Content Creation for "External" Use, Hive and Marketing: An Experiment

Why do you create content? And who do you create it for?

These days, there's a lot of talk around our community as well as initiatives underway to bring more new users to Hive.

Going Elsewhere

Thinking about that further, and thinking about the fact that I still have a somewhat sizeable following in relation to a specific narrow focus psychology niche, I decided I wanted to try an experiment.

Typically, the content I create around here is for my own writing enjoyment as much as anything and I also hold a vague sort of hope that it might appeal to a few other people in the Hive community.

What's sort of important to keep in mind about that, is that this content isn't created specifically for "external consumption." That is to say, whether this stuff appeals to somebody outside Hive in general is not that high on my list of why I'm writing.

To be honest, most of what I write here probably would be of little to no interest to the niche audience that has been following one of my external blogs since it started in 2002.

Anyway, since we now have access to at least some metrics of traffic for our posts here - at least if you are on PeakD - I thought I would conduct an experiment of writing some posts as if I were publishing them on my external blog... except using Hive as the platform to publish it.

That means I'm going to be writing what probably will amount to about a few 1000-1200 word essays, on topics that likely will be a very little interest to anybody within the Hive community. Well, I am presuming that, given that we don't even have a psychology/self-help community here.

However, these article will be promoted via Twitter (I still can't get myself to call it X) and several Facebook pages/groups to a niche audience of some loosely estimated 20,000 people. 99% of them will know little of crypto, likely nothing of blockchain, decentralization or anything technical.

Now the posts are going to be on topics that are currently being discussed within that particular community but it's not going to be a sales pitch for hive. I simply want to see how many sets of eyeballs end up looking at the article and clicking through to Hive.

Expected Outcome?

If I'm right - which I expect I will be - the outcome will be that it will be my most viewed piece of content on Hive ever, but will likely also be among the least rewarded.

Which, in turn, points to an issue that we may have in promoting Hive: in order to be interesting to people elsewhere the content approach we have to take is not necessarily the approach we have to take to get votes on Hive... and maybe the two are rarely the same thing.

And if that does turn out to be true, then marketing Hive is going to be somewhat trickier than most people probably expect.

What might also be illustrated by this experiment - if the results indeed come out the way I expect them to - is that marketing various niche communities within Hive - that is to say our layer two communities - may be the most effective way to reach a lot of people and truly increase the user base around here.

Of course it might turn out that I'm completely wrong and have no idea what I'm talking about. Could also turn out that I don't have as much pull as I used to "out there" because it's been a while since I've been actively part of these communities... however, I do want to get a little bit on board with them again in 2024.

So if you see some rather "unexpected" content from me over the next few weeks that is the explanation.

I'm also intending to create a specific post footer that only goes with these particular articles and are not what I would normally put at the base of a Hive post that I was intending to just post here locally.

You might notice that I am using the terms "locally" and "external" as I write this post and I think that is perhaps something we need to explore more in this community if we're hoping to grow it. The people who are already here are very different crowd from the people who are yet to become community members. And maybe we need to keep that in mind.

As of preliminary thought, I am guessing I will probably write 4-5 of these articles just to get some kind of a sample size going, and we'll see how well things go. And yes, I do plan to write some of my regular content in between, as well.

Can you support me in this particular endeavor? I'm not sure, to be honest. Perhaps the only thing that might work out as somewhat supportive would be if the rewards on these particular posts were at least the same as on my other posts even though they might not be very interesting to people here.

I say that not because I'm trying to fish for rewards, but because people who have never seen Hive before going to see these posts and if I'm going to eventually make a pitch to them that if they are interested in being online creators, it might look nice if the content based on which the pitch is being made doesn't look like it's pretty much valueless!

Well, I think I'm going to leave it at that for now... we'll see how this goes.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2023-12-15 00:46PST
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