The Power of Social Networks in Promoting Your Blog

Of all the things you have to learn when building your blog machine, the most intimidating are the set of inhuman acts you're expected to go through to promote it. If you're in a situation where the number of people reading your blog is the primary driver of whether it will be perceived as successful, then you may be in this situation.

Many of us, however, have more selective audience in mind. For B2B companies whose goals extend beyond Search Engine Optimization, the quantity of your audience may not be as important as the quality with respect to your lead generation qualifying criteria.

Here's an example: if you're a B2B company and your blog's main purpose is to attract and help convert the uninitiated masses into qualified sales leads, would you rather have 10,000 unique visitors convert to 100 qualified leads or 2000 unique visitors convert to 200 qualified leads? No brainer, right? You'd rather have the higher number of qualified leads. There is an ROI for every qualified lead whereas there is no ROI for a unique visitor. You're not selling ads; you're selling products and services. Now, there might be additional value in reaching 8000 more unique visitors, specifically when it comes to long tail marketing goals such as lead nurturing, market presence, and brand value. But from a cost over measurable value perspective, you're taking the higher leads every time.

What if I told you that getting 200 leads out of 2000 uniques is easier than getting 100 leads out of 10000 uniques? What if I told you that the net value of those remaining 2000 uniques would be much higher than the net value of those 10000 uniques?

In learning about social networks, we're just now starting to learn the value of certain kinds of social interaction. It turns out that blogs, like tweets or facebook updates or LinkedIn updates or forum posts are highly contagious social communication events. And that a big part of the "virality" of these events is the relevance of the audience.

If your blog is reaching 10,000 people who don't find it that relevant, what are the odds that they take the initiative to spread your social communication event? Not much right? Their networks wouldn't think it relevant, and so they wouldn't add value to their networks by promoting it, and more importantly wouldn't see value from their networks for promoting it.

If, on the other hand, your blog is reaching 2000 people that are tangentially relevant to your space, a small number of them will be inspired to interact with you on your blog, further inspiring other readers to do the same and adding value to the communication event itself. But a large number might spread your highly contagious social communication event through their social networks. They'll click your "tweet this" button or comment on it in their LinkedIn group or link it through their Facebook status update. In other words, they'll end up promoting your blog for you.

The ROI difference between 10,000 not-totally-relevant visitors vs. the 2000 semi-relevant visitors may be more stark than just the difference of 100 qualified leads.