Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

Creative Social Sharing to Promote Your Blog

How are you sharing your blog? How are you making sure your content is found and then shared?

Are you promoting yourself via social networks, or are you leaving that to your readers? Do you make sure potential clients know about your blog, if you’re using it as a business platform?

Are you simply using the standard sharing options -?Twitter,?Facebook, etc – or are you thinking of ways you can be a little creative when it comes to sharing your blog socially?

Let’s face it, if you’re using your blog as a business platform then the more eyeballs it gets, the better for finding potential new clients or customers. Even a personal blog can benefit from extra visitors.

So here’s a few ways you can get outside the normal views of retweets and shares, and promote your blog to a bigger crowd that may miss it otherwise.

Social Sharing Groups

The most oft-used method of sharing a blog post is via social sharing buttons on the post itself.

These are either located at the top and/or bottom of the post, or to the side. I use a mix of both – Digg Digg to offer the floating share bar to the left of this post, and Share This at the bottom.

But why not take this a little further, and create a social sharing group?

For example, one of the best resources for traffic to this blog is Stumbleupon. This is a great social sharing platform that lets you “stumble” the web, and allows you to give either a thumbs up or down to the site you’re currently on (you can also leave a review if you like).

What happens then is that the site is put into the Stumbleupon library, so anyone else using the stumble option could land on your blog. If they then like it, they give you a thumbs up and your currency increases on Stumbleupon. It’s easier than it sounds, and it’s a great passive traffic generator.

So create a Stumble group.

Grab about 10 of your online friends, and help promote each other’s blogs. Anytime a new post is published, have one of the group stumble it, then you can give it a thumbs up.

You can then take this idea to other social bookmarks -?Reddit,?Digg,?Sphinn, etc.?Just make sure you also highlight a lot of other great sites too – don’t create the group just to promote your work, that’s just spammy.

Turn Posts into Ebooks

You blog. You write. A lot. Depending on whether you’re a niche blogger or not, you might have a lot of posts on similar topics, or even run a blog series of interconnected posts.

So why not turn them into an ebook?

The market for ebooks is huge, and offers a great way for you to either give back to your blog community for reading you, or sell them as part of your business offerings.

Write a crafts blog? Put together some of your favourite tips and publish as an ebook. Chef? Collate some of your favourite recipes and sell them via your blog. And so on – the possibilities for what’s in your ebook are endless.

I put together a bunch of my short form posts on Posterous as a free ebook with some simple marketing ideas, and so far it’s been downloaded just over 2,000 times. So ebooks are definitely a great way to both give back and get back.

Turn Your Blog into a Slide

One of the best platforms around at the moment is Slideshare. Essentially taking PowerPoint presentations to the next level, Slideshare also allows uploads of PDF’s, documents and other presentations.

It then turns these into slideshows that you can either grab the embed code for or download to your hard drive, as well as the normal sharing options on Twitter and Facebook.

You can even add audio or talk tracks, or turn your slides into mini-movies.

So working from your ebook idea, collate some of your best posts on a topic and create a presentation. Edit the posts accordingly to make the best use of Slideshare’s capabilities (perhaps a connecting image, statistic or similar), and then upload and choose your sharing settings.

If folks like it and decide to embed on their own blog, you instantly have a new audience. That could go one step further, and businesses could pick up your kick-ass presentation and use it as a training resource.

The next potential step from that is to bring you on board to expand on your initial ideas – so now your original blog post has become both a training resource and a client lead.

Just Getting Started

These are just three ways that you could take the normal social sharing option, and add a little extra to help promote your blog.

You could also use the WordPress application on LinkedIn, or?Networked Blogs for Facebook as another couple of alternatives. Or you could re-purpose old posts for publication elsewhere.

The thing is, just because you already have sharing options in place doesn’t mean you need to stop there. The great thing with blogs is that they can be essentially timeless, given the right post and topic. Why not use that?

How about you – what are you doing to extend the reach of your blog? Feel free to share your tips on what works for you in the comments.

photo credit:?sigmaman

You Scratch My Back

the price of comfort How much information is free information?

How much should be guarded and how much should be shared?

If you?re asked by someone, ?How do you do this?? or ?What methods work for you??, should there always be an answer?

Say you receive a request from someone asking about some of your business practices or approaches.

Do you always offer an answer, or do you feel uncomfortable giving them one?

Is there a limit on help or is it part of the whole relationship building approach to social media?

Take it offline as well. It isn?t just restricted to social media.

