Offspring Update

So at the beginning of this year I set some goals. One of them was to try out various niche blogs. The first one is up and running for a while now and I have used it to experiment with various ways of promotion. This involves Twitter, Twiends, Facebook, Farmville (yes really), Bit.ly and comment-posting.

This post
For bit.ly I wrote a post already. For Twitter, Twiends and Facebook I will write separate posts but only when I have a better understanding of these platforms. For now, I'll update you on what I tried so far.

Facebook & Farmville
First, I created a Facebook page, and started playing Farmville. Why? Because Farmville is popular and Farmville requires neighbours. People are actually willing to crap their friends list with random Farmville players if their true friends don't actually play the game. External websites promoting this didn't really work (should try and make one myself!), but posting on Facebook Neighbour fanpages (there's a bunch of them) did. If you want to speed things up a lot you can actively add others.

Twitter
Next, I created a Twitter account and started to follow other people by searching for things like 'need inspiration' and posting links to my blog. Roughly 10% actually followed me back and it did generate a few hits and even a retweet. But this doesn't really scale up. Actually Twitter's rules are against aggressive following. And against advertising. Aggressive unfollowing is even worse. Furthermore, I don't really feel comfortable harassing people like this.

Twiends
In came Twiends. It is an odd website where you gain credits by following others, visiting websites, watching vids and liking facebook pages (you can also buy credits). You can trade these credits for people returning the favor. I followed a bunch of people that offered many credits and then started to like facebook fanpages like mad (you need an 'approved' facebook page for that, which wasn't a problem for me because I had a lot of friends already because of Farmville). In the end, I quickly had 300 followers on Twitter. The sad thing is that most of these are quite hollow (like mine). A few weeks later there's still 200 left, but posting a link to a blogpost doesn't result in any visit. It may however, help to get started (ie if you follow a random person and have 100's of followers, he/she might be more prone to follow you back?).

Facebook again
Back to facebook, I now created a fan page (tried a group first because I didn't know the difference, as I said I'm mainly doing this to learn by doing) for my blog. I invited my 'friends' and switched my Twiends strategy from getting Twitter followers to getting Facebook likes. See where this ends up...

Closing remarks
In a nutshell, I'm working on and over the boundaries of what I would normally find acceptable. For now I am far from convinced by anything I have seen. What did generate some visitors was commenting on other blogs and the postaday2011 Wordpress tag I added to my posts. My goal was to write a post every other day, so I need 30 by the end of February. I've been posting every day for the first two weeks. I think I'll spread the other half over the remaining time. Also, I will try the commenting-strategy a little more actively. Although less scalable (I do read the post).