Building Bridges to Steem With Cross Posting

We all know how great the blockchain is. We’ve been here posting (and lurking) and meeting new people, sharing our thoughts, spreading our creative wings and enjoying the apps built on top of the blockchain. But there is a whole big world out there that doesn’t know about all the wonderful advantages the blockchain ecosystem has to offer.

Courtesy of Pixabay

Many people equate the blockchain with cryptocurrency. They will never know that crypto is just one small part of the blockchain universe unless we tell them. It’s not hard to get the word out, especially if we use the techniques I outlined in the SEO series. We can use apps that are already in place, built on the blockchain backbone and cross-post our content to their conventional internet counterparts.

Crossposting is merely putting the same piece of content on more than one internet or blockchain property. There are two concerns usually raised about this technique. The first - won’t Google see that as duplicate content and punish us with a Google Slap? No - duplicate content is seen by Google this way:

If you were to post the same content on your own website in two or three different pages, with the “root url” being the same - http ://www.example. com is what is used in the example above - that would be what Google considers duplicate content. In all probability, they would merely ignore all but one of the pages.

So posting the same content in more than one internet property will not bring down the wrath of the Google Bot.

But what about Steem and the plagiarism bots? Most of the apps I will use as examples of places to cross post have been “white listed” meaning that Steemit groups such as Cheetah won’t flag the content as duplicate content, or the apps are not crawled by those groups. There are some exceptions especially when posting the same article to Steemit and a blog site other than your own WordPress blog, such as Medium. Just be sure to post your Steemit blog first and wait a couple of days before posting the same content to the other conventional web site and you should be fine.

So where can you cross post? Let’s start with one of my favorites - the Q&A sites. On the blockchain side you have Musing.io. On the “other side” you have Quora. Both allow you to ask or answer questions in a wide variety of categories. Simply search for a question that fits your interests or your keyterms if you’re doing promotional work and answer that question. Or, ask one of your own. Quora is highly ranked within the top 100 most popular sites online and is both easy to use and kind of fun! On Musing, you can get upvotes and you have the option of posting that Q&A directly to your Steemit blog for more visibility and engagement.

If you are more visual and less into writing, there’s the InstaGram/Steepshot pairing. Instagram is more visually oriented although you can add a fair amount of text based content to the images you post. Steepshot also has upvotes that pay in Steem just like Musing, and just like Musing will allow your Steepshot image and description to appear on your Steemit blog. It’s fast, fun and a perfect companion to Instagram or Imgur. You can easily get keyterms into the image description and title areas of Instagram, Steepshot and Imgur.

Do you find yourself drifting towards Pinterest? Give Dlike a try and cross post to both. You not only will expand your audience, but you’ll give the blockchain a boost with your keyword rich descriptions and text.

And of course, we have the blog article sites. There are two easy ways to cross-post articles to blog sites. The first is to write your article in Steemit although I would recommend using Steempeak if you prefer the ability to schedule your post, write it using a standard formatting interface rather than markdown language and have statistics not only as you are writing the post (number of words, read time) but also additional stats after posting.

Do your post in Steemit or Steempeak first, then head over to Medium in a day or two after you have posted to Steemit and drop your post into your Medium account. Medium has an ENORMOUS audience.

They have many interest categories and also send out promotional emails to members based on the member interest categories. While you can monetize your Medium blog, I would suggest getting used to Medium and building your audience there before diving into a Pro account with monetization.

If you have your own Wordpress blog, head over to the plugins area of Wordpress and download and install the SteemPress plugin for Wordpress. Also, be SURE to join their Discord channel for updates, and customer service. Steempress will allow you to automatically post to your Steemit blog account and your Wordpress account at the same time and they are white listed so there won't be any problem with duplicate content from the Steem bots.

Be aware that you must be self hosting your WordPress site, or on a Pro account with WordPress.com to be able to use this plugin.

If you're into videos or streaming, there are two blockchain Dapps you should be using to cross post in addition to your Twitch, YouTube or other conventional Net video posting accounts. Dtube allows you to post videos and get paid for upvotes and cross post to your Steemit blog at the same time. Pay particular attention to your SEO work in the description, no matter what video posting site you use. As it becomes ever more difficult to monetize YouTube channels, Dtube is a great way to earn a few dollars vlogging while using YouTube to help drive traffic to the blockchain.

Last, but certainly not least is Dlive a live streaming platform similar to Twitch. Gamers, vloggers, musicians, industry interviews - anyone who streams should check out Dlive. I am not certain that it is technically possible to stream to both Dlive and Twitch at the same time, but you can upload a video of a stream you have done on Twitch. While it wouldn't be "live", it is a way to cross promote your music, interviews, or gameplay.

By crossposting we can hit the best of both worlds. Our blockchain content gets upvotes that put money in our pocket, while the conventional posting can get in front of millions of eyeballs and higher rankings in the SERPs. We can help those conventional net people cross the bridge to the blockchain by simply adding a line to our video descriptions and posts that includes a link to our blockchain accounts. Something like "For more information on this topic check out (link here). "

If search engines are returning the blockchain links as well as the more conventional internet properties to user search queries, some of those users will come and check out the blockchain articles and videos. More people taking part in blockchain activities help boost the token price and means even more content for the search bots to munch on. Building those bridges between the conventional net and the blockchain is a winning proposition for everyone. Here's a list of "pairings" for conventional and blockchain properties.

Quora <---> Musing.io Q&A
Instagram <---> Steepshot Images
Medium <---> Steemit or Steempeak Blog posts
Wordpress sites <---> Steempress
YouTube <---> Dtube Videos
Twitch <---> Dlive Streaming

Next up will be a tutorial series on images, including best practices and software for image work, how to make Infographics and how to create the ever popular memes.