We humans are funny things. We want to be invisible offline really badly. Yet we seek high visibility online while unwittingly cloaking ourselves like Harry Potter in a shroud of invisibility.
While scientists are getting close to figuring out real world invisibility tech, working their brilliant minds into pretzels over it, most website owners have already perfected the technology online.
How to De-Cloak Yourself in 2009
I almost hate to say it. You know it’s coming if you’ve been a subscriber for very long. But you must master a deeper level of social media prowess this year if you are going to become more visible in your niche.
The truth is, if you are not on the social platforms where your best readers, customers, and prospects are active, you are likely missing a big chunk, if not most of your market these days.
The effect? Invisibility. Congratulations! Some of the greatest minds of our generation have been struggling with this technology for decades!
Cutting Through the Noise With A Clear Signal to a Significant Group
To have a successful blog, you have to have a big following. “Big” is whatever you need in your niche to make a living off your blog. This means enough people are finding you and engaging with you that your words spread across the web finding you new readers, customers, eyeballs for your advertisers, and people who will evangelize you in their social circles.
But, the mistake we all made in the beginning of social media marketing was assuming that we needed to belong to vast numbers of communities in order to de-cloak our sites and make them visible to the bulk of our niche markets.
What we’ve found in 2008 is that people who build their blog presence via great content, word of mouth evangelism by followers on social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and keep their presence strong in fewer places, are the ones doing the best.
For instance, my presence increased this week just by focusing my efforts on a few things social:
- Replying to my commentators on the blog, and deep replies at that (keeping your fan base happy and engaged)
- Google Friend Connect (getting more people engaged in the right sidebar with GFC)
- FriendFeed – the number 1 aggregator of everything you do socially and everyone you interact with.
So the number of social sites you work with regularly (as in every day) should go way down in 2009. But the effort you put into the few “core” sites you work with should go way up.
When you engage in a community really deeply, the traffic is much better. Now you’re taking off your cloak of invisibility and being seen by more and more people.
Because with places like Twitter, your interaction can go viral through re-tweets and people you’ve really built something with telling other about you and linking to you. It really spreads.
But you must be present. And you must be genuine. And you must help first, receive later.
As you progress, you will find people finding you in the most unusual ways and becoming great followers, fans, customers, and evangelists for your cause.
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