If you are reading this article, you are most likely at a point in your career when you are thinking of starting your own website. We aren’t talking about a personal blog where you are talking about how your weekend went, this is a blog you are building for anything from helping others in a certain niche to blogging about the latest in the niche’s news.
When building a blog for something other than your personal life, it involves tackling the website as a business rather than a hobby. You must learn to effectively monetize, but that doesn’t occur unless you have a good standing and a dedicated audience. This is achieved through having a great online presence on a social network. How does that happen? We will go over improving your online presence through a social network today.
Your Life Isn’t a Business
One mistake that many websites do is mix their business life and their personal life together. There’s a very fine line for sharing your private life and website life on a social network. There’s also a difference between having a personal social network that outlines what you do in your business life and one that is your business life. For example, if you have a social network that you’ve had for years now, there’s no problem in pinging your articles you have published on your site on your personal Twitter. This is great advertising and allows your personal followers to know about your latest articles, more like in a way a friend would share an interesting article they found online on Twitter. However, the line is crossed when that personal Twitter is your website’s Twitter page. Your business followers won’t take you seriously if your tweet about expansion of your website is followed by a tweet about how you are going out with your friends to a party tonight. Your friends will get annoyed if they repeatedly see updates about a website that they may love and support for you, but may not want to hear about all the time. In a nutshell, keep them separate.
The Ingredients To Effective Sharing
To share effectively, you must look at your social network page as a poster or billboard. First, your page must be visually appealing and look professional. Second, you must have it easily sharable. For example, make sure your tweets are able to be easily retweeted, your Facebook messages are sharable, etc. Just like how your viewers wouldn’t be able to share a three foot poster as easily as a one foot one, they also wouldn’t be able to share a long tweet without having part of the message cut off. It’s all about presentation and being able to be sharable. Thirdly, you must remember to have a social network that readily makes use of the resources available to it. For example, on Facebook, take the time to have your website’s page fully filled out. No one will like a bare page, and if you wish for your page to look like it’s had traction, add some things on the page to not make it look like it was just built yesterday in a rush. Have a personalized or at least professional image, post more than just text, but also images and even video.
Where to Share
It is important to make your presence known on the web. At least have a page on Facebook or Twitter, and take the time to try out new websites you come across. Being ahead of the curve of social media is essential. For example, if you are a fashion blog, Instagram may be great for sharing some of your favorite outfits. But better yet, Pinterest may be a gold mine for you in terms of inspiration and more. Having a presence that works well with your website is essential for building your social network online.
Building a Routine
You have signed up and prepared your profile for just about every site on the web. Now it’s time to work on preparing a routine for sharing on the websites. If your social network has been bare for three months, you won’t get as many followers. This is due to the fact that current followers will get disinterested and new followers won’t see the use of following an inactive page. Building a routine of posting around three to five times a week is a good starting point. It may seem a bit much to some at first to post five times a week, but having something to keep your follower’s interest is pretty essential.
Engage
Finally, and most importantly, you must engage your audience. If you think that we already covered this point when taking about “building a routine“, then you are sadly mistaken. You must not only share on the social network, but you must also interact with the followers and get on some form of a personal level. Engaging will allow your followers to know that you actually care, and that will get noticed quickly.
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bbrian017 says
Hi Emmanuel , I can relate obviously as I’m the owner of Blog Engage. One thing, business does become your life, in fact it’s your life line. It’s what;’ allowing us to have a life, working a 9-5 is death for me and I will never do it again. I work 16 hour days on Blog Engage and I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Ivin says
For me, obviously there’s a separation between private life and online persona. But the closer they are to each other and authentic, the better for you.I have translated my commenting skills on blogs to other areas, and I use the same principles for social media as well. It’s fun, exciting and brings me great returns :)
Iroko@Content Marketing says
I think we differ on some point but according to Brian, our business eventually becomes our life but if we are not yet a corporation, I do think our social network should be different from our personal life, how do you expect people that do not know you at all to now buy from you, whereas you leave the people that have known you all their lives…think about it!
Abdul Qoyyuum says
I don’t think in Business you would expect customers to know all about you. I mean, if I were the customer, I would look at the products and services first and then the people behind them. Wouldn’t that make any more of a reason why a business should be promoted in the first place?