Some marketing research somewhere says that I have six seconds to grab your attention before you point and click your way elsewhere. I really don’t know if that is accurate but since I don’t need the exact number I am not going to look it up.
What I know is 763 Reasons Sexy & Smart People Use Facebook is the sort of goofy headline that will generate clicks and that if I ask people to take a moment to read beyond the first few lines some will.
Don’t worry I am not going to bore you with the 1,983,382 post about how to improve your social media marketing with Facebook. This won’t be the post where you get to hear again about the need to provide great content and how the Facebook algorithm likes images.
Although I will tell you I like Twitter’s Tweet activity dashboard more than I like Facebook’s insights, but that is a different topic.
Organic Search, Links, Writing Samples & Boring Subheads
A few years ago I was at a summer barbecue and a doctor asked me if I could spend a few minutes talking about social media and how it might help his practice.
We spent about fifteen minutes discussing various platforms and talking about how he might use them to build a presence online. He told me he didn’t want to spend a lot of time working on building his readership and asked if I knew any tricks to move things along more at a brisker pace.
I told him I wanted to bring back the washboard abs I had when I was in my twenties but that I didn’t want to adjust my diet. He said there were things that could be done but that he wouldn’t suggest taking those shortcuts because they probably wouldn’t meet my long term goals.
I smiled and told him I felt the same way about building a readership online.
We spent a few more minutes talking and he asked me if I would consider helping him by setting up a blog and writing some posts for him. I told him I was happy to schedule a time to discuss my rates and he was surprised.
He said he would consider paying me but that he wanted to see the quality of my work first. I asked him what he would do if new patients said they wanted to be treated first before they decided to hire them and he said that was ridiculous, after all he was highly trained.
I told him I never work for free, that I am highly trained and that if what I do is so easy everyone would do it.
As me what I want to do with Joshua Wilner and I’ll tell you it is my cyber home and part of a living portfolio where people can see samples of my writing. A place where you might read thoughts about when we were the kings of summer camp or read a story about a doctor who didn’t understand time is worth something to everyone.
One of the goals is to spend my free time producing content that will build community, authority and lead to an increase in organic search results. When people insert my name into search engines I want them to be led here where they can read a boring subhead like Organic Search, Links, Writing Samples & Boring Subheads.
Why?
Because if they are looking for information about me I want to have some influence over the results. I can’t control everything that is found but I can try to manage it.
To be clear, I am not aware of anything that is detrimental or hurtful but I figure that if current or prospective employers search for information I might as well try to have a say in what they find.
How Do You Build A Presence Online?
The simple answer is you produce useful, interesting and entertaining content and you do it for an extended period of time. If you are like most single acts and you don’t have a marketing budget it is really important that you sustain your effort because it is so noisy, chaotic and cluttered out there it is hard to get noticed.
But if you use your time strategically and start commenting on blogs and groups in which you want to get noticed and produce the aforementioned useful, interesting and entertaining content good things will happen. People will start to visit and link to your blog and eventually you’ll begin to show up in search results which will drive more organic traffic to your site.
Of course if you use silly headlines like 763 Reasons Sexy & Smart People Use Facebook you’ll have an even greater need to produce solid content so that the readers who come visit you feel like their visit wasn’t a waste of time.
What do you think?
