I recently wrote about how and why I'm looking into doubling down on my strengths to improve a weakness, and I figured it would be a great follow-up to try and explain the specifics of my strategy. It's an interesting learning opportunity for me, so why not share it with those that are interested?
The format of this post is really just to call out the specifics of some strategies I'm looking at exploring when building the brand for my vehicle to help with sponsorship opportunities.
Reach Outside Core Audiences
This one shouldn't be a shock to you if you're familiar with this blog already. It's primarily aimed at programming, leadership in a tech environment, and self-reflecting as a means to improve. One of my goals is to explore attracting other audiences that might have a bit of overlap with my core audience in order to build up awareness of my brand. In this particular case, I'm writing about branding in the online world and attempting to relate it to setting personal goals and establishing a plan to reach them. So while this topic is outside my core domain here, I think there's some interesting overlap, and working on this will help me build up the knowledge for how to apply this to my vehicle brand.
I'd like to practice on this blog by writing about some things that are slightly outside of the norm for the content here and gauge how readers react. This learning will be used to expand the brand awareness of my vehicle when I apply it in that domain. Or that's the theory, at least.
Linking to Related Content
If you've been paying attention, I've been trying to link you, my fearless reader, to other content I've created. It's a simple tactic to provide you with more opportunities for the information you'd like to read more about and simultaneously keep you engaged with more of my own content.
The specific goal here is to explore how readers consume related information. When it comes to my vehicle brand, perhaps those who are interested in the wheel brand I use will also be interested in the air suspension setup I run. Perhaps the shop that does my work can gain more business because someone clicked a link or followed the breadcrumb trail to their site. Something about content synergy <insert eyeroll>.
Content Planning
Between the last post on doubling down and this current post, I had to do a little bit of work beforehand to plan content. This is something I need to practice more of, and I think I can do a good job of it when it comes to writing programming articles. So for example, I'm picking up more Unity3D work and would love to write more about Unity3D.
This will have great carry-over for social media platforms when trying to plan content around events that my vehicle will be at. I can engage audiences better if I have a better plan for content, but this will take practice, time, and effort. The practice part is something I can work at on this blog with little risk because it comes a bit more naturally.
Ads: Hosting Them and Creating Them
This is a big one for me because it's very new to me, in general. This blog runs ads, and without much experience, they've been able to generate a little bit of income (and I mean, very little). It's something I can work at tuning to get better results, especially because I at least have a starting point to work with.
On the flip side, I've never created ads for my blog to drive traffic to this site. This is something I need to explore in order to help with the vehicle brand and is a great example of doubling down on a strength. This Dev Leader brand has a better online presence (at least in terms of a website) than my vehicle's brand. I think it would be a significantly easier experiment to work on creating ads for this site to drive traffic here and perhaps use my small ad revenue to seed this initial experiment. Minimize the risk!
Once I learn how to use ads better, I can perhaps apply this to the vehicle brand to drive more traffic to the content I create for that.
Calls to Action
For social media engagement, it's really important to have calls to action. In the last post on doubling down, I added a call to action right at the end of the post. Did you see it?
Maybe not, and that's okay because I'm practicing it. For Instagram and Facebook, it's extremely helpful for generating impressions when you have your audience interacting with you. The more practice in creating good calls to action, the better I can do with my vehicle brand.
Next Steps
My next steps for my doubling down strategy are to start with creating some Unity3D articles. As I mentioned above, I'm looking to work more with Unity3D so it's another great doubling down opportunity where it's a minimal investment for me (I'm already doing the research, I just need to write about my experiences) and a low-risk area to experiment in. I can practice some of the individual pieces of my strategy (as outlined above) in creating a series of Unity3D articles, and measure my success along the way.
If you're a Unity3D programmer, what sorts of Unity3D articles would you be interested in? I plan to start some on Autofac and some cool patterns I've been using, but I'd love to hear what you're interested in!