably should go write that.
I came via Twitter, but it just made me come faster — i would have come here eventually.
I always add new blogs to blog directories to get some links to them quickly, so the search engines find them and are happy.
Don’t think anyone gets more than negligible traffic from blog directories — do you use them to look up blog? I may have once or twice.
Chris,
Great post. Some very useful tips there.
At the end of 2007 I decided that I was going to be a lot more focused with my blog and devote some real effort to driving traffic toward it and ensuring that there was enough decent content to warrant coming back.
Then a few days ago I came up with my new strategy which does include a number of the objects you have listed here.
I host my own blog within SharePoint so a lot of the community tools aren’t designed to work with it. As such, I have to do things like generate my own links to sites such as Digg, reddit etc.
Rather shamelessly I am currently submitting my own posts to Digg, reddit and StumbleUpon (I may add some more over the next few days) and, considering that mine is a low volume blog, the results have been encouraging: 59 referrals from Digg in 4 days, 26 from reddit. If even a small percentage decide they like what they read and subscribe then I’ll consider it a success.
I use Twitter to converse with some people I already know and hopefully start conversations with new people (Twitter was how I came across yourself). Like many, I am also using Twitter to post the links to posts.
I don’t think that a lot of blog directories are worth joining as you can just get lost in the noise but one place I have joined is Zimbio due to the way it is divided up in to subject specific “wikizines” that are created by the users. This has also prompted some referrals and they all help.
One thing I always make sure of is that (where possible) any link within my site (even if it’s pointing to one of my own pages) opens in a new window or tab. It’s hard enough getting people there without clicking away and possibly not finish what they were reading!
It’s interesting to read both your and Kyle’s (in the comments) thoughts on Facebook. I’m on there but don’t use it as I think it’s grossly over-rated, has had it’s day and that it’s hard to get past a lot of the noise in order to get to the signal. I may have to rethink things but it all depends how much of the clutter I can filter out and prevent from appearing on my page.
I’ve often toyed with the idea of a pod or vidcast but suffer from that fundamentral problem - what to say? I’m just managing to sort out a decent signal to noise ration on my blog so maybe I could just replicate to a degree to offer choice as to how to consume my material. Just thinking aloud.
Anyway, love the blog and will no doubt be tweeting at you from time to time.
Some great adds in here. I forgot mentioning MyBlogLog, which I like for a community tool. Thanks, Jeff and Jason for mentioning it.
Jason also mentioned using Facebook and some of those other apps as a place to remind people of your links. I do that all the time. Great pointer.
Colin- lots to think about there. I think it’s good that you’re thinking about what to add to the conversation. There’s lots out there, so I’m sure you’ll find your passion, and discover whether it’s got legs as a topic.
Thanks everyone!
great information in this article.
have you tried to set up a facebook group for your media properties? just curious about the effectiveness of that …
also, I don’t want to bag on digg, but I tend to agree. If you get the right eyeballs and some of those people stay, it’s good … but every time I get a digg wave, my page views flatten out to approach unique visitors, my google cpm lowers, and comment quality drops. Conversely, the stumbleupon waves I’ve received have been the complete opposite.
Chris,
Great, I was looking for the AddThis button.
What’s your take on tags? And where (tagging as an option seems to be everywhere)?
Thanks,
Keren
I met you over at Facebook.. And I started following you on Twitter because of your tweets in Facebook.
Hi Chris,
Nice post. I’m just getting started with my blogging, and I’m going to follow your advice.
Joe
[…] Chris Brogan wrote a great post about promoting your media to the online world. That made me (Becky) think about increasing your audience by reaching out to new […]
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Ironically, I just submitted this to Digg. :)