Cross-promoting

If you’re a writer, cross-promotion can help you grow your audience

crosspromo.club

I recently went into a state I hadn't suffered in years. Honestly, I thought I was too old, and my career too established, for me to ever endure it again. The Dev Hole.

Every highly skilled profession has an equivalent, an extended trial by ordeal that squeezes out wannabes through sheer exertion. Junior doctors have rotations, police recruits have time on the beat, actors have creepy casting sessions in provincial theatres. In tech, we spend our junior years screaming at error messages to meet deadlines no demon would consider fair.

I could never understand how these deadlines were set. Nor could I imagine how seemingly nice senior staff could be such malicious sadists on the inside. The same guy who would muck around and fire toy rockets from his desk would expect you to learn fourteen new code libraries by Friday even though they were all documented in Greek, Norse Runes, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Fortune having leapfrogged me from keyboard monkey to "perplexed guy" at the big table, my career never went through a senior technical stage. Consequently, I never got to become a sadist myself and find out what that guy's problem was. Until recently.

If you've read these articles for a while, you might remember that I came up with an idea for making cross-promotions easier. I built a platform, pushed it to a server, and hit quite a large brick wall. There is so much more to development than I remember. For one thing, the global internet has become a tangled mess of regulations, poorly drafted legal advice, and haphazard enforcement. For another, every industry is so online that you can't cyber-sneeze without alerting several multi-million dollar competitors to your presence. Figuring out ways to work with them, rather than against them — all while protecting everyone's privacy and ensuring data fidelity — is seriously hard brain labour.

I wasn't giving up. I had a busy summer of conversations and scoping, and about six weeks ago, I was confident that I'd sorted things out. At least in theory. And what I thought was a reasonable deadline to build it all — the 1st of October — almost bloody killed me. I look like the personification of London at 5 am on New Year's Day, or Glasgow on any given Wednesday. I realize now that senior staff never really set unreasonably short deadlines, it's just that the true amount of effort required is impossible to fathom. And I suppose you have to be optimistic, or you'd never start anything to begin with.

Happily, my idea is now an actual thing. Hosted, already working with other players in the industry, secure, compliant, and taking new members. If you're a writer, and you want to expand your audience, head over to crosspromo.club and sign up — it's all free, no surprises.

If you're new to the writing game, and you don't yet know what cross-promotion is, it's fundamentally quite simple. You put a link to a similar writer in one of your articles, and they put a link to you in one of theirs. The Devil is in the detail. You need to find cross-promotion partners with similar sized audiences to you. Otherwise, if you promote them to your audience of 5,000, and they promote you to their audience of 100, you're getting the thin end of a wedge. You also need to agree dates, decide what the links will look like, exchange images, and so on. The CrossPromo Club helps with all of that.

And it offers the (almost) automated cross-promotions that sparked this journey. Once you've added your newsletter, you'll get a unique link to paste into your articles. That link will match you up with cross-promotion partners, and it will ensure that you receive as many potential new readers as you send to others. I think this could really help.

And to all the senior staff I cursed under my breath many years ago — sorry!