Are You Visible To Your Niche?

This morning, while reading through my daily feeds, I saw an interesting blog article entitled, "Donald Trump’s Top Three Tips for Dominating Your Niche." The author, Julien Smith, introduced three tips: Be everywhere, Don't pay cash, and exceed expectations. However, it was the first tip that moved me to write this post.

Be Everywhere
Under the Be everywhere heading, Julien writes the following:

Are you posting only on your own website? Are you only writing, but not doing videos? Are your ads appearing only where everyone else’s (including your competitors) are? Then you’re missing out on a lot of what you can do to build audience, visibility, and profile.

People need to see your face. They need to feel your energy. They need to see your hair everywhere they go.

If you’re only giving your audience a part of who you are, and only in a certain location, that’s like being a guru on top of a mountain in Bhutan. If no one can find you, you’re not likely to get a lot of disciples.

How about, instead, you participate everywhere you’re allowed to? You use every medium to which you’re allowed access?

Based upon my own experiences, this is very good advice. I am pretty active on a number of web sites. I share videos on YouTube, audio files on Cinch, location updates on Foursquare, daily updates on Twitter and Facebook, photos on DailyBooth, movies on Miso, and news/opinions on my blog. To some, it may feel like I am constantly posting stuff to the web and I guess they would be right.

As a result of my content creation process, I understand that my name and photo flashes across a large number of eyes. I'm seen, even if it's only virtually.

The debate over how much visibility is enough, can be discussed in another post, but I thought it was important to share my appreciation for Julien's point, "People need to see your face. They need to feel your energy." I couldn't agree more.

Ever since I started posting content in a number of places, I find that people recognize me more. When I go out to local events, people comment on a video, photo, or blog I shared. I also receive requests for help with web projects, social media strategies, and collaborative work. It's amazing how many opportunities reveal themselves and it's only getting better.

Bringing It All Together
Being everywhere is a wonderful idea; however, you still need a home base. Chris Brogan wrote about this in a post entitled, "How Outposts Improve Your Ecosystem." Essentially, sites like Twitter, Facebook, DailyBooth, CinchCast, and LinkedIn are outposts. With outposts you can create and share content in a number of places, but remember to bring it all back to your home base. For me, www.damondnollan.com is that place.

No matter what I do in these outposts, I do my best to bring them all back home. This means creating a blog post that shows a YouTube video or Cinch audio clip. This way, visitors can keep up with everything that I'm doing from one place.

Content Preferences
With that written, I understand that people have preferences for receiving information. Some prefer audible, visual, or personal interaction with the material.

A good example of content preference is found on the Tron Legacy review I posted this morning. A friend, and regular reader, immediately expressed his disappointment because he expected to get a critique through a written review, not an audio clip.

As a result, I started thinking about how I could have done it differently. Should I have written the review? Is it ok to do audio? Should I do both?

I believe the answer lies in producing content for all outposts and through all available mediums. This means creating audio, video, and written words for those who wish to receive it. Remember, we have physical books, audio books, and movies. Each medium brings additional opportunities to be heard.

Feedback
What do you think? Are you doing enough to be visible to your customers, readers, visitors, and niche? If not,  would could you do better? Are you willing to give that extra effort to make content consumption easier? Let's talk about it in the comment section below.

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