Why promotion & linking are key!

Well it’s all well and good having a website and blog, but if you don’t promote it then nobody but your die hard fans will read it.  Now die hard fans are very important and should always be recognised and rewarded, but if you want your website to be a living, breathing entity then you need to put in the effort to promote your site and link together all your key communication channels.

With a strong community of followers a blog and website thrives and allows you to make it work as an effective mode of communication for your personal and business needs and to allow it to pay for itself through sponsorship and advertising and/or selling your products and services to a wide audience.

So, with this in mind I’ve been busy getting Wealie’s World onto some of the key blog directories: blogcatalog, blogged, blogger, and MyBlogLog.  I’ve also been further linking the website with my key social media channels: Facebook through the NetworkedBlogs App, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and many more.

In the human body, it is the interconnection of the veins and nervous system that let the key organs do their job and interact, the same principle can be applied to your key communication channels, with the linking and promotion being the veins and nervous system.  In order for all our different on-line and social media channels to work effectively and in conjunction we need to effectively promote and link them together.  By linking all our channels together we create a virtual communications network that can tap into all the diverse communities available to us and take advantage of a truly wide demographic.

There are also pitfalls to not connecting together our virtual comms network, with so many potential avenues of communication available to us, we need to ensure that we effectively manage and control the information and messages we are disseminating from the different channels.  Without the bigger picture we cannot ensure that we do not communicate at cross purposes with ourselves, or worse contradict ourselves.  For example there’s always the chance that we will forget to update certain channels and the information contained on it will be out of date.

It’s very easy to sign up with lots of different social media accounts (I’ve done so today with the blogging resources), but if you don’t update and manage them all, they can work against you, just like the website that is out of date by 3 – 6 months can.  By linking accounts and channels together we can minimise the number of times you have to enter information into systems to update your channels, e.g. By linking your YouTube account to update both Twitter and Facebook when you complete certain actions like when you favourite a video, or upload new content automatically means you are just putting in the information once to  YouTube, but a status update will appear on Facebook and a tweet on Twitter.

And last, but by no means least, we must not forget our traditional forms of communication, we still meet face to face with individuals, word of mouth is as important as ever and paper communications are still a reality in our daily lives.  Make sure that all your business literature has the key social media sites and your website address clearly displayed upon them, e.g. the business card and headed paper.  Ensure that your email signature has direct links as well.  When you’re speaking with colleagues, business partners and customers, take a moment to remind them of the different ways they can keep in touch with you on and off line.

Happy communicating!

Wealie