No matter what industry you’re in, you need great content. People today have high expectations, and they also have a shorter attention span than ever. But even after you do market research, find the right keywords, and create excellent content, there is still work to do.
Just creating your content does not guarantee it will get eyeballs. People are bombarded by content all day on their phones, tablets, or computers.
The reality is that you need to make a constant effort to promote your content. So in this post, we will cover content promotion and the ways to do it effectively to grow your business.
But first…
Get long-term ROI.
We help you grow through expertise, strategy, and the best content on the web.
Why is it Important to Promote Content?
Content needs promotion just as any product, service, or brand does. The research is out. 72% of marketers agree that marketing your content will increase engagement. And engagement is king when you’re fighting to grow your company’s online footprint.
What are the Benefits of Promoting Content?
Content promotion has numerous benefits. First of all, the additional traffic can boost your domain authority, bringing you free visitors. Secondly, it helps you become known in your industry so that consumers trust your brand enough to buy from you.
And finally, the more people engaging with your content, the more potential sales you can make. It’s really that simple.
Now that you know the importance of promoting your content, let’s talk about specific ways you can achieve it:
1. Get an Influencer Quote
Before even publishing your content, attempt to reach out to various influencers relevant to your audience. Let them know what your content is about, and ask them to provide a quote or a quick blurb.
You can offer to put their quote right in your content, with a link back to their blog or social platform of choice. They can even repurpose your content in their newsletter or other content of their own.
This allows you to piggyback on the social proof of the influencer or KOL (key opinion leader) while introducing your brand to entirely new people that might not have heard of you.
However, getting a hold of influencer emails can be challenging. So use an email finding service that finds verified email addresses of influencers just by typing in their name or website domain.
2. Create Shareable Snippets
You can tease out different elements of your content and create short snippets to share around social media and the web at large. This way, you get a lot more potential exposure for your content without having to repeat yourself.
These snippets have another benefit: they act as mini-headlines. You can A/B test these “headlines” to see which angle gets more clicks to your actual content. It will give you valuable insights into what your market is most interested in at the moment.
As for what the snippets should be, here are some great starting points:
- The title of your content (or variations of it)
- Short clips of the content
- Quotes from the content
- Research or stats in the content
- Main takeaway of the content
You should be able to pull out at least a dozen snippets using the methods above.
3. Let your Sources Know when your Content is Live
If you mentioned sources, conducted interviews, or used quotes from experts in your content, then make the most of it. Send an email to these sources. That way, they can take a look at your content and share it with their audience — maybe even linking to it. Email templates can be used here for your outreach to ensure you spend as little time as possible sending out these emails.
Email outreach is a powerful tool to leverage the contributions of sources, experts, or interviewees featured in your content. By reaching out to them directly, you not only express gratitude but also open the door for potential collaboration and wider exposure for your content. Crafting personalized email templates streamlines this process, allowing you to efficiently communicate the value of your content to those involved.
This way, not only do you have social proof, but potentially backlinks for better SEO, and greater exposure as a whole. Not everyone will share your content, but the few that do will be more than worth the few minutes it takes to write the email.
Of course, you can use the same strategy to DM these people on LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other platform.
4. Contact Outlets or Brands who Share Content like yours
If someone is already sharing content similar to yours, this is a great sign. It means that they are much more likely to share your content as well. And it’s a clue that their audience is interested in the kind of things you have to say.
The research process for this is fairly easy. When you’re creating your content, you’ll be researching similar content. Simply take the URLs of these other pieces of content and search Twitter for them. You’ll see who shared them, and you can reach out to a DM.
5. Reach out to Those who have Linked to Content like yours
Notice a theme yet? If you want to get someone to do something (share your content), the easiest way is to find people who are already doing it. If someone is linking to certain content similar to yours, they will likely be much more open to yours as well.
How do you find people linking to similar content? Find the URLs of this content and plug them into tools like Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs. You’ll see a list showing websites that have linked to them. Then just message the site owners and take it from there.
6. Turn your Written Content into a Video
You can repurpose your written content into videos easily by leveraging a video editor tool. And some research shows that you can get 1,200% more shares from video content over text. That’s a good reason to create videos, would you agree?
Video marketing is an effective way to grow brand awareness and get your audience engaged with your content. It also makes your content creation process more profitable. You can do the hard work of creating the content idea one time, then just read off of a script to make the video. Then, you can post it on Vimeo, YouTube, and other places around the web.
7. Make a Slide Deck out of the Content
A lot of content — such as cornerstone blog posts — can be a lot to consume in one sitting. And people have lower attention spans than they used to. So a great way to get your market to engage with your posts is to break them down into slides.
Then, you can promote the content via platforms like SlideShare, which gets millions of visitors every month. Just like with traditional SEO, you’ll want to optimize the title of your slideshow so that it appears near the top of search results.
8. Link to your Most Popular Content
Your most liked, viewed, or engaged post can be found by going into your analytics program. Try to find the one that has the best metrics for the last 3 months, instead of all time. That way it is more recent and relevant.
Then, you can link to your new content that you’re promoting in this most popular post. It will help you get extra traffic to make your new post take off just like the previous one did.
9. Use Content Communities
You can submit your content to certain websites and communities that specialize in sharing content. Some of these sites include:
- BizSugar
- Blog Engage
- Triberr
However, it’s not as easy as submitting your article and having tons of new visitors see it. The competition for these communities is fierce. So you should make your content exceptional — which should be something you’re aiming for anyway.
10. Leverage Social Networks and Forums
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allow you to take out paid ads to drive traffic directly to your content. While content is traditionally optimized for SEO to receive free and organic traffic, it’s worth experimenting with paid sources too.
For under $15, you can often get a decent amount of traffic. While you might need to shell out some money to invest in the ads at first, it could help get your content rolling with enough traffic to help SEO as well. This is especially true if people share your content.
11. Use Native Advertising like Outbrain
Content services like Outbrain, also known as native advertising, allow you to promote your content within other content. If you have ever read an article and then seen a lot of headlines for other content below it, then you’ve seen Outbrain at work. For example:
This works so well because a lot of times people are still hungry for more content after browsing through the first article.
The CPC (Cost Per Click) can be significantly lower than other platforms, and you can choose to show your ads in a targeted way to make sure you attract the right audience.
12. Make a Magazine out of Your Content
You can make a virtual “magazine” using an app called Flipboard. It’s available on mobile and desktop and lets users sign in with their Google or Facebook credentials. With Flipboard, you can collect content in your industry.
The app automatically turns this content into a flipboard or “magazine”. It’s aesthetically pleasing to read and many big companies already use it to promote their content like NPR, Huffington Post, and Fast Company.
Conclusion
No one ever said promoting your content was easy. But when you have something important to say, people will pay attention. So once you’ve created excellent content that truly helps your audience, your job is to promote it.
Luckily, with the 12 effective content promotion tips above, you’ve got a clear roadmap to getting your content seen, shared, and consumed. The end result — getting more traffic and sales for your business.
