I recently learned that all four of my siblings and my mother read this blog on a regular basis. This is especially strange to me not only because I am the youngest of the bunch but because of how they each find their way here.
Small Sample….but. I was a little surprised that Mom and Caroline most frequently find their way here via the link I share on Facebook each morning. Bob generally sees the repost I do on Linkedin and if the topic seems interesting he clicks through to read. Bill and Kim just type in J-i-m-R-a-f-f-e-l-[period]-c-o-m when they feel like seeing what I’m up to. Incidentally, direct traffic is about 30% of all my traffic. Don’t discount that many people still just visit the websites they want to, when they want to.
How I share on the channels. From a social media perspective I share each new post on four main channels each day this way:
RSS/Feedburner(via email) – This is pretty much automatic now that I have it set up. By scheduling the post to publish at 4:30am central each day I automatically push it to the RSS channel.
Twitter – Four times throughout the day I schedule tweets to inform my followers that there is a new post here. One tweet also goes out at 4:30am via the @JimRaffel Twitter account as well, for those who prefer to ignore the rest of my blather but want to know about my new posts via Twitter.
Facebook I share a link to the post with a witty little comment geared more towards friends and family. Yes, I’m a salesman. I want you to read my blog, that’s part of why I write it.
Linkedin Much like Facebook but the comment I share is more business related. It’s always helpful to understand your audience and speak the language they are expecting to hear. (Unless your goal is to shock them).
How about you, which channels do you prefer?
Although your title says to use as many channels as you can for alerting people about fresh content, your post well highlights that there is an ethical way to do this without spamming.
I use the same methods for my new blog posts but I don’t ship my feed to Twitter more than once. Instead, I will send out a “most popular post of the week” tweet/link/etc to let people know what’s hot. This gives more weight to the post and gives the potential reader a sense of “must read” in order to not miss out on something good.
Again, awesome post! I love how your brain works!
I use the magic of syndication to flow my posts throughout the web, which sort of works, most of the time… Automation/laziness is my friend/foe I guess…
Thank you, my brain however scares me most of the time 🙂
I like the popular post of the week idea. May give that a try over the weekend. I feel like the four reminders are too many on Sat and Sun. Perhaps one and add the popular post as well. Keep an eye out for that.
My system is semi-automated….
My wife and I publish our food blog posts at night, so we tweet about them then. But we’ll also (sometimes) repost on Twitter in the morning for those who might be interested but aren’t on Twitter at night. And we link through our Facebook fan page, too.