How to Promote Your Blog Over Instant Messaging

Alex — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:16:37 +0000

Everybody on the internet instant messages. Whether you have a Skype account or an MSN passport, you most likely talk to people via chat. However, few people realize how effective instant messaging clients can be for promoting your blog.

Your friends, family, and online contacts are ripe for the picking when it comes to building loyal blog readers. Because you talk on a regular basis, you’ve already built up their loyalty and trust, and chances are, they’re eager or at least interested to see what you’re working on. This is the secret to promoting your blog without actually advertising.

Ask About Projects – Discuss Your Achievements

When talking online, ask your friends about their recent projects, and how they’re going. Listen instinctively, and offer up some insight. Then talk about your recent achievements with your blog, and ask for feedback. Your friends and family will probably visit your blog, and might even get hooked on it while taking a look around.

Hook Them In

Nothing else works perfectly but flattery, take it from me. Always talk about their website first and tell them how great of a job you think they have done. In the end, somehow get them to ask you what your blog is. I feel you shouldn’t be direct all of the time. You can use phrases like:

“You have a nice blog, the _______ is way nicer than it is at my blog!” – Point out something you think their blog is better in, and tell them that they have it better than you. This should hopefully spark their interest to see the thing they are better at, because it is an ego booster.
“Wow! That _____ is nice. How did you do that? I want to do it on my blog.” – You don’t even have to be really interested, but just ask hem what they did to do something you like. Maybe you really want it on your blog too, and that’s great you found a new idea.

Just make them feel like they have done a great job, build up their ego a little bit, and I am sure they will ask for the link to your blog.

Give Them a Sneak Peak of Your New Stuff

Friends are always begging one another for favors and freebies, and that includes sneak peaks at developing websites. While you might be tempted to keep things under wraps, showing off your online contacts will help you get feedback and build anticipation for your blog. Offering up the occasional “sneak peak” to your online buddies is a great way to get people talking about your projects.

Before the new design here was launched, I did this method myself and I let a few of my contacts on MSN see a close to completed draft of it. I received some insanely helpful feedback, I was let it on bugs, and best of all: I made a few people feel special.

The last reason is not a joke, I believe I did make the few people I showed the sneak peak to special. I created trust between us by showing THEM something that would have a huge impact on my blog. The results?

I got a lot of feedback on the design, and that helped me crush bugs and improve the design.
I rewarded those who have been loyal to me and my blog by making them feel immensely important.
I created friends that I still talk to everyday. They’re not just readers to me, their my new pals.

Ask for Help with an Idea

Similar to discussing achievements, asking for help when you’re stuck on an idea or task is a great way to promote as well. When your online contact is scouring your blog trying to help you, they may actually read the content out of curiosity, and become interested. In addition, your friends will see the help they gave you as an investment, and will visit your blog regularly to make sure everything is running smoothly.

There are two certain approaches you can go with here:

Be Blatant and Dish out your link (WRONG)

You can click on someone’s name, type your message and include the URL all in one message. I believe that to be the aggressive approach to this. Here is my message:

Hey, my header doesn’t align right in IE7, can you help? http://www.blogussion.com/

There are multiple reasons why i would not go this direction:

You seem like and look like one of those spammers who give you viruses when you click the link.
Rather than helpless, you seem like you are trying to force them to help you.
It looks like you assume that they can help you, or assume that they already said “Yes, I can help you.”

The next approach I recommend you go with to look better.

Slowing Down Your Approach (RIGHT)

This time instead of just giving out the link, I will show you ways how to work towards it. Here is an image I made for this:

Slowing Down Your Approach and Creating Trust

MSN is a great way to promote your blog to interested potential readers. As long as you keep form spamming your contacts, and be sure to act appreciatively, there’s no better audience than one that consists of your friends.

Blogussion » instant messaging