How to Promote Yourself on Social Media? The Secret of SEO 2
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In this post I reveal the secret of SEO 2.0!
By 2023 it’s rather known as “social SEO”.
At the end of the day social media is about SEO too or SEO 2!
It shows how to promote yourself on social media.
SEO 2? I sometimes also explain it as
- Sharing
- Engagement
- Outreach
You can make other people promote you for free! No joke!
Sounds impossible? It’s not a contradiction.
Fasten your seat belts! This will blow your mind!
Why Spread the Word and Not Keep it Secret?
Why am I revealing the secret? It’s because the more people know it the better it works.
It also works for me then! Thus I will show you the way of SEO 2 – it’s:
- sustainable
- reputable
- social
- trustworthy
- organic
SEO 2 works without the need of aggressive self-promotion on social media and beyond. It works without manual link building as well.
There are only a few thousands SEO experts out there but millions of webmasters.
Conventional SEO practitioners – more often the average webmasters than not – have only very superficial knowledge of SEO.
Thus most people get social media promotion wrong.
They approach it with a selfish SEO 1.0 mindset like it’s 1999.
You have to apply social SEO or SEO 2 instead!
Selfish vs Selfless Engagement Online
Selfish people tend to promote themselves on all kinds of social media and beyond. I prefer not to. Now those of you who know me will shout:
“Wait, you just spammed me this week!”
OK, I admit it! I tweet my posts and share them on LinkedIn. Other than that, I really want to make the SEO 2.0 blog a proof of concept:
You can succeed on the Web – especially as a blogger – without all the ego-driven tactics like:
- self-promotion
- share or link begging
- befriending people just for their social media power
- vote swapping or exchange
The ideal vision for SEO 2.0 (both the blog and the concept) was, besides of refraining from the above ways of “promotion”, to be based on
- independence from Google traffic
- independence from Facebook traffic
- being proud of practicing SEO
- organic reach growth
- flourishing even during my absence
I succeeded at most of these goals. Why did I go the hard way?
Wasn’t it absurd to shun Google and Facebook in their heydays, the most important traffic sources of the Web? Let me explain!
Practicing SEO means that sooner or later you normally adapt to each and every annoyance of the Web. Typical Internet annoyances are:
- Making sites Google friendly means often crippling them, especially when you work on a limited budget and with people who don’t know much about user experience (most people don’t).
- Being an SEO and using Facebook is like being gay and trying to talk about having kids with heterosexuals. Either you shut your mouth and everybody accepts you or have a coming out and have to deal with the consequences like ostracism.
- There is either “automation” or real engagement – a kind of DIY everything. Some people bombard you with automated updates on Twitter while others listen and respond genuinely.
OK, so what’s the secret? The secret of SEO 2.0 is a little ZEN-like.
It’s about forgetting your ego and doing everything you want for yourself for others. It works.
As I’m addicted to social media anyway I spend hours daily with sharing content of other people. I popularize things I like and rarely out of friendship.
The Invisible Hand of Reciprocity
Of course I read the content of my friends first but if I don’t like them (the content pieces, not the friends) I don’t share them.
I befriend the people whose content I like. The things I popularize on social media are mostly not even related to SEO etc.
People on the Web basically know a few things about me, this guy is:
- genuine
- authentic
- very active on the Web
- has multiple interests (open minded)
- not self centered but altruistic
Is this enough? Well, it isn’t.
You need to have a blog, a unique voice and you need to do some social networking to be recognizable.
I tend to take this for granted by now. It’s about having a unique blog, a few active social media profiles and connected with a small number of friends on several platforms.
Add the secret of SEO 2.0 to it and it is perfectly enough to get almost every single post of yours shared all over the place even those which weren’t optimized for social media.
Also you get links as these friends tend to link to friends in their blogs.
Then the friends of the friends link to you and befriend you etc. etc. etc. The rest is history.
You don’t need self-promotion to promote yourself and you not even have to be a popular blogger to make it work.
How? I get promoted while I promote others and it’s not even an exchange or something.
It works due to reciprocity.
People who have benefited from my actions in the past remember that and reciprocate in the future by sharing or linking my content.
* (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons image by włodi
You’ve summed up my philosophy very well – it’s possible to gain links and search rankings with a completely natural strategy but you’ve got to be patient. Really patient.
