Spreading your tentacles of creation requires exposure to an audience that does not know you exist therefore marketing, advertising, promoting, show casing or whatever is required. Along comes this whole new way of presenting to a live audience called PechaKucha where you talk a slideshow – hang on a minute I sure I have seen this before, surely it is a regular slide-presentation with a fancy name and a few distinctive timing rules but hey if it provides a platform where people feel comfortable presenting their story it’s all good because what really matters is getting the story out there.

A live presentation of your PechaKucha could be recorded and then up loaded online but is that enough? – online I’m sure there many good stories that I will never see and this where we need to promote a story from it’s online recess and bring it out in the open. Now this is where people smell a business and try to lure your story to their promotional site often offering a free limited setup right up to a full “bells and whistles” for a monthly fee and it’s this exposure platform that’s the key basically bringing together enough on-liners to get noticed and then of course it has to be the right people but even so it’s a gamble whether you are right place right time, can we enhance our chances then?

We are looking at a win win here with a little bit of work for the story teller but at basically not cost to both to the you and your audience you can do it yourself!

“Can’t be as easy as that you say“, well yes it can and all the tools are FREE and if you look there plenty of sites telling you exactly what to do and I suppose you want me to tell you how to do it, well I’m not but I will because if you are reading this blog now you are already participating in one part of the ingredients.

The simple message is SHARE, SHARE, SHARE and make use of all those FREE social media outlets but instead of all those personal things that may get embarrassing later on focus them all on your product or story as the case maybe.

“Well that’s obvious” yes but the are some keys to getting it right “Knew there had to be a catch” well no let me explain, recently I got invited to a Webinar from a company called iThemes (they have built a business around a FREE product called WordPress by adding value to the web building application) saying attend our Webinar on 10 Steps to Writing and Publishing a Viral Post normally I would ignore but I have found previous webinars good value so I had a look and they came with the following steps:

1. What is the Buzz – sounds a bit corny but stick with me, as you can hook your story on what people are currently looking for on the web and to do this use Google Trends and Correlate and all the work has been done for you. Note: Twitter which I mention in 4 below has Trending and Analytic Tools (called sproutsocial) as well.
2. Check your work – basically remove the red squiggly lines under your spelling errors (I had over 50 red squiggly’s when writing this and I am worried I have no grammar checker) and read it out load to someone to make sure it sounds right and makes some sense in fact good sense so people respect what you are doing and come back for more.
3. Use Imagery – use images in your story as good old Google indexes these images in Google Images and this provides another portal back to your story when someone does a image search.
4. Be Social – Use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, etc and link them all to your post/website, you could get fancy and try to stagger and slightly alter posts/blogs but just do it.
5. Be a Star – Make a video and put it on YouTube and to make that even easier Hang Out with Google+ by and with yourself and let Google+ and YouTube do all the work in getting video up online – maybe lock the door in case people think you are talking to yourself of which you are but there is a good reason…
6. Be Responsive – It is polite to say thank you when someone mentions you on the web especially when they just might have a whole lot of friends who just might be interested in what you do or have done. Also people love to listen in on things especially live conversations so if there is some chatter going on…
7. Easy to Share – Use any tools you have got on your site to make it easy to share your stuff e.g. a button to share be friends to your Facebook, Twitter etc or a feedback or comments form or easy ways to contact you…
8. Let People Know – These are the important people the ones you already know, send them a Newsletter or whatever to keep in touch.
9. Interlink – On each post have some fun and make up some Click Bait, you know those headlines you can’t resist clicking on – not really convinced on this but are willing to try at the end of this post, maybe.
10. Update – Updates always gives an indication that a site still has a pulse and is alive, so update old posts, new posts, any posts or new information.

As iThemes say there are no guarantees that things will go viral but at least these give you the best chance of doing so. Now you know the secret, do a Google search for “how do sites go viral” there certainly are plenty of other sites offering advise but a lot also want your business so be wary (I know it’s your Dad speaking), be safe out there and I look forward to reading your story, and please keep in touch.