In the first part of this post, I discussed ways to encourage sharing once someone has read a post.
But before anyone shares your content from the highest hill in the twitterverse, you must convince people to read your content. This is a whole different challenge. This post will discuss best practices to put your content in play.
Reading
Again, in order for a post to be shared it must be read. There are certain things producers can do to increase the chances of visitor staying to read it:
1. Write a compelling first sentence.
Bloggers compete in the attention economy. Readers have no shortage of content to consume, but a fixed amount of time. Within this environment, you need to capture someone’s attention quickly …
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If you’ve ever spent 2+ hours slaving over a blog post only to have 1/2 a spam bot be the sole person to share it you may want to read this post.
Improving the odds of getting people to share your post starts with creating compelling content (or having a lot of money to give entrepreneurs). Assuming you can achieve this, there are certain considerations and practices that maximize the exposure available through social media.
The Sharing Funnel
You can visualize the content sharing funnel by working backwords.
For content to be shared, it needs to be read (unless you have a posse retweet jockeys).
For it to be read, a visitor must perceive that it’s worthy of their attention upon arriving at the post.
For …
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It’s no secret that including a link within your email signature is a simple way to promote your blog. But almost all people who do this still miss out on optimal traffic generation.
Few people realize that Google hides content that you’ve already seen in your inbox. For example, I just sent an email from my personal gmail to work one.
Pre-Send Compose View:
Default view from my work inbox:
The default Google view does not display the signature from my personal email. Why? Because I’ve forwarded messages to my work one already this week. Due to the fact I’ve already seen all the content within my email signature, Google’s default view hides it.
The only way to view my signature is by clicking the small …
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If you think of Quora as just a Q and A site, odds are you aren’t getting as much out of it as you could be. In addition to a playground to satiate my curiosity, I use Quora as a channel to create value in my life. Below are some of the less obvious way that you can leverage Quora to your advantage.
Content Syndication:
Quora is a great place to re-syndicate content you’ve already created. Every time I write a post, I check to see if I’m unknowingly answering a question on Quora. If I am and can provide some unique insight, I will insert content I’ve already created while linking back to the full post for additional context. Here is …
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After I made a purchase yesterday the cashier asked me for my email address. For the sake of my inbox sanity I respectfully declined. In alignment with my moleskin diet, I thought about this interaction for a good 15 minutes. It got me thinking, what is the conversion rate on this question and the roi on each email address?
Lets compare this with if she asked me for my twitter handle. Knowing that I’d have to opt-in to receive updates from the brand, I’d be cool with giving that away. Don’t kid yourself, we all want more followers.
Brands can derive a ton of value from their customers’ twitter handles. For starters, by following someone they’re potentially giving them a subtle nudge …
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