Helping promote is a popular way to earn money on the internet. Let’s try to figure out if you can trust in the so-called promotion gurus who promise the moon and the stars, and which is the most important - how to save on promotion if your budget is quite tough.
Generally speaking, there are two types of promotion: legal and not so legal. Let’s start with the second one.
If you Google it, you will find many advertisements of this kind. As a rule, those who advertise these services, offer to boost likes, comments, and followers quickly and without paying much money. Does it work? Not exactly so.
Pros:
- You can quickly have you post at the top of the feed and enjoy looking at a hundred or even thousand likes.
- If you boost the number of your followers to the desirable 10 000 followers, the legend that company and brand representatives will direct message you offering contracts for advertising might come true.
- You can win competitions this way, but there are no guarantees, and it is not honest.
Cons:
- You can be banned because of bots.
- Imagine that yesterday you created your account and today you already have 100 000 followers. If you are not a celebrity, it looks weird, and any algorithm may detect it as suspicious (moreover, Instagram’s and Facebook’s algorithms are very smart).
- Your feed will look horrible because of very many bots.
- Fake likes and comments can be easily detected: it’s enough just to look at other posts. The number of real likes and comments of one post does not contrast so much with the number of another.
- A post which gets fake likes and comments will lose its reach sooner or later.
Summary:
It is quite difficult to say exactly if such an approach is efficient or not. On our part, we most likely do not recommend this rather than do —boosting fake likes will give you fake followers which will not buy or recommend.
Now let’s talk about several legal ways.
Famous bloggers often host webinars on promotion. To watch or not to watch?
Pros:
If you like a blogger and the price is adequate, then watch — you have nothing to lose. Moreover, you will become motivated and get a set of simple rules to apply immediately.
Cons:
- Your enthusiasm and inspiration will fade away the next day.
- You can find all those rules on the internet and nobody will tell you anything new, we are not an exception.
- The blogger’s lifehacks can be irrelevant to you. Especially something like “post pictures of yourself in nothing but underwear as often as possible.”
In this context, live events like, e.g. storytelling workshops are far more advantageous (especially, when “celebrities” are invited). In this case real communication, a possibility to get acquainted with the right people, and making a lot of pictures against a nice-looking press wall will be worth it. Disco or buffet parties will make a good impression even better. And finally, you can post all this to make your colleagues envy for your active self-promotion on social media.
You can work with the “mentor” on an individual basis. It is expensive but promising.
Pros:
- Individual teaching means working with your own goals and problems.
- It will help you get such useful skills as, for example, writing posts, determination of your target audience, working with negative feedback, etc. – to be short, everything you should know by heart.
Cons:
- It is expensive and takes much time. It is multi stage work with texts, photos, webinars, online lives, and image making. You will have to work hard and covet success.
And, of course, you can always hire a team: copywriter + marketing specialist + photographer. But first, talented people are always employed and it will cost you a fortune to hunt them. Second, you need to be able to manage your team and set clear goals for it.
Things you can do yourself:
- Work on improving your content quality. Texts, videos, lives — everything should grab and hold the audience’s attention.
- Create attractive photos. You can laugh at fitness cuties as much as you want but a showy picture will always “beat” all texts.
- Choose your own role model to get inspired and watch his/her behavior and actions. Do what this person does. Ideally, get a post with your idol, this way you will get a part of his/her audience.
- Try paid advertising but first prepare your account for being “crowded” with the unfamiliar users. They are not always friendly, learn how to handle haters’ comments.
- Add enough information to your account. People should understand clearly who you are and what you do.
- Agree on advertising posts in large groups of your niche. Try to offer them your services in trade. Some people agree.
- Try to get in the public eye in local news programs, on TV shows, in papers. Earn popularity not only through channels you are used to.
As you can see, we cannot give you an unambiguous answer to the question we have put as a title (we know it’s unfair), but we can’t do it just because you should make decisions considering your own experience and budget.
Be patient and persistent — this will be a stony path but it will be paid off.
