If you run a business of any kind you will know that to make a sale to a completely new customer is much more difficult and requires much more resources than to make a sale to an existing one. This is true also for content creation. It's much easier to bring somebody who knows you already to read your post than to invite a totally new user to read and upvote your content.
The key to your success is to keep your readers happy
For the long term you need to make this your first priority in your content creation business: keep your customers/readers happy! This means that you should appreciate when they interact with you, reward them for their efforts and favor reciprocity.
Here some simple principles that you should always observe to keep your customers happy:
Leave no comment unanswered
When I read somebody's post and leave a comment, I truly expect to get a comment in return from the author. If the reader takes the time to read a post and in addition to that leaves a comment, I think it's the minimum for the author to answer this comment within a day or two. If comments stay unanswered, the chances are high that this reader will never bother again to read your posts and to leave a comment.
Acknowledge mentions, shout-outs and reblogs
When people talk about you or about your posts, they are actually advertising you to their own readers and followers. This is an amazing gesture and we should always at least thank these people for that. It's not always easy to realize when people mention you. I use for that the tool notifications in peakd. I can sort these notifications and check out the mentions and also the reblogs.
How to find the posts where people mentionned you and your work
Say thank you with an upvote
If you have the possibility to valorise comments, mentions and reblogs with an upvote it's great. If you have less than a couple of thousand Hive Power, it's not worth to give an upvote. Because your upvote value won't be enough to pass the 0.02$ threshold and your voting power will be wasted and the beneficiary won't get anything either. A good idea is to create a specific tribe account and to use this to upvote comments.
I often use the ctp or leofinance tags in my posts and I have two specialized accounts achim03.ctp and achim03.leo. On these accounts I have very little Hive Power but quite an interesting quantity of staked tribe tokens. When I give upvotes with these accounts, the person who commented my posts will have a real benefit. If he sees that each time he gives a comment to my post, he will also get an upvote worth something, the chances that he will come back and comment again are simply higher.
Most of your readers have their own content creation business. Read, comment and upvote them whenever possible
We shouldn't forget that we are all here in the same boat and we all want to get these upvotes and comments on our posts. When you have readers that come to your posts very regularly, it's a good idea for you to show interest in their work as well. Make it a habit to add your readers to your feed so that you see what they publish and spend some time to read their work and give them upvotes and comments.
This is the best way to develop these relationships and it has a lot of positive side effects:
- Upvoting your readers will give you curation rewards and them author rewards. This will allow them to grow their stake and their upvote value will increase. When they read your posts and give you upvotes, you will profit from the increased upvote value!
- When you read the posts of your readers you will get pretty good ideas for your next posts. I believe that this is the best inspiration source.
- When you leave a comment under the post of your reader you also promote your brand and people might get aware of you and maybe start to follow you.
The importance of reciprocity
If you want to build something in the long term on this blockchain, the most important asset for you will be the relationships that you manage to create.
In terms of marketing, the best thing that can happen to you is when other people start to promote your work and your brand through mentions and reblogs. This is how something can go viral. In order to see such things happening you can either write posts that are so good that everybody wants to share them or you create relationships that encourage people to want to help you. Often this comes once you showed them that you want to help them too. Take the time to mention them in your post and reblog their content.
Keeping these relationships alive requires time but it's worth it
It can require a lot of time and work to do everything that I pointed out. Soon you will realize that this is actually great fun. The relationships that you build and the interactions that you have will become much more important in your eyes than the monetary benefits... At least this is how I see it :-)
In the next post of this series, I will write about the financial aspect of your business
This post is part of a series in which I want to rise the awareness that content creation is a business. The previous posts:
- Content Creation is a Business and you are the CEO
- The most important part of your content creation business: YOU
- Your content – The core of your business
- Why your Content needs a nice Packaging
- How to Market your Content Creation Business
Let's connect on Hive, Lbry or on Publish0x
My free e-mail course: The 100'000 satoshis a week strategy
What I find most striking about this publication is the fact that it considers the creation of content as a business, I also think the same, since what a business means to us is something that requires seriousness and commitment.
There is a lot of diversity on this issue, sometimes I have read some users who say that the generation of content should be considered as a fun, and it is not that I do not agree, I think it is also something fun, but under a certain perspective to consider them as mere fun makes you lose in some sense the responsibility and seriousness that gives the business vision.
