Let’s face it: the more content you create, the harder it is for your audience to find your most relevant work.
So why not help them zero in on the blog posts, tweets, photos and videos that you (or others) consider to be your most valuable?
When your various channels are united, you increase your chances of…
- meeting interesting people
- discovering useful information
- streamlining your personal brand
- saving yourself time
And the best part is, you don’t have to do anything more than what you’re already doing; you just have to do it smarter.
5 Ways to Boost Your Own Relevance (by Repurposing Your Own Content)
1. Offer Your Own “Best Of” List of Top Posts.
Some of your blog posts are better than others. Those are the ones you want new readers to find most easily.
So group them together.
Amber Naslund recently summarized her own best work on Altitude Branding, so her visitors won’t have to hunt through volumes of information to find her posts about marketing, blogging and beyond.
In that same manner, I’ve selected an array of my own leading posts about everything from social media and philosophy to freelance and pop culture. I’ve grouped them all together on one page, which gives readers a shortcut to my strengths and an overview of the subject matter I routinely discuss. (If you’re reading this post on my website, that snazzy new orange word balloon in my sidebar leads to the same place.)
2. Keep Your Channels Where I Can See Them.
How many profiles do you think you’ve created across your various social media channels?
10? 20? 50?
Are people aware that all of your profiles exist?
If not, what might happen if they did?
No matter how I stumble across you, I should easily be able to find all of your other active and relevant content channels.
Thus, if I like your photos on Flickr, I should be one or two clicks away from your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts at all times.
And your blog. And your Etsy store. And anything else about you that I might find interesting.
(Hint: Don’t worry about what I might find interesting. Simply provide as many ways to find you as you feel comfortable divulging, and then let me decide how much of you I want to remember.)
3. Find Ways to Make One Type of Content Interesting for Various Audiences.
Video is not audio is not photo is not blog.
But it can be.
For example, when you’re shooting a video for YouTube, have someone else take photographs documenting the making-of. Then post those photos to Flickr, and link to the finished video from the text description of each photograph. And then do the same in reverse.
This way, regardless of which direction your audience enters the story from, they’ll have a means to see it through. And by seeing slightly different facets of the same subject matter, they’ll have a richer understanding of the whole.
(Tip: If you use Viddler*, you can embed contextual links to photos, blog posts, etc., within the video itself.)
4. Reference Yourself When Applicable.
Odds are, you’ve written or spoken about your topic of the day numerous times before — and the odds are equally good that whoever’s reading today’s post or watching today’s video has no idea what you said last time.
Link to your own previous work within your newer blog posts. If you revisit themes, point to the blog posts that led to them. Include plugins (like the one I use below) to direct readers to “possibly relevant posts” within your own archives.
Likewise, link to your own previous videos within your newer work. Include onscreen titles (or embedded links) directing the audience to your other clips, and mention those clips via text links in your video’s description. No matter what spoke your audience first finds on that topical wheel, they should be able to reach all of the others from any starting point.
And So On And So Forth…
Yes, finding creative ways to cross-promote your channels can be time consuming. But once it becomes a habit, you’ll spend less time finding ways to be individually interesting across multiple platforms and more time being contextually relevant in perpetuity.
And the more aware people are of the vast entirety of who you are and what you do, the more opportunities they have to care.
* CORRECTION: I’d originally cited Vimeo as the video platform with contextual embedding; I meant Viddler. Sometimes, I get my “v”-christened video platforms confused. (Hi, Veoh.) While were at it, Blip is wonderful too, but they don’t start with a v.
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Tags: audience, Blogging, branding, Business, common sense, My Social Media POV, networking, perception
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