MAXimising your REACH

“Climb every mountain high.”

You’ve come a long way baby. Don’t underestimate that. And after all that, you want to make sure that people are appreciating your efforts. This is the point where I tell you how busy people are, how attention spans have become a lot shorter and how much content is already out there, yada yada yada.

Stand out
We already know you’re not trying to be everything to everybody, you’re trying to be really something to somebody. Doug. Hopefully you’ve thought of delivering something that Doug really wants, in a format that’s going to make him think ‘wow’.

There is a lot of content out there but a great percentage of it is crap. And for the most part, not that much thought has gone into it. You might find this hard to believe, but most people won’t have read Alice and Sophie’s Ultimate Guide to Content Creation, so this already puts you light years ahead of all of those people and means
that you’ll be creating blow-Doug’s-frigging-socks-off- type content.

Tell people
There’s no point starting a blog or an Instagram account if you aren’t going to shout about it from the rooftops.
Put it on your website, tell your customers face to face, put up a poster, have a launch party, email people, add it to your e-signature, ask people to be involved, collaborate, join #Write52!

Grow your database
One Doug probably isn’t going to be enough to make your business a roaring success. You need lots of Dougs. They’ll look at your content and there’ll be no question as to if they’re the type of person who it is meant for. You want them as part of your community so make sure you give them a clear reason to join (tell them what to expect and incentivise if you can) and an opportunity to get on board with a sign-up form.

Grow your following
You can also grow your social media communities. An email database is thought to be more valuable as you own it. Obviously, people can still unsubscribe but you don’t have Facebook deciding whether to include you in the algorithm or not. But social media definitely has a place. Master one channel before you move on to the next and ask your social community to sign-up to your database.

Repurpose your content
A blog becomes an e-newsletter or a video, this can in turn become a series of tweets or posts. Make your content work efficiently for you to get out across your different channels.

Who inspires you?
What do you like that other people are doing and why do you like it? What are your competitors doing that they seem to be having success from? How can you replicate this in your own way?

Put some budget behind it
You’ve got to spend money to make money. Use some of your marketing budget to test advertising and promotion or for outsourcing some tasks to do with your content creation and delivery.