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