Content Marketing Profits: 10 Tips to Unlocking the Secret Key

How much time and effort do you devote to Outreach - connecting with others, leaving blog comments, responding on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn? This is an essential key to successful blogging, and essential to making your content marketing efforts profitable.

If you're like me, not enough, I'll bet. We (I mean me!) are so driven and task oriented that it's easy to forget to reach out to others.

I'm really writing this for myself, you see, but maybe you can relate. For example, I have a list of things to do, and I plow through those things, checking off as I go...and I'm pretty good about getting most things done.

But the one thing that often gets left til last is reaching out to others, finding out what they're doing, reading their blogs, commenting, and checking their tweets on Twitter.

I should take that back, it's not entirely true. I visit Twitter daily, sometimes 2-3 times. I get several emails a day from a service SocialOomph which gives me all the tweets in certain keywords I track.

The reason why this is so important is because without others, your products and services will remain a "best kept secret." You can create all the content in the world, have the best marketing strategies, but if nobody knows you, you won't get read, won't get found, won't turn your content into dollars.

Nobody cares until you care about them.

I'm not spending enough time with others. It's not that I don't care, I do, but I tend to lurk and read at social sites without speaking up, without connecting, without truly being social. What good is it to use social networking if you're not really social?

When I was in school, I was the kid reading a book during recess. Later, when we had dancing at lunch time, I was an observer, but I never felt cool enough to join in. (I made up for all that when I spent  years in Paris, many nights in clubs, and at all the cool European hangouts. But that's another story for another time.)

Last week when I was interviewed by Joan Stewart, aka The Publicity Hound, about Time Saving Tips for Smart Business Blogging, I shared my CODA system: there are 4 major keys to successful blogging:

1. Content
2. Outreach
3. Design
4. Action

The most overlooked key to successful blogging is Outreach, all the things you can do to get your blog and your business well-known. You do this by participating in social media, and by connecting in a helpful and generous manner with other people.

Here are my tips for reaching out to others on the Web, essential for getting more traffic and making your content marketing profitable:

Content Marketing & Blog Outreach

1. Find other blogs to read and comment on: This will keep you informed, build partnership possibilities, & get you new traffic
2. Use Alltop.com to find blogs in your niche; Build your own Alltop favorite blogs page
3. Make sure you're monitoring the conversations & keywords on your favorite social sites
4. Twitter: Track keywords, use SocialOomph.com, do searches
5. Facebook: participate, respond
6. LinkedIn: use the Answers feature
7. YouTube: Do a 30-60 second video tip clip, refer to your blog post
8. Other sites: special groups, forums, membership sites, Amazon reviews
9. Subscribe to and read other people's e-newsletters, reply to them
10. Do web searches for your keywords, find out what others are doing; when you see something cool, email them to say so.

Just writing this post has inspired me to go over and respond to a couple of smart people over on Facebook and LinkedIn!  What about you, do you have anything to share about reaching out to others?

Comments

[Joanne Estes]

Thanks so much for that survey. I learned a great deal by answering the questions. Presently I am working on a wordpress blog about safe weight loss and your suggestions really helped.

[Beth Robinson]

For me the most difficult thing about outreach is making sure I'm reaching out to and paying attention to the appropriate group of "others".

In content marketing we always need to be paying attention to what our prospects and customers care about. But their problems aren't always what fascinate us, it's how we can solve them with what we know. So it's more natural to hang out and be social with the other people in the business of solving the problems and show them what we're doing and appreciate what they're doing.

But that social circle is really only a small part of who we really need to be reaching out TO.

You don't say otherwise in your post and probably figured that reaching out primarily to your biz audience is what you were talking about, but that difficulty of remembering who the "others" need to be is what popped into my head while I was reading the post.

A little bit of colleagues, which is good for many reasons, but a lot more of those who could use your services or products. I imagine some people find this easy, but I bet I'm not the only one who has to remind myself of it from time to time.

[Patsi Krakoff]

Thanks, Beth, for your interesting perspectives, always good to hear from you.

[Dave]

Super valuable, Beth! Thank you for sharing and for being social : )

[Advanced Acai]

Wonderful ebook... Very educational and helpful... Thanks for all you do!