You may write the best content, the wittiest lines, the most productive tips but if nobody reads your content it will be lost between the millions of lines of text that have been written by the time you finished reading this sentence.

The question is not Whether you have good content or not, the question is How can you get other people to read your content? Most people will say well if your content sucks it doesn’t matter how many people read it or buy something you are selling, it still sucks. True. Let me give an analogy though on that perspective.

How many sleeper movie hits do you watch before they become hits and make millions at the box office or video? Not that many! Now, how many big production movies, with shitty story lines, bad acting, over done action sequences will you go to see every summer, or major long weekend? Quite a lot!

Ever wonder why? All because of networking and marketing.

Here’s something to think about -

• Michael Bay directs the Transformers! - You’ll go to see it because…well it has Optimus Prime!
• Steven Spielberg and Seinfeld together for Bee Movie! I don’t know about the story line but hey, it’s Spielberg and Seinfeld so it has have some substance. I’ll still pay to watch it, even if it sucks.
• Spider-man 3 - Sandman! Venom! has to be good right? I’d had preferred it if they hadn’t made part 3 at all. It downright sucked!
• 20 year old produces his own movie with lemonade stand profits! - Huh! Why would I want to watch that, I’ll wait till someone tells me if it’s good then I’ll have a look - maybe on video. Plus it’s bound to be in limited release.

{btw Transformers rocked - good for Michael Bay otherwise he would face eternal hate mail if it sucked}

Most things that are promoted in a big way will grab attention, no matter what the real truth behind it is. Period.

Before sites like Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Fark etc…were not that popular and could even be described as elitist internet junctions. Some aspects of these sites are still that, elitist. But with an influx of new user registrations and even more mass media coverage the potential of these sites as networking and marketing platforms has risen considerably.

Though, I’m still alarmed at the rate of junk I see on digg and reddit homepages. Which is fine, because that content is like “Spider-man 3″ - over hyped with a lousy after taste.

Blogs themselves are networking and marketing platforms.

You don’t need to rely anymore on search engines for traffic, you can do that simply with a few contacts on your IM list. Chances are most of them have blogs with at least a couple thousand readers {depending on who you know}. Get the blogger interested, you get their audience interested.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day you see people watching the daily news every evening on their favorite blog, with submissions from its readers, rather than CNN - but that’s another discussion.

So in conclusion, I think that you will be seeing a lot more online and networking platforms grow going forward. How you grow with it depends on who you know and how many of them you know. The content will come, it always comes. You just need to let people know you have it, that’s all.

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About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.