Your Solution is Staring You in Your Face(book)

cross

verb

to move, pass, or extend from one side to the other side

as in cross promote.

Having a hard time coming up with content for your blog? Think before you say ‘yes’ because really it is a bit silly if you are.

I’m going to assume that you are somehow involved in children’s publishing or writing whether it be as a writer, an editor, illustrator, or a book blogger. You do something that makes you care that people come to your blog and learn about you. So you struggle time and time again trying to think up a new topic to blog about. Or you take a topic that has been covered over and over in the blogosphere and desperately try to make it interesting. You invest a lot of time in your blog and yet you are still having trouble bringing people to your sight.

Two words. Cross promote. You have a ton of people out there who are more than happy to spend a day on your blog. Invite them in. Get to know them. Find out what they do that is similar to you and what is different. Ask their favorite breakfast cereal and after school cartoon. Ask writers why they write in the genre they do or illustrators what their favorite medium is. Ask editors if they have a pet peeve they see too often in submissions, ask fellow bloggers where they carve time out of their day to create a daily post.

See, the beauty of inviting guests over is they bring their friends. Your guest meets your friends. Their friends meet you and some people like your bloggy digs enough to hang around for the next post or check out your profile. It’s okay, you aren’t stealing friends. People are capable of following more than one blog at a time.

In a perfect cross-promoting world, your guests will then invite you back to be on their blog. After all, you’ll bring your friends to their party to get to know them better right there where all their info is set up nice and pretty and shiny.

Stop beating yourself up to come up with new content when you have a plethora of content staring you in your face(book). People have stuff to promote, you will be doing good giving them an opportunity to promote it. You aren’t necessarily endorsing it just by having them on your site, so don’t worry about having to read everything they do. Just allow THEM to talk about it. Your readers will love the variety and your guests might consider you hero for a day. Complete with cape.

So sally forth and cross promote! Huzzah!!