Blogger Challenge: Increase Promotion and Amp Up Results

Many of us are writ­ing these great posts that guess what? Nobody is read­ing. We put a lot of care­ful time and thought into posts that we know are going to be hits. We hope that they are Dugg, shared on Facebook and tweeted a few hun­dred times, but it doesn’t happen.d

We even pro­moted, some. Tweeted it a cou­ple of times, told a cou­ple of our bud­dies. Some even shared it with some celebrity on Twitter:

Hey @kathyireland Read my new post White bread v. Wheat bread!!!!! http://bit.lyfail

In the hopes that they will read it and do the work for you by retweet­ing it and then hun­dreds or thou­sands of oth­ers will retweet it. Boom instant traf­fic. Wrong. It just doesn’t work this way. If you want more than two or three peo­ple to read your blog you can­not be afraid of pro­mo­tion espe­cially when you are try­ing to estab­lish your­self.

It may seem like the big blog­gers don’t work that hard to pro­mote their posts and maybe they don’t, but they have estab­lished an audi­ence who will tire­lessly pro­mote for them. You don’t have that yet. I don’t have that yet.

Yes, we have our reg­u­lar read­ers who we appre­ci­ate that share our posts with other peo­ple, but the bulk of the work we have to do.

I know a ton of blog­gers and I watch closely how often they pro­mote their posts. On Twitter there are some who pro­mote their post once. Just one time. How do I know? I check their time­line. I could have titled this post, “Are You Too Busy Tweeting to Promote”.

Let’s look closely at how pro­mot­ing on Twitter really works.

Test Subject:

@nonpromotingblogger

Has 275 fol­low­ers

13 loyal read­ers

4 faith­ful retweet­ers

At 10:30 am @nonpromotingblogger sends out a link to his post:

Hey! Read my post on White bread v. Wheat bread http://bit.lyingtohimself

At 10:30 which can be a busy time on Twitter ten peo­ple sees his link and actu­ally go read the post. One of his faith­ful retweet­ers shares it and that sends another five peo­ple to his blog.

If @nonpromotingblogger doesn’t share the post for the rest of the day this is all the vis­its he will get. With the excep­tion of a cou­ple more of his faith­ful retweet­ers dig­ging through his time­line to find the link to his lat­est post and a few peo­ple who wan­der to his site via search this is all the vis­its he will get to this great post.

How can I make such claims you say? This was me about two months ago. I did not pro­mote well and that showed in the stats.

If you see your­self in this exam­ple here is what I chal­lenge you to do:

Promote your posts 5 times a day via Twitter or Facebook (if you pre­fer)

I don’t mean back-​to-​back. At vary­ing times of the day a few hours apart. Do this over one week’s time and next Wednesday I will do a post where I hope we can dis­cuss how effec­tive it has been.

I know you’re think­ing my friends/​followers will hate me if I pro­mote that much. But, let’s look at it real­is­ti­cally. If they can tol­er­ate 200 tweets or updates about how you did your hair or what hap­pened on one of the Housewives shows they can tol­er­ate five links. If they can’t they don’t truly under­stand Twitter as a tool.

So get busy writ­ing and pro­mot­ing and I want to hear from you about results.

Thanks for read­ing,