Word of mouth is powerful. A prospective client, for example, will expect YOU to say how great your product or service is, but when Bob or Sue tells their buddy how brilliant you are, that REALLY has an impact!
With websites and blogs, word of mouth can also be an extremely powerful way to get your message to a wider audience. However, to benefit from it, you need to do 2 things:
1. Avoid generic content
Thanks to “Social Media Guru’s” telling bloggers they need to blog as often as possible, there’s a lot of generic content ‘out there’.
However, when you think of the articles, websites or blogs that YOU have recently shared with people, they will be the ones that stood out in some way. That was what made them worth sharing! Maybe it was an article that made you laugh out loud or a blog post that made you think about something in a different way. Maybe it was a powerful piece of advice or some information that gave you an answer you had been searching for.
What it probably wasn’t, was one of those awful, generic posts that get written when someone follows their Social Media Guru’s list of “50 things to blog about!”
Focus on quality, not frequency. I often blog just once or twice a week, because I will only write when I have something to share, which I believe is of value. I refuse to blog just to feed Google or fill someones RSS reader with crap.
As a direct result, this blog already has over 11,000 inbound links and an amazingly high number of readers / comments for a 4 month old blog!
2. Make it easy to share your work
You need to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content. If you look at the bottom of this post, you will see the ‘sharethis‘ link. With one click of that link, you can share this post with your friends via all the major social bookmarking websites. You can also ‘tweet‘ this post from there and even email it to a friend. I now get a stack of new readers from social bookmarking sites, often over 2,000 a day. By the way, I have no connection with the people who make sharethis, I just use it and like it.
I hope you found this useful – if you did, share it!