The Jeff Korhan New Media and Small Business Marketing blog enjoyed a great week, leaping back into the Technorati Small Business Top 100 Rankings.

How does this happen?

While producing great content helps, it is not enough – not nearly enough. Your content has to get shared, again and again.

Original content is fuel for helping your customers – and social media sharing is the flame that ignites it.

Getting Your Content Shared

To start, you have to earn the right to be shared, and that does require having a base of solid content that is the result of understanding your business and its customers – and then showing up to do the work of creating it.

Your content is a body of work that earns the attention of your community. If you consistently provide value, the community will engage with your business blog, with a few even taking a moment to leave a comment.

This is precisely how I first met Jon Loomer. Since then, we have crossed paths as guest bloggers at Social Media Examiner, something that would not have been possible without our respectively building a base of content worthy of the standards of Social Media Examiner.

Links from prominent sites like Social Media Examiner significantly contribute to the ranking of your blog. Now fast forward a few years to just last week, when I did an interview with Jon Loomer on his Social Media Pubcast.

Jon’s podcast is so popular that we scheduled that conversation months into the future. So, in addition to the time investment for doing your own work, you have to be patient about your content sharing.

This is a marathon – not a sprint.

Get in The Game and Let Serendipity Happen

Jon Loomer is influential as a Facebook expert, and we had a good time chatting about the new Facebook hashtags. The article I recently wrote on that topic earned quite a few shares, something that occasionally happens when you continue showing up to do the work of helping your community.

Serendipity played a role in helping that article reach a larger audience, because my content is syndicated by Business 2 Community and Social Media Informer, which both significantly helped to earn it even more shares.

These partner relationships would not be possible without first creating content worthy of sharing.

So, the lesson is simple.

Create content to the best of your ability, keep showing up to do it again, and reach out every now and then to expand your audience by joining the communities of other blogs.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to share and share alike.

When you share, you create opportunities for new relationships. That’s how I met Jon Loomer, Mike Stelzner at Social Media Examiner, and lots of other cool people.

The web is designed for sharing.

You simply cannot do this alone. You need friends and allies.

The aforementioned Technorati ranking may have my name on it, but it was a team effort that was years in the making.

Are you ready to get started building yours?

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, helps mainstream small businesses create exceptional customer experiences that accelerate business growth. Get more from Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

Jeff is also the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley 2013)