6 online spaces where you should be growing your presence

Digital marketing, if you do it the right way, can literally put you all over the place. For every business out there, there’s a need to be seen, heard, known, and trusted.

Now, trust is something you can’t buy. It’s not even something you can gain by “mere” presence online.

The presence we are talking about is an authoritative and still friendly one. You are expected to be knowledgeable, understanding, inspiring, and patient.

This is the kind of presence where you learn to give it all away without expectations.

Digital marketing is a little like mother’s love. You just keep doing it without conditions, expectations, or even hopes of returns.

If you think you have the resources for this, you are wrong. The right tools are all over the place, including right under your nose.

• Using IM Creator and Duda, your website — and its mobile version — can be up in an hour.
• HootSuite can help you set up social media updates for as far in the future as you like.
• Campaign Monitor and MailChimp can help you template out your newsletters, and automate and analyze your email marketing campaigns.

You don’t need a fully laid out plan. Just start – that’s the key.

Once you get started, what do you now with the time on your hands? Build your presence, that’s what. Here are the web places you should frequent in order to do so:

Start at home

You’d have head this ad nauseum by now, but I’ll state it anyway: start blogging. Without existence on your own turf, there’s nothing you’ll gain by any sort of manifestation elsewhere. Pick a frequency for blogging per week, think of the best blog topic ideas you can for your target audience, and start writing away.

Eventually, your blog itself will command an impressive presence with a growing list of readers.

Build that email list

It might not be something you’d work to “build a presence on”, but capturing potential subscribers is perhaps the most important thing you might do with digital marketing. Email marketing, if this post by Jason Corrigan on Search Engine Journal is to be believed, has an ROI of 4300% percent. But that’s for you to convince your boss or your client, or even yourself.

More importantly, in the perspective of this post, a large subscriber-base is a community by itself. It’s captive audience looking to hear from you, waiting to learn from you, and eager to share what you have to say with others.

It’s the only channel in the entire digital marketing mix that’s private, one-to-one, and long lasting (as long as your email sits in customers’ inboxes).

If anything, stick to that commitment of building that subscriber list.

Image: GetResponse Email Analytics

Say hi to your web neighbors

Once you have blogging on, and active, it’s time to wake up the neighbors. Call it digital brand advocacy, influencer outreach, guest blogging, relationship building or whatever, but the point is to show up in the neighborhood.

Create a blogging outreach plan, reach out to other bloggers and influencers, and start writing even better blog posts to gain that attention you need.

Guest posting works, because it’s mutually beneficial to the author and the blog, and it adds value to the digital marketing ecosystem.

Get social

You started the awesomeness on your home turf, you went out to the neighborhood. Now, it’s time to get social virtually. Maintain a solid presence on social media, on the networks that make sense to you.

Aren’t all social networks built the same? No, they aren’t. B2B businesses find more traction on LinkedIn and Twitter while B2Cs have a lot going for them on Facebook.

Meanwhile, YouTube works great for video content and a ton of podcast hosting sites work well if you do audio. Ecommerce and other business dealing with images will find Pinterest and Instagram crucial.

Now, within social media networks, there are many other places to build your presence on. You could try being active on other businesses’ accounts or pages (which have a similar target audience such as yours). Better yet, you could hang out and participate in discussions on “groups” exclusive to the network:

• Google+ has probably been the most successful at creating a community-oriented social media site. Specifically, Google+ actually has groups called communities. You can browse these communities to find like-minded groups of people, and leverage this to build up a reputation and an audience.
• Facebook Groups can be another place to find communities, although these typically aren’t as active as Google+ communities.
• Probably more active than Facebook, but more B2B than Google+, LinkedIn’s groups can be a great place to find like-minded professionals. You can find these groups using LinkedIn’s search feature.

Join communities

Niche-driven communities around particular topics, problems, issues, or even brands have mushroomed over the years. Some communities are very specific while some others like Quora, Google+ communities, and LinkedIn groups can be large, and general.

Remember: a community is not a social network. A social network is a group of people who are held together by interpersonal relationships: friends and family. These people do not necessarily have common interests.

A community is a group of people who are held together by common interests. While some of these people might have interpersonal relationships, most of them do not. It is their common interest in a subject matter that holds the community together.

Don’t focus on the number of members, or even posts. Look for communities where people are actually interacting with each other. This is the crucial thing that separates a useful community from a vanity metric.

One of my favorite social media studies, conducted by the University of Singapore, found that subscription to a Facebook page did not create sales directly. The marketer’s posts didn’t produce sales either. Instead, it was interaction that led to transactions. When the marketer engaged directly, and when the audience interacted with itself, sales went up.

Crucially, direct interactions lead to price inelasticity. Interactions with others actually transformed the products into inelastic commodities. Clearly interactions are a must for loyalty.

A community that doesn’t interact with itself isn’t worth trying to capture visitors from. You want to be visible in a place where visitors are engaged and invested in the community. Also, keep an eye out for “regulars.” A community that doesn’t seem to have regulars isn’t a strong community.

All of this goes for forums as well, of course.

Image: Money Saving Expert is arguably the most popular forum for consumer advice, with over a million members and more than 2 million threads

Also note that in large communities, you’ll find sub-communities and sub-topics related to your business.

It’s not about what communities you join, though. Don’t sweat over that. Just think about how you can contribute to individual threads in these communities and make a difference to people.

You have expertise and knowledge (because you run this business); everyone else has questions and doubts. How do you answer in a way that solves their problems or expands their knowledge? Could you point your community members in the right direction? When need be, can you inspire, motivate, help, and go out that extra mile?

Communities are built on trust and value. It’s your job to plough the way to that path.

Be a spoke on content hubs

SlideShare has tons of slides and visually rich content, each of which tries to communicate something. Course marketplaces like Udemy and WizIQ allow you to “teach” and “train” your customers.

Uberflip is another content hub, while Reddit is a class of its own, combining the best of bookmarking, Q&A and discussion. Plus, there is the entire world of curated content with tools like Scoop.it and Curata that allow you to pick and choose from the information already out there and present a bespoke, packaged version to your audience.

These content hubs attract users looking for specific information, all in one place depending on what they are looking for. No matter what niche your business relates to, there’s a chance there’s a hub that already exists for it. In the rare chance that one doesn’t, start it. Show the world that you care. Curate some content, create some more, get visible, and be out there.

What are the different things you do to grow your presence? Which of these do you spend your time on? What’s working for you?