IOF PSA: Marketing 101 for Bloggers – Social Networks

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So after Cajsa did her unbelievably thorough marketing pieces for Creators (mostly fueled by frustration- don’t get us started) it was mulling through both our minds that not only do Creators need some sort of SOP and content marketing strategies for marketing success, so do us bloggers.

This list is by no means comprehensive or complete. Blogging is a real time evolving thing. It changes month to month. Day to day even. You don’t have to write complete sentences to be a blogger. (see what I did there?)

Regardless, there are some things you can do to improve your blog’s marketing and traffic and I thought I’d list of some of those basics here.

First of all quit lying about not caring about traffic. If you didn’t care about traffic your blog would be private or invitation only. You DO care. The degree to which you care is what is going to motivate you to take steps to market your blog effectively, and how aggressively you market yourself.

We bloggers are peacocks of various ilk. That’s ok. It’s what we do. So then, where to start?

Social Networks:

It’s valuable to belong to them, because not only can you put up links to your most recent posts, but through conversation and contact you’ll meet people who might enjoy your blog (and you theirs if they have them). You might also meet creators who find your blog a valuable resource for promoting their products. Be who you are, be real, don’t be a sycophant or a suck up. We hate those people.

A few I can think of are:

  • Twitter – communicate with your friends list, get to know people with like interests and share your posts.
  • Plurk – the same.
  • Moolto – I personally joined and never have really much researched Moolto. You might like it – check it out.
  • SLUniverse – I don’t belong to SLU – or I do and forget. However there is a really thriving and active community of SLers on there and it’s probably someplace I SHOULD join.
  • The Official Second Life Forums – There is information from the banal to the totally fascinating being exchanged there. Give them more than a passing glance.
  • There is also apparently some sort of social networking on the official viewer. I can’t USE the official viewer as it hates me, but I’d recommend checking it out. I have no idea what it looks like or how it works.
  • Facebook – If your acct doesn’t get deleted, your avatar can have a facebook account and everything just like a REAL PERSON!
  • Flickr – participate in liking and commenting on people’s work on Flickr. Join Flickr Groups that pertain or are relevant to your photographs. Comment on people’s pics!
  • Other Blogs – yes, there are ARE other blogs. I’ve met some of the loveliest people I’ve ever known (looking at you Harper G) by reading SL blogs, commenting and then getting to know the author.
When using these different social media platforms, a word of caution. People who just post links to their blogs without interacting with the others are generally not viewed that positively. Interact. Get to know people. Make friends. 
And I wouldn’t believe the hype you hear about one platform vs the other. They all have value. Find the one one or ones that you are most comfortable communicating on, that has the people you LIKE to interact with.
A tool I use is that I feed all most posts via Twitterfeed to hellotxt to pump out to my various social networking platforms as soon as they are posted. This is great for when I’ve set up a timed post. If I’m on the road or at work, these posts also hit my social network platforms to be shared with my friends. And I can also have twitterfeed pick up posts from my friends whose blogs I support to share them.
Social networking is a fun and powerful thing. The best piece of advice I can give you though, is to remember that it’s supposed to be fun.
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2 thoughts on “IOF PSA: Marketing 101 for Bloggers – Social Networks”

  1. Harper Ganesvoort

    (BIG hug) Ah, gee, Gidge, thanks so much for the mention there! It’s been a pleasure knowing you and Cajsa, ever since your Vicious Days. (I still remember that costume party I attended at the island, when the owner came packing heat, and I suddenly found myself with only a katana in the middle of a gunfight [chuckle].)

    You make a good point about communicating that you’re out there to get more traffic in. I’m not much of a Twitter maven, but one thing I did was to tie both my Twitter and Facebook accounts into my Plurk account. Everything I plurk gets echoed on the other two services, unless I add the !TW and !FB switches at the beginning of the plurk.

    I might also mention 2ndHub as a service similar to Facebook, but exclusively for Second Life Residents — you need an SL user name to get an account. Also, the Great Joiner, Strawberry Singh, turned me on to about.me, which will give you a single unified page that you can add links to all your accounts, streams, etc. on, and then hand out the about.me address to your page. Very customizable to get just the look you want. If you’re curious, you can see mine at http://about.me/harperganesvoort. And last that I can think of is Diaspora, which has been plugged by Strawberry and several others as the way to go if you don’t want to worry about Facebook or Google Plus throwing you off for not being a “real person.”

  2. Pingback: Marketing 201 For Bloggers | It's Only Fashion

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