As they say, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. So for anyone to take you seriously with your jewelry line, style consulting or green marketing firm, you not only have to walk it (do the work) but you have to talk it (…well in this case, Blog it, Tweet it, Facebook it, Share it) And what you are blogging, tweeting, etc is your content.
Your content is golden. Reason why is that everyone is doing something. Be it a music career, fashion line or green guru, the difference between you and them will not only be who’s sales pitch is better but who LOOKS like they are actually doing something.
Take for instance you are looking for a caterer. You’ve asked all your friends and google the word caterers. You pick the top three caterers in your area and then check out their Website, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Lets assume they all have reasonable prices and an ok website presentation. But the one you will feel most incline to hire will be the one that just posted a blog post about the catering business, featured a recent project, tweeted all month about the locations/details of the different catering jobs and are getting Likes and Retweets from their Facebook friends.
Don’t get me wrong, its not a “popularity contest” that i am recommending but a “Hey I am alive and doing this” that I suggest for you to utilize in this new world of social networking. The other caterers that don’t seem to display much activity on their site will give you the impression, “maybe they are not even open…”
So how do you figure out your content? Basically, what do you like to talk about in reference to your business? Believe it or not, the more you speak about how you do business, the more people want to do business with you. Don’t get caught up with treating your business like a “secret recipe.” No matter how much you divulge your “secrets”, the work that goes behind those secrets is truly that special ingredient that makes your business successful. That is ingredient is YOU, so unless they clone you, they can’t take what you say and beat you.
How do you deliver your content? There are soooo many ways to do this that as soon as you finish reading this post, their will be new ways of delivering it. You have blogger, tumblr, linkedin, facebook, twitter, youtube etc etc. The key is to deliver it constantly and to connect all these social networks so that when you speak on one social network, the other ones speak too (so you don’t have to re-input on each network). And keep in mind, keep it short, no more the 300 to 500 words. I know its hard but getting the message thru before someones short attention span expires is much more valuable then to verbally masturbate every angle of a subject.
And finally, who has the time to do all this? Well no one BUT thx to technology, you can take one rainy sunday to sit down and write all this content in advance. Online programs like Hootsuite and WordPress allow you to schedule content in advance. So rather then sitting their on your egg till it’s time to hatch, you can put it on a timer and go walk your quack (i mean talk).