Step 6: Check the box, expand your reach

Gather members create terrific experiences for one another every day. Members also have great conversations on the site. In prior posts, I mentioned that you can earn more Gather Points when more people read your content. Promoting your content and your conversations off-Gather is a great way to increase your earnings. Today, we look at an easy way to increase your readership using Facebook and Twitter.

For those just joining us, this is the sixth in a series for the Earn More Points group on Gather. You may want to review the rest of this series as well:

• · Step 1: Find Something that You Love to Do. This post suggests finding a subject that you really enjoy as a starting point. In the conversation, many members reflect on what they already share on Gather and consider what they might share going forward.
• · Step 2: Evaluate the Appeal of Your Topic: This post looks at tools that help you to understand how many people are interested in the same things that you are. Selecting a relatively popular topic can help you increase earnings.
• · Step 3: Consider the Competition: This piece helps members determine whether the experience they want to create meets an unmet need (on Gather and on the Internet) or would compete with lots of other solutions online.
• · Step 4: Creating a Consistent Experience: Here we examine how to create an experience that will deliver on your readers’ expectations consistently. Like a boutique magazine may have done last decade (whether on home décor, gardening, skiing, travel, or parenting), what you share on Gather can deliver new and fresh ideas on a theme that your readers enjoy.
• · Step 5: Don’t just Create, Curate: Here we explore how creating a consistent, quality group experience helps build critical mass in audience. Becoming an editor builds your readership and credibility with your audience.

Today’s tip: each time you share your own content or comment on someone else's, you have an opportunity to grow your audience. Technology that we launched this week on Gather allows you to share your content and comments with our friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter easily. Because your Facebook and Twitter friends know you, they are very likely to want to read what you share here.

To increase your earnings, each time you share content, remember to check the boxes labeled “Share on Facebook” and “Share on Twitter.” Gather will do the rest. [Note, the first time you check these boxes, you will need to complete a one-time set-up process for Facebook and Twitter. MaryAnne explained how in a recent article. After that one-time process, you just check that box every time you share content.]

Commenting thoughtfully and sharing your comments on Facebook and Twitter will help increase your earnings as well. You may have noticed that when you comment, your friends on Gather often browse your content and join in conversations about it on it as well. Posting substantive comments on Gather, even on content you don’t own, will remind your friends that you share interesting things here. Checking the “Share on Facebook” and “Share on Twitter” boxes when commenting will encourage your Facebook friends and Twitter followers to explore the whole body of content you have shared on Gather.

If your friends make substantive comments on your content and share their comments with their own Facebook friends and Twitter followers, it will help build your audience as well.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Your thoughts are encouraged. Thanks for the great conversations you inspire and join here on Gather!