Bark Louder: Why You Need to Market Your Content Relentlessly
Do you press publish and hope? Or do you tell people -- loudly and often -- HERE I AM!
Are you barking like an over-caffeinated chihuahua to get the word out about your content?
My biggest challenge in marketing is “the ask.”
By personality and background, I used to assume that you do good work, you get recognized, you get rewarded – hopefully with more than a pat on the head or a belly rub.
The real world doesn’t quite work like that.
You’ve gotta bark some.
There’s a volume balance in content marketing in two senses:
1. How loud are you?
2. How much do you spit out?
You don’t want to be so quiet that no one hears you; too loud and you get tuned out. You don’t actually want to bark like an over-caffeinated chihuahua, but you do need to bark. (With apologies to the chihuahua owners out there, that bark is freaking annoying – I hear it often as the one around the corner barks (safely across the street) at my two boxers.)
As for amount of content, again, there’s a balance between too little and too much. There’s a Goldilocks middle ground, but that takes some time and veering from side to side to reach.
Having spent the better part of a month listening to and thinking about drumming up business for myself, the most common challenge is no one wants to bark.
Thinking about it now, when I first began reading about marketing 15 or so years ago, I had to read and re-read the CTA suggestions. You have to put a “bark” – a call to action – in everything you do.
We wanna bark.
We know we need to to bring in money.
It’s still hard to overcome that inertia and thinking – to mix analogies – that we don’t want to be the squeaky wheel.
We want to be greased, but many of us have been taught to keep our heads down and just put in the work.
That doesn’t work.
Ask for the sale or the meeting.
Share your content more than you think you should.
So squeak. Make some noise.
Bark like that over-caffeinated chihuahua pumping himself up to charge across the street to take on a whole pack of dogs.
No one is going to hear you otherwise.
Note: Do not give dogs caffeine!
Need to put some bite in your content marketing bark? Let’s talk: duhonius@gmail.com or 301-275-7496.
I don’t bite.
I wanna “bark daily” 😁, but still practicing repurposing content.