How to Create Your Online Buzz Club
Join friends and colleagues to promote one another’s online work.
Aliza Sherman
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How to Create Your Online Buzz Club
Hi there, The Digital Marketer here, ready to help you put the power of the Internet and technology to work for your business.
Do you ever wonder how to drive more traffic to your website or get more comments on your latest blog post? You might want to consider putting together your own online buzz club.
Whenever I post to my blog or publish an article on the Web, I always try to drive traffic to the content by posting a link on my Twitter page or adding it to my status on Facebook, Plaxo or LinkedIn. How can you let others know about what you’re posting online without always having to do all of the announcements yourself? An online buzz club can help you strike the balance between being informative and being perceived as too self-promotional.
What’s an Online Buzz Club?
An online buzz club is an organized network of friends, family and colleagues that supports one another to promote the content they all produce online. Instead of publishing an article on a website or posting to your blog and then waiting to see who sees it, you let your buzz club know it’s online and invite them to read it. Your buzz club, however, should also be willing to comment on your blog posts or better yet, share a link to your content on their Facebook page or in their del.icio.us account or to Digg it on the content rating site Digg.
The goal of a buzz club is to provide more opportunities for other people to see the articles or posts from everyone in your group and hopefully encourage others to comment or share the links to continue to expand the content’s reach.
Setting Up Your Buzz Club
Some things to think about when setting up a buzz club include
- make sure that you choose people whose content is complimentary and not competitive to yours
- pick people whose opinions you respect and whose content is high-quality
- establish the guidelines for the group in advance so everyone knows what they’re committing to, and
- decide before you start buzzing exactly which content sharing tools your buzz club will use
Not all sharing tools are useful to all content. Kirtsy, for example, focuses only on content by or for women so you need to make sure you’re not adding random or inappropriate content to any site or sharing tool.
To manage my buzz club, I’ve set up a Google Doc and shared it with my five buzz club members plus my assistant. When one of us posts the title and URL of a post or article we’d like buzzed, we let my assistant know. She then goes into the appropriate sites to publicize the content. Then she notifies us to go “buzz” it, Digg it, del.icio.us it, Twitter it, Reddit, Mixx it and more.
Caveats to Buzz Clubs
Before creating your buzz club, keep in mind that
- not everyone thinks buzz clubs are a good idea so be prepared for some push back
- some sites require consistent participation such as Digg and StumbleUpon so use these sites with care, and
- everyone is so busy therefore buzz clubs are only as good as those who commit to participate consistently
Keep in mind that not every post or article you publish is buzz-worthy. Be strategic when asking your buzz club to participate. You want everyone to feel the collaboration is useful, not annoying. Draw attention to – and ask for a buzz – for any of your content that has the best chance of having a broader appeal. The real buzz happens when many more people read your post or article and decide it is really worth sharing.
At some point, you may want to grow your buzz club beyond the core group of five or six people. Expand to people who are known to you or members of your club. Buzz clubs work best between people who already each other and have genuine connections rather than random content producers.
Bottom Line: An online buzz club can help you garner more exposure for the content you publish, however, for the content to truly be shared by others, it must be high-quality and valuable to a wider audience. Be thoughtful about the content you share and how you share it through your buzz club.
Contact Me
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Resources
Digg – Digg
del.icio.us – del.icio.us
Mixx – Mixx
Reddit – Reddit
StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon
Twitter – Twitter