Obviously I realise that often people use the word pimp to mean promote and in relation to this post that is what pimp is taken to mean..... but I digress, a discussion of the word pimp is not what I set out to do. What I wanted to ask, was how you use twitter to promote/ advertise or pimp (if you like) your blog posts?
Sunday evening I was on twitter and I tweeted the following - 'So tell me peeps, why has my blog become so popular in the last week or so??? #benice' and I received various responses, my favourite of which was about algorithm changes in google and more traffic being directed my way from other blogs and this certainly fits with what I see in my stats page on blogger.
I also received a response from @cosmicgirlie saying 'Haven't you been pimping a lot?' and this got me thinking, have I? So I asked that question back? 'Have I, more than I normally do?' and Jay felt that I did pimp a lot. Her opinion, perfectly valid. So this got me wondering again, what do other people do? I know blogging and also tweeting is a completely personal thing and we all do what is right for us but I am a 'tow the line' kind of girl and I would not like to think that I am alienating people by marketing my blog too much.
In general I would say my strategy (as much as you can have a strategy for a totally random hobby blog!) is to market/ promote/ advertise each new post about 3 times in the day. I try to do morning, noon and night as I know that I only pop on for very short bursts of time and thus assume others will do the same (we all have busy lives after all). So if a post was only tweeted once it could easily be missed and the way I often find good material to read is to follow links on twitter. I know others do this '3 times in a day' method too as they tweeted to tell me this (with all these screens shots read the bottom tweet first) -
I got to thinking that if you spend more time on twitter you will see more and that will make a blog look more pimped or promoted, whatever word you like. So, does my blog look very promoted to avid users of twitters, who are on there frequently and tweet a lot and look less promoted to people who perhaps do not get on during the day or choose to tweet less? Yes I expect it does.
@Spudballoo made an interesting point, saying that once people tweet more than once it all starts to blur into one for her.
and I do have to say that I love the honesty of @missielizzieb, when she tweeted in response to the conversation -
Also my thinking led me to the conclusion that as I currently post frequently on my blog, every day in general, again my blog will look more promoted as frankly there is a lot of material there to promote. Then if I have worked hard on the material and it is not sponsored or a review I do not see why I would not tweet the link and drive some traffic my way. No-one has to click a link, people will only do it if they want to... just in the same way that no-one has to follow someone on twitter that they do not like or whose tweeting style they can not get on with.
Each to their own, hey? Like I always say, live and let live. It is not for us to judge...
So there we go, that was one of my conversations of last night.
Now, would you mind telling me if I pimp too much? Of course I might just ignore what you have to say and go my own way anyway, but I would genuinely love to know what you think.
and because this post is about pimping, it would be totally amiss of me not to remind you that I am a finalist in the MAD blog awards in the Best MAD blog about Family Life category, you can vote for me if you like.. Here is a little montage I put together to show new readers what Mummy from the Heart... is all about, enjoy!