1 Million Impressions In A Week: 5 Lessons In Getting Quoted, Linked & Discussed

As most bloggers know, one of the main benefits of having a blog is the media hits and recognition from multiple sources that you end up getting accidentally and by design.  In terms of these hits and recognition, the past week has likely been one of my most busy since starting this blog back in 2004.  Though the "million impressions" referenced in the title is just a guess … below is a quick rundown so you can judge for yourself:

• BusinessWeek Blogspotting Blog – mention of my post on Facebook Campaign to save Business 2.0 magazine
• VH1 Blog – mention of Simpsons Movie Marketing post
• Globe and Mail (largest newspaper in Canada – Quoted in an article about Simpsons Movie Marketing based on an interview given by phone
• Library 2.0 Blogs – post about Library 2.0 linked across more than 15 blogs
• Daily Kos – mention of Simpsons Movie Marketing post

Each of these mentions have been big discussion and traffic drivers on my blog over the past week.  Thinking about how these links happened and how you can optimize your blog to get as much media as possible, here are a few lessons from my last week about getting found, getting quoted and getting linked:

1. Target new audiences.  When I wrote about the idea of Library 2.0, I was engaging an audience who may not usually read this blog.  Doing so in a positive way helped to drive new discussion about my post and open the audience of my blog up to a whole new group of readers.  To date, the post has been my top traffic driver to the site, indicating that there are a whole lot of forward thinking librarians loving the chance to finally feel appreciated.
2. Give them something to share. Soundbites work well for people to cut and paste into their own blogs or stories … but making it shareable means letting people forward emails with your posts from one to another, take elements of content, forward a URL and have an easy way to summarize your point.  If someone else can’t paraphrase it in a sentence, it won’t get discussed. 
3. Offer a linkable and useful resource. The Simpsons Movie marketing blog post is one that took hours of effort to compile and several updates to keep current, yet it is a great resource for anyone interested in the range of marketing that is behind the film.  The post has many links and images and as a result is linked to often for its thorough list and as an example of how pervasive the marketing for the film has been. 
4. Join a buzzworthy effort. You don’t always have to create something original in order to add value.  My post about how a Facebook group is trying to save Business2.0 magazine was in support of a group that had already been created.  The whole campaign is extremely buzzworthy as it represents a great story of people fighting back online for an offline publication they love (a brilliantly ironic story).  Being part of something like this creates a "halo effect" where the conversation about the topic drives interest and awareness and your voice goes along with it.
5. Make it easy to contact you. In my day job, I often find blogs that could be worth including in a marketing program or ones that would be interested in a particular idea or product … yet many of them are hidden behind a veil of secrecy.  Protecting yourself from spambots is one thing, but you cannot make it too difficult for people to contact you or else you will end up missing every opportunity.

Hopefully I’ll be able to offer some more tips like this in the future from a similarly amazing week.  It would be nice to hit that million impression mark again (and hopefully next time have some more exact numbers behind it) … but in the meantime, these tips should keep you busy on a Monday.