Exactly, Tad. Reciprocal arrangements are useful in the beginning, but once established, SEO “karma” begins to take root.
PS – I would encourage you to consider adding the subscribe to comments plugin. :)
Andy: How did you know it was you I described? ;-) If you start with a bang, you don’t need patience btw. look at my archive. The first 2 months were very busy on SEO 2.0
Michael: Even in the beginning I didn’t need them. You remember me from back then you know that! I’m very wary of plugins due to WordPress compatibility, update and security concerns…
andymurd got it right – patience is the answer. Organic, natural growth is the answer but its unfortunate that many clients are not happy waiting. Hence the explosion in services offering to “get you to the top of Google” yesterday…
Imagine my surprise when a Google alert for my name revealed this post. Who knew our innocent web conversation would elicit a blog post. Just goes to show you have to be careful what you say or type. Luckily, I agree with everything written here and follow the same methodology. If only our clients were as patient for those results…
Rock on, OnReact! You are a shining beacon in sea of spam. ;-)
I couldn’t resist. I added this page to my feeds. Self promotion is in my blood, I guess.
I did a little bit of SEO work around the 2001 – 2002 timeframe. I know that it was a different operation then than now, although some of the basics remain the same. I do wonder thought what you say about not caring about google et al, if you just mean that for your blog or also for your clients as well?
steve: In SEO 2.0 you can succeed instantly and you don’t have to wait until Google accepts you. This takes a while.
Shell: Self promotion is not bad per definition but it does not work as well as promotion by others :-)
Itsme: For my conventional SEO clients I do a combination of SEO and SEO 2.0. There I can’t ignore Google of course. My SEO 2.0 blog is testing ground for cutting edge methods of online promotion. Most of these attempt to gain independence from the Google monopoly.
“I don’t need to promote myself to promote myself and I’m not even an a-list blogger. I get promoted while I promote others and it’s not even an exchange or something.”
Sounds like promote zen? Good stuff, enjoy your post very much.
good points here. i like this way of thinking. i’ve been trying to practice it as well, but sometimes i wonder if the traffic will eventually arrive. at least now, i feel a bit more encouraged.
In the old days http://onemancan.ca/articles.html you can see I was doing it all the laborious way. I also very much enjoyed what I was doing and the reasons why. I avoided all SEO other than the norm, Meta, Titles, Keywords, and focused more on quality content for a reading audience. Over time, while people around me exploded their incomes manipulating the traffic opportunities via SEO etc., I gained a certain level of credibility. Then my life unraveled, and so did my site. Now I’m working in the industry, and my site is a whole new kettle of fish… so what next? I know not. But this to say, I agree in principle, though the Black Hat tactics are going to continue to be a problem for anyone who really cares more about the purpose of their content, rather than the almighty dollar.
I hope it’s possible to do it with a natural strategy. Who has time to do it any other way? ;-) I tried hiring these things out this year, but it just didn’t pay for itself. Thanks for the article.
Promotion is always the hardest part but it can be handled in a respectful way if you get others to recommend you and your products. That is much more powerful technique.
An excellent article, well I dont know of others but it works for me very well too. I tried everything in the book to get both traffic and rank to my arcade site. Nothing really worked. Then I sat back and thought one day, why would anyone want to come to my site. I wrote a few articles about flash games, talked about the latest games that I had played in a few forums, and things started to turn around – and – I enjoyed it.
Thanks for the article, the more I read about SEO, the more I realize that I have a lot to learn.
Interesting. You show how to do soft promotion. A must reaing post for every SEO.
Valuable information. I’m still on a very steep learning curve in relation to SEO.
Soft self promotion is definitely the way to go. It can be quite a balancing act to promote without using too much self promoting!
This is a really well written piece. Thanks.
I have been thinking about doing something for a while but as our stuff is mostly information only for those requiring our design, PR, photography and copywriting services we havent bothered.
Your piece has really given me something to consider or act on.
Take good care and get as much joy and fun as you can every day. Cheers.
This is a very good read thank you. I feel that you have done some great work on this article and you are 100% right in what you say about the wait for the organic results. keep up the great posts
Thank for updating the link to my new website :)
No problem Darren. I check broken and redirected links routinely.
A great-looking website design can do wonders to make an online business successful on the internet. I am impressed with your creativity. Keep it up. Thanks for providing useful information to us