The “Big 4” Promotional Tips
This article explains how to make the big four promotional tips work for you:
• Connect with brands in their target demographic.
• Target your audience based on their interests, not just demographics.
• Focus on creating a brand that people are passionate about and feel good about supporting.
• Keep your content fresh, relevant, and engaging without being aggressive or overly pushy.
Connect with Brands in Their Target Demographic
The first promotional tip is to connect with brands in their target demographic. What are the top 10 things that your target demographic would like to do? These should be the types of things they speak about online, on their own social networks, and so on. Even just knowing that they are interested in this type of content will encourage you to produce it. This is also a great way of building up your brand as you become more well-known among your target demographic.
Target Your Audience Based on Interests
The next promotional tip deals with targeting your audience based on interests. While demographics are important, they are also very limiting.
The key to getting ahead online is to build a brand that people are passionate about and feel good about supporting. What type of niche audience would they be interested in? What kind of things do they like talking about? Do the target audience members respond well to humour, reviews, or non-conventional information? The goal here is not to target just another demographic but rather a very specific niche within your given demographic. The more specific you can be with your niche audience the better it will be for both you and the brands whose products you wish to promote.
Create a Brand That People Are Passionate About
The next promotional tip involves creating a brand that people are passionate about. The point of this is so that people will support your work whether or not they are being directly compensated to do so. Getting a big enough following to where you can support yourself through your blog or social media page is a hard thing to do but it can be done. How do you get the word out? Well, let’s take a look at the final promotional tip for the big four.
Creating Engaging Content
The final promotional tip for this article has to do with creating engaging content without being too pushy or aggressive about products that you want people to buy. This comes down to being creative in how you share information about your product and how you ask for people’s help in getting the brand out there.
This article is based on a blog post that I wrote back when my blog was still new to the market. It's interesting to see analytics on how many people have read this article, the amount of comments and shares, and how long it has been online. Despite getting thousands of views since it was written, its popularity has waned over time due to the decline in interest in such articles (this is also due a lot to people no longer caring about new content as much – see Google's Panda update). And I plan on revising this article for its 12th anniversary later this year. This kind of thing is important to keep track of and be aware of.
If I did the same type of thing today, the analytics would likely show a lot more fans and a lot more comments. What makes this article so interesting is that it was written back in 2012, when I didn't have a very big following nor did anyone care about new content as much. There are already some wonderful comments on the article, which has been favourited over 200 times, so it looks like people do still read these kinds of articles and find them useful.
So what's changed since then? Well, my blog has grown significantly since then reaching over 190 thousand pageviews per month this past November alone. I have over 2000 followers on my Facebook page, 20000+ Twitter followers, and over 1200 subscribers to my YouTube channel. My blog also has several partnerships with big brands for exclusive content on my site.
In the past two years I've also expanded from just blogging about blogging to branching out and creating other digital properties like this blog, a podcast, a podcast merchandise store (which is only available in the US so far), a Facebook group for 'Foamheads', an online comic book store, a personal website which is linked to from some of these websites above, the aforementioned YouTube channel (which has quite a few subscribers) and many more.
I've also published two books, 'The Power of Introverts' and 'I Am Not A Slacker', co-host a podcast, created four free resources for bloggers and freelancers, built an online comics community (and an entire online comic), been interviewed on hundreds of websites and podcasts, changed my job to blogging full time (though this last one is sort of irrelevant to the topic) and many other things that are too numerous to list.
For the most part, people may not think of me as a #bigsetc blog, but I'm sure that this article will attract new followers and certainly benefits my future blogging efforts. I started blogging back in 2011 because I wanted to start my own website without having to pay for one and since then it has grown from just a hobby into an actual real business.
The big four promotional tips work for me because I have built my own brand that people are passionate about. My audience knows exactly why they should support me instead of some other person or brand who is trying to sell them something. I am very honest about why I'm promoting the brands that I do. This is important to me and is done purely out of a desire to help rather than to get free things or money.
This is one of the big differences between me and those who promote products they don't stand behind. For example, if someone asked me to promote their product in the same way that I promote my own (i.e., with honesty), then I would probably say no. Even if their product was really great, I would not promote it because I would not be able to live up to the standards that I have for myself.
It's important to find what you stand for, what makes you tick and it's also important to know when to stand up for it and defend your brand. This is how people will get past the hard sell and either buy whatever you are selling or switch sides. Branding yourself as someone who has integrity and cares about more than just money is key in this regard as well.
Conclusion
The four big promotional tips are how to maximize your footprint online and get more out of it. They don't necessarily have to be adhered to in full, but they are useful if you want to reach an audience that will care about what you have to say. As I've mentioned above, building a personal brand that people know and love is key in all of this. This is one of the biggest keys when it comes to building a successful digital business (our Medium posts have over 10,000 readers). Once you've got your brand and know what you stand for, then you can concentrate on the rest.