Practicum Post #7: Getting Readers

Initially, when I was trying to promote my website, I shared the link on friends' facebook walls, emailed family, etc. My strategies relied almost completely on me reaching out to others. In theory, they could share this content with other people as well, but it didn't really seem to be playing out that way. Then, after checking out a few other blogs/websites, I realized that any site worth its salt that was trying to promote its content had links directly on the page for Facebook and Twitter. So, I downloaded a couple plugins for Wordpress, and spent a good amount of time building these links into my own page.

I kept up my old strategies, but I think these new ones helped a good deal. With every post I made, I would share it on Facebook and Twitter, where it would then get readers who would subsequently reshare it.

Some examples of people sharing and responding to my work:

I even got a Linkedin request from someone working

in the Chicago Media industry who saw/liked my work:

Another reason I tried to share and tweet all my posts was to attempt to optimize my site for search engines. By getting the link out there as much as I could, it would up my standing in search engines like google.

Currently, a search for "Colorful Revolution" in Google

will consistently bring my site up as the number 2 result

(especially cool given that it's also the name of a pretty popular song)

Also, on a good day, a search for "Joel Meyerson" will

bring up colorfulrevolution.com as the number 1 result!

So, ultimately, I think this project has been a pretty big success! I definitely accomplished what I wanted to (creating a platform for me to share my art), and I gained a lot of pretty good skills in the process. Not only can I share my photos, films, writings, drawings, etc., but I can do so through a medium that I built, and that I'm actually really proud of.