When considering the creation of content as a business I assure you that all the considerations that you excellently explain in this post, we must be reciprocal and humble and respond to comments on our publications, comment on the publications of others, in conclusion to gradually build a path of success that only gives us the vision to consider the creation of content as a business.
Greetings and thanks for your excellent contribution.
First I would like to thank you for this amazing comment!
I also believe that if we consider this activity as a business, we will consider it an a more professional way. This doesn't mean that we can't enjoy what we are doing but it will allow us to allocate the necessary time for tasks like engaging, commenting and reading. These activities will be a part of our business and we can consider it as a building block for growth.
If we consider content creation as a business and we behave accordingly, we will be able to analyse all of our activites and try to improve them, become more efficient in oder to grow and in the end also to earn more.
This is a nice content. It c OK ntains all the necessary tips about blogging and community engagement. And for @project.hope as a community, if every member engages with other writers in the community, we gain more and get our contents to greater reach. Thanks for sharing @achim03
The whole concept here is to give in order to recieve and I believe that we can improve this side of things a lot starting with ourselves. Let's find some time to interact with others and create a new atmosphere where we are not only wanting to increase the value of our posts but also the value of the posts of our friends.
Thanks a lot for your comment!
I really have nothing more to add on these great tips that you wrote down... :)
I can just agree that it requires time... Actually, I was counting how much hours do I spend only for engagement on Hive and CTPTalk (without content creation, twitter promotion, etc)... Just watching/reading other's stuff, commenting, engaging, replying on my comments and posts, upvoting other content... I spend between 3-5 hours doing that...
It sounds a lot, but only my moderation for ThisIsAwesome takes 2-3 hours of checking content and commenting on them... So, an ordinary member will not have that, but 1-2 hours daily can make a difference... If you spend so much time, you will create a solid friend member base, and you will GROW your account...
Is it too much? For someone, it is, for others isn't... It's like watching one movie every day or spending time watching one soccer match...
Is it that too much time if you spend it with your friends?
Made in Canva
@thisisawesome Moderator
This post is AWESOME!
It will therefore get a manual 100% upvote from @thisisawesome (will be done today), for the Awesome Daily Highlights in category CTPtalk, we give out 1 such vote in that category per day, plus 4 more in other categories, and your post will also be featured in today's Awesome Daily Curation report for more visibility.
The goal of this project is to "highlight Awesome Content, and growing the Hive ecosystem and the CTPtalk tribe by rewarding it".
Source
I often wondered how much time you were investing in engaging and curating because what you are doing is simply mindblowing... I have to admit that I was quite influenced by how you are doing it and I probably increased my time engaging with others by 3 :-). This makes me close to 1 hour per day. Since I do that, I've seen a dramatic change compared to before in terms of comments on my posts and also in terms of mentions and interactions.
Thanks a lot for your comment and of course for the curation :-)
Well, I have to admit that I see more often your posts on Hive than earlier... and a lot more comments by you, and on your posts! That everything together is fruition of more interactions and engagement with others...
And I saw that a lot of other people mention your great posts, which requires additional time to show them appreciation... but, it has to be like that and I'm happy to see people appreaciating others' work!
You are doing an outstanding work here! Thanks for doing that!
Thanks a lot!
People like you, Erik, Jenn, Russel, John and the whole CTP tribe are responsible for creating a very creative, positive and motivating atmosphere where it's a real pleasure to keep engaging and writing posts...
You are welcome! And thank you for your kind words...
Now you are inspiring and motivating others! That's what I call blockchain-snowball effect :)
Aww thanks so much!! I think we all inspire each other. It's like a boomerang effect & it never stops. I am blessed to work with you & all the others you mentioned above. You guys make this journey amazing! 💜
This was a lot of good information, I have been here a week, and have probably not got used to how things work here, but I am learning. And this was some good education for a beginner like me.
I remember when I joined the platform about two years ago. It must be a daunting experience for your. There is so much to learn. It takes time but the more you get familiar with all this, the more you will enjoy it and you started in a community where people really care and will help you on the way.
nice post. Learned something new.
I now know what i am not doing properly/correct, and will work on it
thanks.
I'm happy you could take out something useful out of it. Thanks a lot for your comment!
Really nice. I see lot of popular authors like Jon,Zoltan ,tarazkp (Hopefully I put his name right.) do upvote comments.
