One of the aspects of starting Talotics.com that I have found interesting is the notion of “Starting from Scratch”.

I am a Software Consultant, and have built a profile in that industry over the span of a decade and have gradually adopted blogging, YouTube, book writing, and all the ‘.etc’ elements that are associated with Becoming a Recognised Expert.

With Talotics.com I am back to square one. I’m communicating my lessons learned and tactics adopted for marketing, with the ‘success case study’ examples coming from my Software Consultancy work, and my ‘growth case study’ work coming from Talotics.com itself.

And there is something a little unsettling about seeing 0 followers on Twitter and Instagram when I’m used to 000s and 00s.

But, it makes me realise that one of the attitudes that is important for growth in marketing is the belief that it will happen.

If you expect it to happen overnight then it won’t. The world is saturated with content, data and information. This blog post barely registers a ripple in the ocean of content.

Therefore we have to adopt strategies. There are fast growth strategies that lead to increases in vanity metrics:

• follow/unfollow strategies
• like/comment on anything strategies

The above can actually be automated.

But I don’t want vanity followers. I want people to consume my content and find value in it.

This is especially true when creating content to grow your business or create a market for your products.

Therefore a slower strategy of adding value with content. And then identifying how to get that content into the hands of people is important.

Some strategies that we have for that:

• Tagging
• Aggregation
• SEO
• Networking

Tagging

Using Hashtags is vital for gaining attention.

Content aggregators use hashtags to find content that their users might want to re-promote to fill their content pipeline.

Machine Learning algorithms use the hashtags to identify related content.

We have to be careful not to enter a swamped hashtag where the hashtag no longer reflects is wording e.g. have a look at socialmediamarketing and contentmarketing on Instagram.

• socialmediamarketing does not match the wording anymore, and it is almost 4,000,000 posts
• contentmarketing still seems to match the wording and has only (only!) 750,000 posts

I will avoid socialmediamarketing in my hashtags for Instagram.

All of which means we have to to hashtag research before blindly jumping in and using the hashtags.

Aggregation

We can hope for some automated aggregation by using hashtags, but we also want to try and identify blog aggregators and news sites which will either automatically syndicate content or manually filter the content before re-promoting it.

I know aggregation sites for my normal domain of expertise but I am still researching aggregation approaches for this marketing domain.

SEO

Adding titles, metadata into our blog posts.

This is something I have yet to do.

I started with an experiment to see if that was still needed, just in case the search engines were now using content rather than meta data, and while I think they are getting better, we still need to adopt good SEO practices for that.

I have a todo list to identify the SEO improvements that I need on the site.

Networking

By this I mean identifying influencers in your domain, following them, and then commenting,liking, re-posting their content - with added value.

And I think the key her is ‘with added value’.

When you retweet, add a comment, to explain why this is useful.

When you like, be selective about the items that you like so you are providing feedback to the creator.

When you comment, add value that adds to their observation i.e. additional examples. Paraphrasing their content (at the risk of filtering out important nuances) is a dangerous strategy. And questions are a dangerous strategy at first, because you haven’t added value. If you do ask questions then try to ask questions that can lead to new content ideas for the Influencer because then you’re also adding value.

TODO

These are the ToDo Items I mentioned above that I still have to complete (at the time of writing):

• Identify blog aggregators for social marketing domain
• Identify SEO improvements for this site
• Identify and engage with Influencers in this domain.

What are your ToDo Items? Or what have you already done that I missed?