For the past year or so, I have experimented with CoPromote as a viable alternative to expensive advertising. There are other similar services out there, not always free, but I will focus on CoPromote for this article. The information below can be utilized with any kind of marketing you decide to undertake. So please keep reading, because this is truly important to you, whether you sell photographs, dog food, or are an author or musician.
First of all, CoPromote is a service that you can use for free. You can also join for around $50 and get more. I have not coughed up the money to examine the difference. Honestly, I don’t have $50 laying about to throw away. Like many authors, budgets can be tight.
The free service, thus far, has been enough. It does limit you to the number of shares you can have during a day. The number of shares that you give determines how much CoPromote coin you get. Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Tumblr (also Vimeo), each carry their own bounty amount. Twitter has the largest payout for each share, and I tend to focus on it regardless, because that is where I have the most followers anyway.
Another aspect is that you can follow and be followed by other users, very much like another social media page. My advice is to follow people who share interesting things that relate to your platform. So you will need to know exactly what your platform is. For instance, if you’re a historical writer, you might look for art, more specifically old photos to share. My platform corresponds to the topics that I cover here on the blog. Mostly, I look for recipes that are not advertisements for specific products (sometimes I still share these if the product is really just a small aspect of the post). The other things I look for is fun dog stuff, like videos and pet parenting advice. This maintains my brand. That truly is necessary. Otherwise you look like you’re just advertising crap, and people start to look at your twitter or other social media as a spam site.
If you’re an author, and you’re looking to share a post, please do not choose something that is basically an ad. Write a blog post that is interesting. You can post to Medium, if you don’t have your own site. Give people something quality to share, that helps bolster you as a writer and shows how interesting you are. That way, readers will get a sample of what to expect from you. You will build a community and loyalty. Don’t expect to get millions of views. This site is a bit more subtle (my best was around 500k). However, you’ll probably notice that your followers increase, and that your blog views also increase.
Avoid sales ads as much as possible. It is understandable if you have a new release you’d like to get word out on. Or, you’re having a sale (which shouldn’t be monthly).
Your ad will stay up to be shared for about a week or so. In that time, you’ll need to keep sharing other people’s posts to keep the coins coming in to support your campaign. This is why I said to choose things that pertain to your platform. You should also choose to follow other CoPromoters who share the content you want to share. Following other authors isn’t going to help you. Your choices of promotions will be clogged with ads for buying their books, because most of them don’t know how to market smart. They’re not going to listen to advice to the contrary either. There is a huge faction who believe this is the way to do things. There are also paid sites that use CoPromote to get shares for the ads they’re running on behalf of authors. Thus, you see a lot of spammy ads (following recipe sharing people can still get me ads and contest announcements).
Regardless of who you follow, you’ll have to discern what is best to share so you don’t look like a spam site yourself. CoPromote offers a search function. Use key words to find possible candidates. They will also send you suggestions, mostly based on what you share. If you use the phone app, there are three dots in the upper right corner of the post. Click on this to block the user, follower the user, or ‘see less’ of these posts. Doing this will help hone your suggestions and make searching less necessary.
When I mentioned that your shares influence your suggestions, it’s based on the keywords you use when preparing your post. It will ask for your category and tags. These keywords will tell CoPromote what to suggest to you. Who you follow also influences your suggestions.
Overall, this is a great, and free opportunity for people trying to market their blog or product, especially artists. We can make it better by sharing quality content (both our own and those of others). I get at 
least 300k shares of my posts each time I share on twitter. The number is dependent on your number of followers on each social media site, as well as the shares you reciprocate. So, it is up to you how successful it will be for you.
That CoPromote has an app for your phone that you can manage your posts with is a super bonus that makes it so easy to utilize.
Overall, I’d give the site a 4 out of 5 stars. If the content was better (which is up to the users—less spam please) and I saw more followers being added to each social media site I use, I would give this a 5 star. It’s simple to use. It’s mostly effective if you use it correctly. With better CoPromoters (not spammers), this could be a powerful tool.
well, now, Copromote isn’t even online anymore. Please tell me if there are any other good sites to co-promote on the Web?
And you know what…I wrote this and published days before they went ass up. I haven’t found another site that fills the void. That was a real loss of something that was helping with outreach.