Struggling To Self-Promote Your Projects?
If you want to promote yourself, publish your thoughts, or showcase your work, you will end up trying to do lots of self-promotion. Self-promotion is sometimes frowned upon because it is considered as spam. But you have to do it if you want to be visible!
Here are some bumps I have encountered when promoting my work, along with a solution. (No, I’m not after your money. Yes, it is free.)
TL;DR Share web links to interesting content and get rewarded as a contributor using Relinked.com.
The Problem
Social networks are built in such a way that posts will dash through your feed along with a lot of noise. Noise is not fun and people can quickly lose interest. Even if your self-promotion is legitimate, your friends can miss out and there is not much you can do about it, except perhaps reposting again and again until your friends are completely blinded. This contributes to the self-promotion and noise problems.
Friend-Centric
Most feeds are “friend-centric”, meaning it is filled with what your “friends” are posting and you can only post directly to them. This is a great automatic curation tool because you probably like the same things as your friends, right? Not necessarily! Many posts in my feeds are vaguely related to what I want and rarely actually catch my interest. So, when I am posting in my feeds, I ask myself if I am only generating noise to others? Friend-centric feeds are great for self-promotion, but it is hard to stand out without contributing to the problem.
Non Friend-Centric
“Non friend-centric” feeds allow you to interact with people outside your network, but self-promotion is often prohibited here. You have to play the game of promoting yourself without actually doing it and you might not have the time for this. It makes sense to block self-promotion because some ill-intentioned people might spam a network enough to render it completely useless. It is thus way harder for you and I to use this technique for self-promotion.
Guest Posting
“Guest posting” is when you ask others to post content for you. You are already doing this when you get reposted. If you manage to find someone willing to do guest posting, this is a viable solution, but it requires you to change networks often to reach out to more people and not spam. To stand out of the noise, you need to do it a lot, ending up with the same problem.
Paid Advertisement
Advertisement is basically guest posting but to a very large network. When you advertise, it generates a lot of noise for which you are not charged, but rather pay for the clicks you get from pseudo-random targets. Repetition is said to be the key in advertising so your message is clearly received, but it only contributes to the problem further. To me, advertisement is just like paying someone to kill a fly with a shotgun.
What’s Left?
When you generate lots of content, promote it like mad and go on a quest for “likes”, you are making everyone dizzy. You need to present your stuff to people outside your network, who will feel compelled by it, without being an annoyance. The solution I’ve investigated is: they need to find you on their own, and only when they feel like it.
Should you just build it and wait? Yes, but here is a twist!
Of course, we get to the point where I must promote a solution and encourage you to use it. If you think you can go on and successfully do self-promotion, you can probably stop reading here.
If you are still with me, then you are wondering what you could do to get more views and help reduce the noise problem.
User-Centric
A “user-centric” network gives the power to the user. Feeds can be trimmed to focus solely on what the user likes. (That means unwanted advertisements can be eliminated.) If you show up in such a feed, it will be because your content is matching the interests of the user. Here, you can do all the self-promotion you want, but more posts does not mean more visibility. If a user notices and likes what you have to offer, strong bonds are made at the best possible moment! On the other hand, if the user notices you and tag you as an annoyance, he or she could block you. You do not want to slowly destroy your audience, do you? Being viewed when the user is looking for something exactly like what you have to offer is the best possible outcome for advertisement.
Looking for a way to do self-promotion, share interesting content and get rewarded as a contributor?
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