No matter what content you are creating, blog or YouTube videos, especially as a starter you always face a problem: where to get audience, how do I attract more traffic? Putting materialism motivation(monetizing your content) aside, when you create something and put on the Internet, it's naturally to think "the more views the better", because they are meant to be shared and watched and read, so the essential question all comes down to "how to get more attention".
Here I want to talk about why sharing your content across different platforms is important to grow your audience base and eventually how to efficient reach wider audience. As a starter a very often mistake we make is that we create a bunch of stuff and just let them sit there and naively believe "if this is a good enough content, people will find it", fact is, people will never find your stuff unless you share them.
Let's do the simple math here, let's say your content is a nicely done work, you spent lots of time and energy in it and if anyone comes across there's a 10% chance that they may decide to share it with his or her friends. As a starter your website or channel surely hasn't gotten that much of traction yet, so sometimes it is even hard for a video to get 10 views just by letting it sit there doing nothing. So it's a bad chance to have somebody happened to search for a specific title and happened to find you in search result because as we know if your content isn't popular it will definitely not be favored in search result by search engine. Now let's say that your content is good but not really awesome awesome, then there's even less chance to get attention because people are not going to share it even when they see it. All in one word, you need to share your content across all kinds of social media platform by yourself.
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| There's a difference between share and not share |
Now speaking from my own experience, I've done marketing for tennis club and hotel, I've tried YouTube and blogger career, here are some ways of sharing your stuff to get people noticed:
(with my rating from 0 to 10)
1.Facebook groups. If you just type "YouTube group" you'll get hundreds of results with name like "Sub 4 sub" "Youtube starter" etc. these are places people share contents and get attention from other creators. It's a first step, but it's pretty hard to get people's real attention because obviously, everyone in the group is a content creator, logically they are here to share their content, not here to see what you create, to be absolute honest, they have little or zero interest in you. So it's not quite a good idea to exhaust yourself in those groups, plus all those spams you get along the way is just not worthy.
Facebook group - 3.5/10 stay away unless you got no other choice.
2.Google plus. This one is another last resort sort of thing, because the platform itself is extremely unpopular, as y'all know that Google plus is pretty much a failure, you won't get much attention in Google + community, yes there are categorized interest groups on Google + but there's just not enough traffic.
Google plus - 2/10
3.Twitter. Well many people use twitter as promoting tool for their content, it's simple and easy, you don't have to say much, just put the link there, put some key words and hashtags, good thing is when people search on Twitter, as long as you have the hashtag, they can find you. But still it relies on other people's action because what if nobody searches anything related to your topic, and you don't have tons of organic followers on twitter, then still it won't be seen. However it's a nice way to keep your stuff constantly under people's radar, at least.
Twitter - 4.5/10
4.Reddit. Now this is the real deal, guys. Reddit is a place designed to share interesting things with people who are genuinely interested in this specific topic, it's not a place where people drop their link and run, it's actually hard to drop and run because there are just too many interesting stuff on there, you just can't help but linger a little bit longer on it. Anyway, to submit a link you need to read the rule of the specific subreddit, sometimes they don't allow a certain type of content existing in their place. As long as you have interesting enough content, and come up with a nice title, you will get views for sure, as for how many views can you get, it all depends. When I shared my Youtube videos in Facebook groups, I get only a handful of views if lucky, if not people just spam you with "like for like","sub for sub", no actual views. But here on Reddit, from my experience, if I do the submission right, I can get a hundred or hundreds of views easily. Recently I shared my vlog in Venice in subreddit "travel" and "venezia" and it got 272 views in just 24 hours, in comparison most of my other videos are like 3 or 4 views and some of them are just caused by myself reviewing and adjusting the video. Previously as I was doing marketing for a tennis club, I shared some training footage in "tennis" subreddit with titles such as "There's no age on tennis court" featuring an 80 year old man playing tennis at our club, and "7 year old little champion vs adult amateur", "how fast do I hit the service" and "Some baseline rally with previous ATP pro" etc. They all got very good attention, people react on reddit to my posts, they leave comments and give advices on your game play and such, naturally the views of the videos raised to hundreds even a thousand.
More extreme cases, when you caught something fun or extraordinary on camera, you may potentially just go viral. I shot a footage showing some water trapped in between the double layer window of a bus, and the water moves back and forth as the bus accelerate and brake, I dubbed it "Acceleration visualization ...." shared on Reddit, got over 8000 views, became my most viewed single video. People really loved it, they shared it and had discussion in the comment section.
So much said, I'm gonna give Reddit a solid 8 for how much it proved itself useful in promoting.
Reddit - 8/10
These are a few platforms I use or used to use, if you have other ideas you can share with us in the comment.
Now I want to talk about another strategy, that totally differs from directly sharing your content to a group or forum whatsoever, as you know I'm running a project called "Solar Power Venice", basically at this early stage it just works as a media tool to share latest solar news and product reviews and relevant articles with people, to raise the awareness of solar energy. Anyway, I have this facebook page "Solar Power Venice" and I regularly update it basically everyday, however, not much reach and pageviews achieved, because of the reason I said, nobody finds you unless you share it. So what I do is not to find a place to tell people "please follow this project, this is helping local community, it's non for profit blahblahblah", instead I share the news I shared in a facebook group with 19 thousand members dedicated to Elon Musk, as you know Elon Musk is also the founder of SolarCity, solar energy is one of his biggest concern and interest, so my post in that group works out really well, it gets hundreds of reach on average, and even some likes and shares in the group.
What I'm suggesting is, you don't always have to promote your stuff itself, you may choose a way around it and promote your stuff just along the way, people get useful information and you get attention nonetheless. That was just an example, I'm sure if you understand the rational behind it, you can come up with even more efficient strategies and interesting ways to spread your content around the world.
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