The Op/Ed Blogger's Survival Guide To beBee

I’m a writer. I write all kinds of stuff. I write advertising and marketing stuff and get paid for it in money. I write lyrics and sometime composers turn them into songs. I write screenplays and sometimes producers turn them into (low budget) movies. I wrote a novel once, but I won’t make that mistake again.
But I am also an op/ed blogger and get paid for it in readership.
My blog is about a lot of different things. Sometimes its about entertainment. Sometimes it’s politics or sports or people or social media or things I have learned about communications that I like to pass on to others.
There is no ryhme or reason here. Because my blog is my hobby. And so for that reason it’s almost always written on my own terms.
You could also say that my blog is a bit of a marketing tool. Over the years I have picked up my fair share of marketing business as a result of it. But that’s not its primary goal.
If it was I would write exclusively about communications.

So What’s The Point, Jim?

If you are an op/ed blogger like me, and there are a lot of people who fall into that category, you’re always looking around for the right places to post.
You probably have a Wordpress or Blogger blogsite. You may have a blog attached to your web site. But if you’re at all experienced in this area, you know that those places will only get you a bit of readership.
You really need social media sites to hit the kind of numbers you’re looking for.
Otherwise, what’s the point of doing it in the first place, other than the temporary rush of writing and the gestalt of getting those thoughts out of your system?

If There Ain’t No Audience, There Ain’t No Show
Chilliwack

Social media sites are a op/ed blogger’s bread and butter. Because when you post an article there, it automatically becomes available to as many people as you are connected to and there's a good possibility that they will forward it to their networks.
And that, in a nutshell is where your larger audience is waiting for you.
Over the past several months, even before I was made a BeBee brand ambassador, I was actively promoting beBee as a great place for bloggers to pitch their tents.
There were a couple of reasons for my doing this.
After my numbers on LinkedIn Pulse, where I posted close to 400 articles, started to fall off, (for reasons that are all too well known), I looked around for a new blogging headquarters. Fortunately a guy named John White put me onto BeBee, which I joined immediately, and found, even before they opened their publisher, that there was a lot of interest in what I was writing about.

After they opened their Publisher, those numbers grew even more dramatically. So a typical post for me on BeBee, was being seen and engaged with by more than ten times the number of people who ever saw the same sort of post on LinkedIn on a really good day.
Posting on beBee gives you a couple of other advantages as well.
1. Once you have done your post, it will appear on your home page, but you can also direct it to 3 hives or special interest groups. So if you’re writing about digital marketing, for example, there are a number of hives that would be logical places for you to place your post.
There are close to 20,000 hives on beBee. So pretty much every kind of special interest under the sun is covered. There’s no big deal to go through to join a hive, and you can also find the kind of stuff you’re interested in reading about there as well.
2. beBee has set up links to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, even your email, so you can post to these sites just by clicking, which is a huge time saver and audience builder.
3. The beBee publisher is very simple to use. If you know how to use WordPress or Blogger, it’s no more a process than those.

The Biggest Difference/Plus Of All

I’m only speaking from my own experience here, but to me beBee is a very positive environment in which to interact. There are very, very few trolls or bullies here. People have a really positive disposition overall. They are interested in finding out about you, both as a person and a professional.
That’s the whole beBee philosophy in a nutshell. You are, we all are, both things. Getting to know what someone is like as a person tells you a lot about what they would be like to do business with.
It’s so simple I’m amazed nobody thought of it sooner.
There are a lot of people on BeBee who are interested in reading and engaging with high quality content.
This has been proven to me time and time again.
BeBee has about 12 million users right now, but that number is growing quickly, because a lot of people, especially bloggers, are finding a real audience for their work here and the word is spreading.

Don’t Give Up LinkedIn, Or Anything Else, For beBee

I’m still active on LinkedIn. I probably always will be. But as far as blogging goes. I’m getting way more response by linking my beBee posts than I would by posting them directly on Pulse.
If you want to be successful as a blogger, you need to be as ubiquitous as you can on social media sites.
And honestly, beBee is a great place for most op/ed bloggers to be. It’s not the only place. But right here, right now, and for what I can see of the future, it’s probably the best place for anyone creating high quality content.

If your business has reached the point where talking to a communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.

If you want to read more of my posts, you can do that here: 

https://www.bebee.com/publisher/@jim-murray
Download my free ebook, Small Business Communications For The Real World, here:

https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/

All my profile and contact information can be accessed here:

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/this-post-is-my-about-page


All content copyright 2016 Jim Murray.