YouTube, blogs, and Medium all can do the same thing.
Some twenty years ago when I started learning how to make a buck on the Internet, I used traffic exchanges.
I signed up for several of them in rapid succession under a veteran marketer whose name was Tony. After about five of them, he sends me an email saying, “You've been busy :)”
He freely shared a lot of his knowledge. One insight he gave was that he always promoted something in the signature of his email. He always ended his emails with an opportunity to check something else out.
The trick that some platforms are really good at
Let's say you've read a great blog post.
What better way to get you to stick around than to present a list of posts related to the one you just read?
“Oh, that looks good too!”
And after that post comes another set of related posts.
This is how habits are formed.
(For WordPress sites, the key to implementing this is a related posts plugin.)
Medium does this for authors as part of the platform. Other articles by the author appear directly below the end of each article. Authors can also include direct links to their other articles within the articles themselves.
YouTube has a sidebar of videos that often includes more videos from the channel. Plus, there's a selector to make all of the related videos from that channel alone.
Creators can also include end screens on their videos that put related content directly in front of the viewer. I did this recently on my own YouTube channel.
(YouTube and other similar platforms want you to stick around, because that's how they make their money. YouTube wants to encourage people to watch more YouTube, and they give creators tools to help them do that.)
Generously offer more of your work to you audience.
I'm working my way through Seth Godin's The Practice, which is a collection of his blog posts on the professional creative process.
In the short essays he writes often about how shipping work should be a generous act.
People can choose to accept our work, or not.
Those that do accept our work, though, are more likely to accept more of it. Those are the people we want to stick around anyway!
Some platforms, like Medium and YouTube, will reward you for just getting people to stick around.
Others, like a self-hosted WordPress blog, can reward by a paid offer that's a natural (but also generous) extension of the free work.
Someone has viewed one of your pieces of work.
Great!
Encourage them to view another. Find out how to get your platform to help you do that!
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header photo by Calum Lewis