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Let’s say you’ve got a sale going on in your store. It’s only timely for a limited time (it only runs for x number of days!) and you want to get the word out to as many people as possible.
What many sellers do is take a message like “Sale this week!” and share it endlessly across their social networks and on their blog… almost exactly the same every time. Not only do your potential buyers tune that out, if you’re just saying the exact same thing the same way, it isn’t going to work any better on repetition. I’ve address something similar to this before in the post Rewrite that retweet! Fixing generic tweets with keywords & a better headline to provide more follower value but I wanted to take it a step further and give you a real world example.
If you have something that you want to sell that is especially timely, obviously you want to get your message out as many times as possible in a short time. But instead of just saying the same exact thing over and over again (“Buy our book!”), think about how you could promote the same product, several times, from a variety of different angles to cast the widest marketing net possible. That person who tuned out one message may connect to that content when you present it in a different way.
Better yet, make sure your marketing posts have readability and value beyond just the marketing plug. Most people will tolerate a little promotion if they are getting something from the article itself and an article that is useful will be shared and retweeted based on its own merits, spreading your marketing message even farther. The best marketing post is one that doesn’t seem like it’s marketing anything, it looks just like an informative or entertaining blog post.
(If you didn’t open all 5 links in the third paragraph up there, you’re missing half the value of this post FYI.)
So, now that I’ve given you a peek behind the curtain, how’d I do? Did all of those posts reek of marketing when you read them the first time? Did you realize what I was doing before I pointed it out?
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On a side note, I do this exact strategy A LOT across all of our blogs. I rework blog posts so that fit on other blogs for other audiences frequently as well. If people want more examples, let me know.
The examples above were the first time I ever actually did it on purpose with the goal of showing you so I feel like it was a bit clunky.