Choosing an Outpost Platform for Your Content

Which platform, or outpost, aside from your blog should you choose?

That really depends on the medium you plan to use on your blog. If the content on your blog will be primarily text, choose a text based platform, like an article directory. If your content will be video primarily, then choose a video source.

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet.

Same thing is true for audio. If you plan to make recordings, choose another platform where you can do that. If you publish a podcast on your blog, it can push out to several major directories at once.

You’re probably wondering, why does it matter whether or not there’s any sort of consistency between the two platforms?

There are a couple of really good reasons:

The first one is that you are able to create your content much more quickly if you do it that way. So if you are doing all in text, it’s going to be a lot easier to think about it. It’s much easier to think writing, or to think audio, or to think video, that it is to think writing and audio, or writing and video, or audio and video. Each requires slightly different skills, not only to create the content, but also to upload it. Since speed is a critical piece in order for you to be able to create content, you don’t want to ever do anything that’s going to slow you down.

The second reason that you want to have some kind of consistency is that people want to stay with the same kind of medium. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to be really obvious. Let me give you an example.

Let me ask you this question: Which do you prefer, text, audio, or video?

If you would rather read in order to learn how would you feel about being forced to watch a video for an hour? Maybe video is your thing, it is for an awful lot of people. The thing is that people who want to watch don’t like to read. I know a lot of people who do not like to read. You can see the problem.

If you mix the media, then the people who want to read probably won’t watch your videos or listen to your audios. People who want to listen probably won’t read what you’ve written. And neither of them will want to watch other things either.

That means if you do 2 or 3 in more or less equal amount on your blog, then half or 2/3rds of your visitors won’t get much value out of it. What happens when you go to a website where the majority of what’s on it is of no interest to you? You don’t hang around do you? You leave. Your prospects will do exactly the same thing.

Does that mean that you should never put an audio on your blog if you write for the most part? No, not at all. A little variety is fine. I’ve seen blogs where they have a post, then PDF’s, audios, then video for the post… All created for the same content.

That’s so that the people who prefer one over the other can consume the information in whichever way they want to. But if you do that it means that you’re going to be putting in 2 or 3 times as much work as you are just for the one type. Even if you have the in-house expertise, it probably isn’t a good idea to do this for at least the first 90 days. Remember, you’re still getting your feet wet on this, so there’s no reason to jump into the deep end.

The main thing is to choose what’s going to be easiest for you to do and make that the #1 way that you use for most of your platforms.

You have 2 platforms, choose the same media.