Are you looking to earn a living online? This is the final article in a series of posts on the 3 Simple Steps To Earning A Living From Your Skills Online.
Imagine this:
It’s a Friday night, and you’re dressed to kill!
Your Limo pulls up and as the Chauffeur opens the door for you, you’re greeted with camera flashes and several screams.
And they haven’t even seen you yet.
Then you finally step out and the chaos increases. As you walk down the red carpet, fans from both ends of the aisle stretch out their hands just to either get your autograph or touch you.
The paparazzi, with their natural annoying nature, engulf you in white camera light.
But you’re not bothered, so you smile all the way and greet a few people.
As you reach the end of the carpet, you give your final handshakes.
Then with an air of confidence, you enter into the building for that all-important event you came for.
By all standards, you earned this!
We all want that celebrity status. That point in our lives where our names and brands create a lasting impression.
The truth is we can have it all. But there’s only one way to get there.
Earn celebrity status with promotion
Nothing goes viral without constant promotion. No one attains celebrity status without promotion.
You won’t make a dime online without promotion.
With the several methods of promotion available to us, it can get really confusing settling on which one to use.
And in digital media, promotion is sometimes the hardest part of marketing. Yet it’s also a critical aspect you can’t ignore.
For this reason, we’ve had gurus come up with a million and one ways to promote yourself online. From driving traffic to engaging people.
But like everything else, you have to get the foundation of all your promotion right.
What am I referring to?
The bedrock of all successful online promotions
Promotions are a form of leverage or tool to either get you in front of more people or help you get more customers who will pay you for what you do.
And the purpose of this is to get them to come back to you.
You want to promote your personal assets so that people have a place to come back to when trying to check you out.
Some solely share their work on Social media, without thinking twice about what could happen if for instance, their preferred social network changes the rules one day.
For this reason, one of the first things to put in place is your website.
Let’s look at it this way:
Why do you save your money in a personal bank account?
Because you want to have full control over it. You want to know what goes in, what comes out and be in control of all its resources.
By using social media as the sole home of your brand, you’re simply saving money in another person’s bank account.
If for example, you’re solely building your brand on a Facebook page (without a website), you’re saving money in Facebook’s bank account.
One day, they could lock you out, revoke your access, sell out or shut down their services, leaving you without all that saved cash you’ve worked for over the years.
And there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it.
However, with a website, and a good system in place to retain those fans who want to know more about you, the reverse is the case. You simply use social media as a tool to promote your work, instead of it being the final destination.
Makes sense eh?
A darn simple workflow for promotin your work
As complex as online marketing is, there’s always a very simple process to everything. A lot of the complexity stems from the multiple “inventions of men”.
When promoting online, one of the most important things to note is to always write for the people you want to reach. This is why it’s so important to know who your target customer is.
Why is this important? Well, because of the workflow below:
What this means is:
- Publish content on your site that’s quality enough to get ranked by search engines.
- Share on social media.
When you solely promote on Social media, what you get are views, reactions, likes and more reach for everyone who encounters your brand.
You can’t exactly claim them because they are still random fans who can easily get distracted due to the multiple promotions being published on Social networks.
When you start from a well built website and promote on Social media, you have the opportunity to:
- Convert a fraction of those social media power users into website traffic, readers, subscribers and then customers.
- Get visibility when people search for the problem you solve or the kind of solution you provide through Google or other search engines.
Why settle for just social when you can have the best of both worlds?
To get traction with this workflow, you do need to employ any or both of the marketing methods I talked about in the previous post in this series.
For example this could be:
- Promoting your videos on YouTube or Facebook with a call to action for people to come back to your website for more stuff from you. This way, you get more video views, likes, comments, shares, a chance at going viral, traffic back to your website, an increase in subscribers, and some sales if you have something to sell.
- Sharing your written content from your website to Facebook or Twitter and then running them as ads. You still get the above benefits.
- Posting your quality content (either articles, images, videos) on your website so that they appear in search results and you get traffic when specific words are used as search terms in Google.
- Posting your quality work on your website so other bloggers and website owners can’t help but link to your work.
Promotion is a never ending cycle
Crowd begets crowd. The more you share your work, the more authority you build.
Eventually, it’ll gets to the point where you no longer have to do the sharing every time. You publish, your readers share it to their friends, and their friends come back to your website and repeat the process.
Well, that doesn’t happen easily though. But it’s something to look forward to.
This article is the third in a series of posts on the 3 Simple Steps To Earning A Living From Your Skills Online. Learn the right way to promote your work online in the next post.
