One
Team Up: Most of the work we do on our sites and marketing is for our own immediate gain. We write a linkbait piece to get others to link to us. We push out messages and links on social sites to get traffic directly back to our sites.
When you have a newer, less-than-popular blog, you have to look at the assets you have and use them wisely. Who is in your social net that can help you in a bigger way than simply “liking” a post or retweeting something?
Once you’ve answered that question, don’t simply ask them for a big favor. DO them a big favor first and suggest that you team up to help each other in more significant ways. Develop your own small network of “players” in your niche who help each other with guest posts, writing about each other, linking each other and promoting each other.
Have your team share their assets as well to broaden the team’s reach and do some great stuff together that you couldn’t achieve alone.
Two
Leverage: Most people are too timid to do anything to market themselves online that requires a more intimate tactic like relationship building. But, alas, networking and leveraging is the fastest way to release your business from obscurity and get on the best sites the web has to offer relative to your niche and target demographic.
Break out of your comfort zone and learn about guest posting and network with your extended social circles to reach up to bigger sites and get their attention. Often this process results in your having to spend far less time link building and getting social buzz, because a big site’s visitors will do that for you once they see one of their favorite, trusted people endorsing you by letting you guest post for them.
Three
Be Consistent: People who jump around too much in their marketing, or worse, have no solid marketing plan at all, are almost always guaranteed a permanent stay in obscurity land. You can’t do everything possible to market yourself or your site. There is more opportunity to spread the word than there is time in your day.
So, you have to stick to being consistent with the big 4 social sites: G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for example. And you need to list what your priority marketing activities are each day and do them, consistently, every day.
While it may look like a popular competitor of yours simply gained their fame overnight, the truth is they were consistent in the things they did on a daily basis to market themselves to build up to their current popularity. Patience and consistency are virtues of successful online marketers.
Four
Interviews: Reach out to a big site owner, expert, author, or celebrity in your niche and offer to interview them. Of all the ways to get an expert to take the time to do something with me, the easiest and most successful has always been the biggest appeal to their egos and need for others to market them.
When I was doing Webside Chats regularly, I was rarely turned down for interviews. The result for me was being able to been seen talking with Gary Vaynerchuk, Darren Rowse, and many other notables in my market. The result for them was easy exposure to my audience and social networks by answering a few questions. Easy work for them, and it is ego and marketing driven, so they are super willing in most cases to get on interviews even if the interviewer doesn’t have the kind of reach they are used to getting with bigger outlets.
When I interviewed Vaynerchuk for his first book launch, he went right on after our 30 minutes to be interviewed by a major media outlet. People like Gary understand the value of doing interviews with all sizes of outlets and his popularity now speaks for itself.
Five
Lightening Strikes: …at any time and often in the most unexpected ways. Going big on the web is not always a linear process defined by the amount of time you put in. It is something that happens to people who consistentlycreate their own lucky breaks by consistently giving themselves more chances for lightening to strike.
You must be ready for it to happen any time. A chance meeting at a conference with a thought leader in your market. Or an email from such a person who saw your guest post on their peer’s blog. You never know where it is going to come from, but you must be prepared and expect it to happen at any time, especially if you are doing some or all the things in this post on a regular basis.
When someone you know or follow suddenly gets a big piece of publicity, or a business-boosting link from a big site, or a book deal or any other lightening strike, study what happened. Figure out what they did that caused lightening to strike and become better and better at turning yourself into a lightening rod for attention, branding, and notoriety in your market.