Tag Archives: original content

Getting People To “Like”, “Retweet”, or +1 Your Blog; The Truth

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts being written that purport to tell us how to get people to “like” our page to Facebook, encourage them to retweet our content to Twitter, or the new thing, to +1 our sites or blog posts for Google. All well and all except for one thing; once again it’s garbage.


via Flickr

Okay, that’s not quite fair, so let me say it another way. It’s repetitive, boring, and kind of untrue. If you look at it like I do, what you’re getting from people is the same thing you got from them when they said they were going to tell you how to get more comments on your blog posts, or how they were going to teach you how to drive more visitors to your blog.

What are the ideas? In a nutshell: write great content, write posts that ask questions people can respond to, make sure your style is conversational, write about things you know something about, check your spelling and grammar, on and on and on.

In a way it’s probably not fair to bust on people writing this stuff but someone has to call it for what it is; a major waste of time. I ask you, if you’re checking these posts out like I’ve been doing, are you seeing anything new? Truthfully, is there anything new to offer?

Actually, there is, although most of us hesitate to do it. That one thing, which I’ve done every once in awhile, is to just come out and ask someone to “like” or “retweet” or “+1” your blog post. Why would you do this, and how should you do it?

You do it because most of us are blind to these things. Just like most of us become blind to Adsense after awhile, and more and more of us start becoming blind to ads on someone’s blogs, we tend to become blind to the buttons that allow us to highlight posts we might like. Some of the buttons people have near their posts are small and easy to overlook after awhile. For my blog, just recently have I started getting more of my posts retweeted by through that bit Topsy button you see at the top right of my posts; that’s not a bad feeling.

That’s why you would do it. But it doesn’t do you much good if you start adding it to the end of every post either. At a certain point your regular visitors will become blind to that as well, and then it becomes a worthless phrase for you. This means that if you’re going to do it, at least from my perspective, you should do it on posts you absolutely know are premium posts. How will you know? If you don’t know when you’ve written a premium post then no one else will either.

Of course, to some of us it seems kind of self serving to ask people to do these things for us, which probably explains why I’ve rarely done it. If I was going to do it I can easily point to the few posts that I believe deserve being better known. And it’s that reason, that I know it’s “few” as opposed to “all”, that I believe it’s feasible to ask for it for certain posts that you really feel are special.

Let me ask you; have you seen many people advocating what I’ve just mentioned? Is it something unique to some of you? That’s all I’m saying; some of these folks need to try to give us something new every once in awhile, step up their game. What say you?