We build relationships every day because we want to help people and be helped where needed. We offer our experience and ask for that of others when we become stuck.

Some relationships move to a higher level than others. Some may even become akin to partnerships without the legalese to say so.

Yet is there a time to draw the line at how much free help is offered? Is there some help that should be viewed as a business service?

Where?s your line drawn?

photo credit: Genista

Are You Selling Baldness Cream to Seth Godin?

You like Seth Godin.

You hear he’s speaking at an event in NYC so you sign-up for your ticket. Others have signed up too because, well, Seth Godin always offers excellent knowledge and you want to catch up with the latest news from him.

There’s you and 200 other folks in the audience. Seth’s talking, and it’s awesome. You learn so much that you can take away and use for your own business. That’s the gold; that’s why you came.

The MC asks if you have any questions.

Other folks ask about things he was speaking about; he answers. They take notes and share thoughts on how that can help them increase their leads.

Then you pipe up.

“Great, Seth, but I think you’d really benefit from my product that helps bald men be more successful. We guarantee that you won’t feel awkward ever again, and you’ll be more successful with women and career prospects than you could possibly imagine. Because I’m here today, I’ll give you a 3-for-1 option on it – just let me know where to send it. Oh, and while I’m here, do you have erectile dysfunction too, because my company can also help with that.”

Yeah, right.

So. Are you looking to sell to the right audience at the right time, or are you just hitting blindly and hoping something connects?

Image: Squidoo Graphics

Social Media Roadmaps

This is a guest post by Kapil Apshankar, an innovative social media strategist. He writes about tips, tricks and techniques that help his readers score higher in social media at Social Media Notebook.

Kapil also maintains a personal blog, Spring Rainbow, which captures his life away from social media.

He can be reached via Twitter @KapilApshankar – or by email from his blogs’ contact pages.

Social media is one of the most misunderstood – and underused/abused – concepts of our times.

To borrow a term from Michael Stelzner’s lexicon, social media is indeed a jungle – where it’s very easy to get lost or get (b)eaten! We all need a roadmap for success here.

Chris Brogan had a wonderful post a few days ago – Sharpen Your Pencil – that talked about making success happen. The original post is a worthy read by itself – but one of the comments (by SocialSteve) really rocked:

This sounds similar to what Emmet Smith said at the induction of the Football Hall of Fame. He said something like he had dreams. And the next step after a dream was writing it down on paper. And then turning that into a plan. Maybe there will be a social media hall of fame some day. 🙂

Social media success strategies need to be customized and tailor fit. A one size fits all approach just doesn’t work.

Here are four key steps to build a custom social media roadmap – one that works for you.

Establish Your Base Camp

Your base camp isn’t Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Your base camp has to be your blog. Take it anywhere else, and you’re at the mercy of external forces to keep your camp alive. It just doesn’t work that way.

There is also the About Me page – the center piece of any base camp – that needs attention. To recap the wisdom of Darren Rowse,

Setting up an about page is really important ? it?s one of those pages that a new reader will head to in order to help them work out what your blog is about, who is behind it and to decide whether they?ll keep reading it.

Fortify (And Diversify) Your Primary Social Media Channels

The next step is to focus on your primary social media channels. In all likelihood, they will be Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn.

One rule to remember here is something I learned from Tamar Weinberg. Every baby is different, so also every social media channel is different.

Play to the strengths of each channel. Danny had written a wonderful post right here on the topic, How to Use Blog Lists for Your Social Media Strategy. And then, take them to the next level. For starters, answer questions on LinkedIn and get on Twitter chats. You want to get more from your primary channels.

Establish Secondary and Tertiary Channels

Social media without interactions is a monologue at best. Think about ways to make your social media interactions rich – both in content and semantics. Encourage comments, cross-comments and discussions. Healthy debates are good for everyone involved.

Also to think about are mechanisms for your audience to share more than just text – how about images, audio and video?

That’s also what I would refer to as your secondary and tertiary channels of the social web.

Think beyond the conventional channels – think YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, UStream, Vokle et al.

Keep The Big Picture Perspective

Social media is all about real connections that thrive on the foundation of trust, empathy and authenticity. Anytime we violate the Golden Rule, we dent our reputation and credibility. Everything that we do with social media should fit into our big picture perspectives.

It might help to define your big picture using the framework I laid down at Social Media Success – One Day At A Time!

What do you think? What other strategies are helping you build your own successful social media roadmaps?

Image Credit: nullalux