By: Dawn Fotopulos
Melea Seward, a good friend and social media guru, said something that really made me stop dead in my tracks.
She said “everyone is so worried about getting a million followers on Twitter, what about the people that are right around them? They get ignored.”
Melea’s right. It was an OMG moment.
That sparked an idea. What if we could get a few people together to blog about each other’s businesses? What if by planting posts on high traffic websites about other people’s work and products, we created backlinks to their site?
What if we became advocates for one another?
That would create backlinks and elevate our brands in the mind of our audience. Since these are friends, they would know us really well. We’d be helping each other. We’d also be helping the world get to know these wonderful businesses hiding in the Bermuda Triangle of cyberspace.
All of us have people around us who already know us and believe in what we’re doing. When it comes to marketing tips for small businesses, the key to a successful blog party is to start with an audience that knows and trusts you.
Step 1: Write Down Your Inner Circle Network
Look at your network; family, friends, colleagues, college or school mates. Look at your suppliers, instructors, service providers. Now look at the key people in these categories who know you super well, love your products, talent or service. These might be the people in your first degree on LinkedIn.
Step 2: Identify Four People in Your Inner Circle in Non-Competing Businesses.
These are people who are trying to grow THEIR audience and need help too. They should be people who don’t compete directly with you or with one another. In order for this marketing tip for small businesses to work, it should be people who are comfortable with the web and basic social media.
Step 3: Choose a date and two hours when those four people and you are available to meet at a single location.
Step 4: At least a week before, the blog party host should create a program for the two hours.
First, you must have great munchies and great coffee present. It’s motivating and inspiring!
Step 5: The program should include: which websites will be promoted in the time you have together. The program should also include five high-value websites in the niche where the site owner wants his/ her URL to show up.
This directs the efforts of the other members. Check www.alexa.com to find sites in your niche that have great traffic. Also check to see if the sites are “no-follow”. It’s better to plant a brand on a “follow” site to start. My humble opinion.
Step 6: On the date set, be prepared to write at least two blog posts on high traffic sites for each of the other members. They in turn will do the same for you. Two hours is 120 minutes. If you’re posting 2 comments per other person (four), that’s a total of 8 comments in two hours.
That’s one comment every fifteen minutes. You can do that!
At the end of two hours, you’ll have 8 backlinks to your website. Isn’t that amazing! It might take you weeks to do that on your own otherwise.
Think about it. If you did this twice a month, you’d have sixteen backlinks a month. That’s 192 backlinks in a year. High quality backlinks from people who know how to speak about you. All these lovely things spoken about your business would be coming from third parties, not you. That matters.
The idea here is not to hype or hard sell. It’s to engage an audience with helpful ideas, products and services that can help them relieve pain or find their passion. Now, you’re not slogging it out on your own.
This is called leveraging relationships.
A Blog Party is a mini-swarm strategy.
It’s like crowd sourcing, except backwards!
Instead of “from many points to one point”.
It’s “from four points to many points.”
And the group you’re working with knows each other.
And trusts each other.
And wants to be incredibly helpful.
Marketing tips for small businesses is easy and fun if you know how. We have a lot more ideas for you, so stay tuned. We haven’t even hit our stride yet!
Dawn Fotopulos is the founder of BestSmallBizHelp.com, a certified Kauffman Fast Trac facilitator and a successful entrepreneur who has launched over 80 different businesses. Learn more about small business training and resources at bestsmallbizhelp.com.