This really bring engagement.
The three authors that you mention are doing something very well, they thank the readers for their time and their comment by giving them an upvote. It's not surprising that these 3 authors are also among the ones who interact most on the whole blockchain. I believe they are really examples on how to do it correctly.
Thanks a lot for your comment!
Very nice tips, @achim03.
It is not always easy to keep the attention of readers.
This is definitely true. It requires a lot of work and in addition to that good articles :-)
Thanks a lot for your comment!
Hello friend @achim03 very good points, I think that making relationships on this platform and in this community are essential, also it is important for one as a content creator that people read what you write, and if they can leave a comment much better. It's a nice feeling, as you say not everyone has to give a good vote, but I think that by taking the time to read and comment you can achieve a lot!
I think that you unserstand the most important part here. Everybody who writes a post wants to earn some money of course. The most important thing however is that they want recognition for what they have written. If they get a comment I believe this is something that proves that this person has spent some time on the post and took the time to leave a comment. It's a nice sign of recognition for our work. Therefore I'm always very happy when people leave a comment on my posts :-) Thanks a lot!
Hello @achim03
This is an interesting post that also brings a great contribution.
I agree with most of the points, however, there is one thing I must emphasize.
There is a reality that I have seen more and more, and I know that it happens in many, especially in the newest ones, although there are those who have years in these paths and do not know it.
There are those who are completely unaware of what a tribe is, an additional token to Hive, is a reality. So it is very likely that there are those who have a few tens or hundreds of hive in the form of other tokens and do not know.
Hi my friend,
I think that you point out something very important. A lot of people are simply not aware of the tribe tokens and they could do so much with them. Simply create a second account, stake these tokens and use this account to upvote comments.
Thanks a lot for your comment!
Yes, a while ago, when the tribes came out and eventually created steem.engine, someone spent months not knowing that it existed, and literally when I explained I had a few hundred steem in the form of tribal tokens.
What you're proposing is a good way to support your supporters. You're so right.
Thanks for all the great tips about engaging with your readers!
Thank you very much for taking the time to read the post and for leaving a comment!
I truly took to heart the message of your post. Just starting my blogging journey, I look for all the tricks and tips, like answering comments. Thank you so much for the lesson
Thanks a lot for stopping by. It can be quite overwhelming at the beginning. There is so much to discover and learn. Just take one step at the time :-)
I really like how you frame content creation as a business and the engagement that you create for it as marketing, it sets you up for having the right goals when doing it, and great tips on how to accomplish these targets.
As to mentions I have discovered that as you grow and especially if as me you run a couple of challenges that it becomes very hard to really stay on top of that, so for the most part I use Engage to sort through them, makes it way easier to handle, otherwise I would have to go to each individual post to check them out.
On this platform we are actually doing a lot of marketing and business related activities without realizing it :-).
It's definitively not easy to keep on top of all the posts that mention you and it's a pitty if we miss some of them. Especially when people speak about us in videos and don't mention it in the posts, it's almost impossible to see it.
Thanks a lot for your kind comment!
Yeah if you want to check out Engage just click the logo in this comment, you get all comments and mentions in 2 columns in checklist fashion.
I checked it out. It looks quite interesting. I have just one problem with it because I'm using one account to comment and one account to upvote. When I switch account it shows me the comments on the other account. But it looks nice and useful. Thanks a lot for the tip!
Yeah that can be a problem, but if you are logged into PeakD with the account for voting, and then logged into Engage with the comments, then you can just click the link to open it in PeakD to do the voting and answer it with Engage, best of both worlds.
You just solved the problem man :-). Thanks a lot, this seems a very good way to combine them!
Yeah even better together than separate.
great tips that really help keep our followers motivated and faithful.I'll be waiting for the financial part that you will explain, good contribution.
Thanks a lot for your comment my friend!
If your readers aka customers are interested, they will become your repeated customers. Any business can grow more when they have repeated customers. What you said in this post, that's practical.
So true. I wanted to read some posts and watch some awesome videos, but I couldn't do it. So today I'm doing that. lol...
No matter which business you do, you have to make money, otherwise, you will go out of the business. I am looking forward to reading your next post - about the financial aspect of the business, @achim03.
Posted Using LeoFinance
The financial aspect is the liveblod of every business. We tend to forget it here because our time doesn't cost us directly.
Thanks a lot for your comment!