The other night, I found out author/marketer Chris Brogan was in town. I am a big fan of his and his book Trust Agents, so I wanted to go meet him. I’m not going to go through all of the details of the tweet exchange—you can read about how I wound up not meeting him after all on my blog.However, as a result of trying to meet him, I had a conversation with him via Twitter. So, I wrote up a post about what I learned from not meeting him, and I put his name in the title when I tweeted it out to my followers. Chris was notified, and he retweeted it to his followers, with the tag, “Very nice story.”That doesn’t sound that interesting, does it? I mean, Chris doesn’t know me, has really never met me, and it was one tweet. But by putting his stamp of approval on it, Chris was publicly inviting people to read my article—and he has over 177,000 followers. In a matter of minutes, I had an influx of traffic (see the screenshot below). These are by no means numbers to write home about, but when you average 50-60 visitors a day, 185 sure is a big jump—especially in the span of a couple of hours!
The "Brogan Effect"—An hourly breakdown of traffic that day
It also taught me a few very important lessons about networking:
- Don’t be afraid to introduce yourself to the big dogs. Chris Brogan, in the small interaction I’ve had with him, seems to be a pretty genuinely nice guy, and my post only brought more people who told me the same thing about him. Twitter has such a low barrier to entry that it gives you the opportunity to connect with just about anybody who’s there, and most of them are just normal people.
- You have to be genuine. If I had gone into this interaction with Chris and was purely motivated by the thought, “Hey, maybe I can score some free traffic to my blog,” he would have sniffed that out pretty quickly. He wouldn’t want anything to do with me—and he’d be right. Sometimes you have to catch it, and remind yourself of the motivation for your actions. The rest of it will take care of itself. Just focus on building the relationship. That was the opportunity I saw when I found out Chris was in town.
- Be proactive in your efforts. One of my favorite stories of networking is my friend Jacob Sokol’s adventure of taking author and well-known entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk to a New York Jets football game. He reached out to Gary proactively and regularly to get noticed—and on Gary’s terms. Sometimes it will feel like a throwaway; I tweeted Chris that I was heading downtown to see him just on a whim in case he checked his Twitter feed while he was out. I never thought he would reply, let alone do any of this. But that happened because I took action.
- Don’t ask for anything. This goes along with being genuine. I did not ask Chris to tweet my post. I did hope he would read it, but I didn’t ask him to read it. I merely let him know it was there. It’s the same thing I did when I got 19 other people to share their small achievements with me: I told them, “Here it is, it’s done, read it if you want, and thank you.” Most of them took it upon themselves to share it with their followers. Instead of asking for something, work hard to make what you are doing to be noticeable and different. Let your sincerity show through, and that’s what motivates people to share your stuff—not because you asked, but because they want to.
Have you had any experiences like this, where a small contact led to a traffic burst for your blog? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
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