Marketing via content and getting it in front of people

One hard part of being a consultant is that 'you are the business' therefore you are your own marketing department.

Given this, I want to get my content in front of as many people as possible.

I could pay for this via advertising, but much of my content is 'value add' i.e. it doesn't sell me, it builds up authority through the authority of the content.

I would rather see it spread 'socially', i.e. people like the content and retweet it or mention it online via social media etc. But that requires that they see the content in the first place.

Therefore I have started looking for aggregation sites to feed my blog content through.

There seem to be two types of aggregation:

- we share anything in the rss feed
- curated where the moderator chooses what to show

I subscribe to many of the 'we share anything' feeds and I do put my content through those. As a reader I occasionally find it useful because I stumble across a blog I haven't read before, but there is usually a lot of low quality noise as well.

I value more the moderated feeds. And I have just submitted my blogs to a moderated feed. With the first of my posts being 'accepted' into their feed.

The statistics for that were surprising. There is a page count on most aggregated feeds. And page counts or view counts are not all created equal, so they can't be trusted, but... the page count difference between the aggregated version any my blog version were large.

At the time of writing:

- post on my site 114 views after 6 days
- aggregated version 1135 views after 2 days

It is too early to know if people are reading the article fully, or if it actually drives more traffic to my other sites, or if it will lead to increased product sales. But, it is early enough for me to look for more moderated syndication sites to feed into.

I'm doing this first before 'guest posts' or 'articles' on other sites simply because this allows me to build on work I'm already doing. I haven't considered 'guest posts' or articles on other sites yet. But clearly that is a future option for me to explore and when I do, I can compare the impact.

Take Action Now:

- Identify blog aggregation sites for your specialism and add your blog feeds to them
- Identify moderated blog aggregation sites for your specialism and if you like the moderated content that they show, then submit your site
- Look at the 'successful' posts on the moderated aggregation sites and analyse why you think they succeeded and 'spice' up your posts with those ingredients.