Networking

You’ve spent how long composing that article.  You have submitted it to that site. Your item has now been published. Congrats.

Now comes the real effort.

Compare it to beating out other applicants for a job.  You’ve ‘won’ the job; now you have to do the work. The work consists of self promotion.

If you are the rawest newbie you might think that the site on which your item has been published performs some kind of marketing of your work.  Sorry to bust your balloon. Publishing sites just give you space. Promotion  is up to you.

You could have posted the complete Olympic results in May. But if you don’t network, don’t use all the possible ways to get publicity, no one will have seen it.   It is pretty much secret.

You have to use promotional sites. You can join all of them. You can spend a day getting your work on each of these sites.

It isn’t a one click; “Promote my site”, and automatically your work is distributed.  It is, even with an array of ‘buttons’ on your browser a nearly full time job.

After you’ve spent the day getting your item promoted; putting up with all the glitches all the eccentricities, Is It Worth It?

Depending on what you write about, a site with 10k visitors where most of them are ‘into’ your topic will get you more hits than a site with 1M visitors where most of those are not.

Posting a photo of a cute puppy will get more hits than using the same site to post the thesis that got you that P.H.d in psychology.

There are message boards, (whether one calls them fora, social networks, fansites, ) devoted to every possible subject and sub-subject you can imagine. You get an article picked up by a message board you’ll get hits aplenty.

Of course, you might actually have a life, which means you can’t spend forever writing and promoting your item.

You’ve got to consider the wiser expenditure of your time, for it certainly is pointless to spend even one minute having to fill in all the little info boxes when the networking site you’ve chosen gets you 1 view.