Do you want to know how we used the three things above to spike our traffic from 20 visits a day to over 2,000? It’s time you start thinking outside of the box when it comes to marketing and promoting your blog — way outside of the box.
Your Problem: No One Cares About You or Your Blog
(Except your mom — and she could be jiving too)
Q: What do you call a million people all shouting the same thing at once?
A: The Internet.
If you’ve ever tried to drive traffic to your blog, then you’ve probably felt like one of the million people all saying the same thing: “Hey — come listen to what I have to say!”
It might work. But one-in-a-million isn’t very good odds. So, even though you provide good content, you utilize every social media site around, and you get fresh ideas daily from sites like Blogussion, nobody really seems to care.
All of those things are good — and that’s exactly your problem. They’re just good. Good isn’t good enough. You are remarkable — and it’s about time you started acting like it.
Nobody cared about us either. Until…
It was the summer of 2010. My buddy (and budding business prodigy) Nick Tart and I had just finished interviewing 25 of the world’s most impressive young entrepreneurs — including Alex Fraiser himself — for a book. The only problem was that just a select few really cool people knew about it.
We had tried spreading the word with emails, articles, and comments — but we were only making ripples where we wanted to make waves. That’s when we had a kooky idea: make a stop-motion music video to promote our book.
I got to work writing music and mixing in audio chopped-up from the interviews. Nick Tart got busy buying Sharpies and making cut-outs of all 25 young entrepreneurs. Overall, we put in around 68 hours into the song/video and the results made it completely worthwhile.
Quit Moping Around & Create Something Remarkable
But You Don’t Like Making Stop-Motion Videos…
Good for you. They’re a pain. To find your personal promotional perfection, don’t look around at what other people have done. Look at your own life. What do you like to do for fun? What creative things did you waste your time on as a kid?
In our case, those were silly stop-motion videos, but in yours it could be anything from finger paint to play-doh to wooden blocks. Simply create something that you would want to tell all of your friends about.
And don’t play the “I’m not creative” card. If you’re one of the left-brained among us, then you can still use your technical prowess to make something awesome, like a big row of dominoes that spells out your URL.
From Hobby to Purposeful Content
Of course, you can’t just make a video of your stamp collection and expect it to be a promotional boon for your blog. You have to redirect your hobby so that it fits your purpose like a glove. Recognize your assets and your message — then start thinking creatively from there.
In our case, we realized that the audio from the 25 young entrepreneurs we interviewed was one of our biggest assets. So, we decided to incorporate some of the best audio clips into a song. We also knew that more people would recognize these bloggers by their faces and accomplishments than by their voices — so we decided to incorporate a visual component too.
You can do the same thing to promote your blog. Think about the possible ways that your creative stream overlaps with your blog. Find an idea that’s unique and exhilarating and then go for it! A few nights of hard work and you’ll have your killer promotional content.
Let Your Content Roam Free, Like The Wild Buffalo
People are incredibly lazy (as a former lazy person myself, I can vouch for this). Even if you’ve created a mind-blowing song/dance/paint-by-numbers-drawing for your blog, nobody’s going to share it unless it’s really, really easy for them to do so.
Here are the three ways we made our video more viral than pink eye:
- Facebook Comments
This is a new tool that lets you put a snazzy little Facebook comment box underneath any scrap of content. It’s great because it encourages feedback, community, and it posts a link on the person’s wall. - Tweet Button
Everyone tweets. Even your grandma. That means that one or two tweets about your promotion aren’t going to make a big dent in things. But if you can attract a whole flock of Twitterers with a sleek little ‘Retweet’ button, then you’re in business. - Posted on YouTube
We uploaded our video onto YouTube so that people could easily embed it onto their websites and Facebook profiles. YouTube is also the second biggest search engine in the world and it’s especially popular with younger people — which happens to be our primary demographic.
Here’s the video that helped us go viral:
There are very few reasons not to be remarkable.
If you can think of a few good reasons to be average, then ignore everything you just read. Otherwise, get out there and start transforming something you’re passionate about into a perfectly mind-blowing promotional campaign for your newly-remarkable blog.
Ready to jump in with DIY marketing? Or are you convinced that your hobby is too weird, dorky, or illegal to be transformed into eye-catching promotional content? Hop on down and join the brain-storming in the comment box below.
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 | Hi, this is Néstor Pabón I'm just a regular "Joe" who discovered internet marketing back in 2004, and by 2005 had replaced my day time job pay check, and doubled it by mid 2006. If you liked this article and would like me to share with you how I make my living online subscribe to my Newsletter for more tips and "insider" strategies. |
