Are You Posting Where You Should Be?

If you ask a DJ where they enjoy performing the most, they’d probably mention places where every song they play is met with a roar of approval, right?
On a recent podcast I guested on, I alluded to the aspiring online entrepreneur or thought leader consistently posting to online forums where they aren’t received well in terms of a small number of likes, comments, shares, and/or little to no sales. Even though a blog or marketing consultant might tell you that posting on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and/or blog ad nauseam will work, it doesn’t make sense objectively!
Even worse- if you’ve been told you haven’t made a sale or gotten comments on your posts because you have to build brand awareness for months- don’t just walk away- RUN — from that person.
Every post you make is the TIP of the marketing iceberg. Right after you create something your first thought should be — “Ok…now who ACTUALLY cares?” Ask yourself, “Do my friends legitimately care and are they incentivized to promote me and my online business or information?” Simply liking you isn’t enough and at NO point in time should you feel like they owe you. If at any time you predict the success of your business goals on shares from friends, you’re setting yourself up for an emotionally charged meltdown. (I’ve been there!)
A more productive/practical thought would be to map out where the person who would like and engage with your post is living online.
Where is their attention online?
What forums are they in?
What associations are they a part of?
What brands do they wear?
What Facebook groups might they be subscribed to?
What hashtags are they using?
What events do they attend?
What sites to they visit on a break at work?
Here’s a personal example. When I first started OctoNation, the largest octopus fan club, less than .001% of my friends cared. In fact, most thought it was silly & pushed that I should invest my time into something they understood as worthwhile. So instead of thinking emotionally, “Wow, NONE of my friends support my dreams!” I thought practically, “Ok — so who does care and how am I going to go about getting in front of them with educational facts, stunning photography, and incredible footage?” To date, I’ve brought together 140,000+ people who share my fascination with octopus. The only difference is now it isn’t so silly. (Ok, well maybe it kinda is… lol, but you know what I mean.) The point is, if you don’t know where your prospective followers attention is — then there is absolutely NO way to reverse engineer a strategy to “show up” in their lives. As a result, you will truly start to think it’s YOU who has the problem and it’s YOUR content that is never enough. This simply isn’t the case!
We are the DJs of our own content in the vast online world. Though there are numerous free places to share our ‘music’, we have to look up to read the audience first.
Hoping your next post is a hit,
-Warren
