So you’ve written a piece of fully optimised high-quality, valuable, relevant content that stands out and you’re ready to release it into the world for your content to be read and loved by your audience. Don’t make the content marketing mistake of leaving your amazing content on your site waiting for it to be read and the views to come pouring in.
Unfortunately, it’s not a case of building it and they will come, you have to work hard to promote your content and get it in front of those who need to read it, otherwise, your hard work producing the content will be wasted. You should spend as much time creating content as promoting it to give it the best chance of success.
To help you market your content, this post looks at 29 of the best ways to promote your content to ensure you get the best results you can and make content marketing work for you.
Social Media
1. Post To Social
Post your content to all social media profiles that you’re on, which should be the channels where your audience is. Tweet it on Twitter, post it to Facebook and Linkedin, upload to Instagram and Google+. Posting on social media exposes your content to your followers, which they may then share with their followers and their followers share with their followers and so on, expanding your post’s reach further and further.
2. Re-Post To Social
Schedule and re-post your content for the future multiple times using a content calendar in a tool such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite or Buffer to keep getting eyes on your content. Experiment with the best times to post to get the best engagement from your audience. Likewise, each time you post out your content, vary images and text to see which visuals and messages get the best results.
3. Pin Your Posts
You can pin a post to the top of your Facebook timeline and pin a Tweet to the top of your Twitter profile to make your content the first thing visitors see. Also, include a link to the post in your social bios to draw attention to a certain piece of content that you want to promote.
4. Share In The Community
Join Facebook groups and Linkedin groups to further share your post with relevant audiences. Join Twitter chats and get involved in the conversation, offering your blog post as a point of reference – if it is relevant and provides value to the chat. Build a relationship with those in your community by responding to those who interact with your post – simply saying thanks can be a great way to get a dialogue going, build engagement, and further promote your post.
5. Use Hashtags
Use relevant hashtags to broaden your content’s reach, for example, this post could use #contentmarketing. Hashtags get your content in front of the right people who are likely to enjoy your content. Hashtags are very effective in Twitter and there are always trending hashtags you can use to join the conversation and promote your content in real time. You could also try Datejacking and use hashtags to promote your content based on a specific date.
6. Encourage Sharing
Encourage your readers to share your content by adding social sharing buttons to your blog. You can also add ‘click to tweet’ buttons which pull a quote from your post to make it easy for readers to share sections of your content on Twitter. You could also kindly ask readers to share your post on social at the end of your post which gives readers a clear action to take next. Don’t forget to ask employees to share your content on their social channels too.
7. Send It To Your Email List
To use this method you first need to build an email list. You can do this by adding an email sign-up bar to your blog and offering an incentive to sign up such as a free guide. Once you have built a list, send your content to your email list. Your email list is filled with people already engaged in your content and interested in your brand’s offering – subscribers who have signed up because they want to receive more content from you. You can also use push notifications to appear directly on user’s phones and let them know you have an email update they need to read.
8. Test Different Email Formats
There are a number of ways you can send your content using email marketing. You could send your content in an HTML-designed monthly newsletter with that month’s blog posts, a weekly news roundup post, or plain text update letting your readers know that you have just published a new article that they might be interested in reading. Test which email formats get the highest engagement and open rates for best results.
9. Optimise For Promotion
To ensure your email is opened and gets read and shared, there are a few things you can do. Don’t send the email from a business named address, but rather from your personal name as this makes it more personable and friendly and less promotional. Most importantly, use a must-open subject line that compels subscribers to click. Include a clear CTA in the email to open and read your blog post. Highlight the benefits of reading your article and keep the email short and to the point to capture short attention spans. Include social sharing buttons in your email to enable easy sharing directly to social. Add your post to your email signature so everyone you email has the potential to read your post.
10. Re-Send Your Email
To ensure you get the most from your email list and ensure your content is seen by as many people as possible, resend your content to those who didn’t open your email the first time. You can send it as an ‘in case you missed it’ or follow up email to those who missed out, and this time send it at a different time and use a different subject line to test which times and text work best.
Outreach
11. Reach Out To Influencers
Influencers are industry experts and authorities in your niche. Reaching out to them can be difficult as they receive hundreds of requests just like yours. But if it pays off your article could be exposed to their massive audience and adds credibility and recognition to your brand. When reaching out to influencers you need to demonstrate how your article provides value to their brand, is relevant to their audience, and benefits their goals. Hence, you need to pitch high-quality content and build a relationship with them.
12. Mention Influencers In Your Article With An Expert Roundup
Reach out to influencers by mentioning them, their brand, or their quote in your article and let them know, and they are more likely to expose your article to their audience. An effective way to mention influencers in your post is in an expert roundup-style post in which you reach out and ask influencers for their insights for your upcoming article – with many experts contributing to your post you can reach out to multiple experts and their audiences.
13. Reach Out To Those Engaging With Similar Content
Reach out to those posting, writing, liking, linking and sharing similar content to yours. Connect with those in your niche on social and drop them a message with a link to your post. In the message let them know that you have a similar article they may be interested in as it covers the same topic in a new way, or your post offers more value to the one they previously engaged with.
14. Comment Marketing
Comment marketing is a great way to share your knowledge, build relationships, and connect with your community whilst promoting your content. This involves replying to comments on other blogs and forums in your community with a link to your post – but only if your post adds value, is helpful, and is relevant to the comments and conversation – don’t just spam the comments with your content as no one will read it and you will damage your brand relationships.
15. HARO
HARO is a form of digital PR. You sign up to receive queries from journalists looking for reliable and authoritative sources for their article. You pitch journalists with answers to their queries and they may feature your insight in their article. Not only can this help promote your business website and expertise as a whole, but can also help promote individual content pieces. If your content is relevant to their query and provides extra insight for their audience you can pitch with a link to your post and they may include this link in their article, hence exposing it to new audiences on authoritative sites and aiding your link building efforts.
16. PR
As with influencer marketing, traditional PR pitches can be difficult to nail but can expose your content to new and greater audiences. You need to build a relationship with the news outlet and contribute something relevant, quality, and valuable. Research the journalist to understand what stories they are interested in receiving and determine whether your content is exclusive and newsworthy enough for them before you get pitching your awesome content.
17. Guest Posts
Guest posting involves writing and posting valuable and relevant articles on high-authority sites with a bigger reach to expose your content to bigger audiences. You will write a new article for a third-party site, but you can also use the opportunity to promote content on your blog that you have already written, as most sites allow a bio link plus links in the body of the article which you can use to link to and promote existing content that relates to the post and adds value. This will also help boost your article’s authority through link building and thus help promote it on search engine results pages.
Paid Promotion
18. Paid Search
Use paid search, or PPC, to promote your content on search engine results pages to make it more visible to those searching for content provided in your article. Use Google Adwords to create ads with a link to your content. Ensure your targeting is correct, choose the right audience, and set your budget. Write a high-performing ad with keywords that are aligned with what your audience would search for so that your content can provide the answers.
19. Display Ads
Display ads, also known as banner ads, are a great online advertising option as they work well to promote your content in a more visual way and hence capture the attention of users as they browse the web. Use images and animations to draw users in and compel them to click on your ad to view your content.
20. Remarketing
Remarketing and retargeting ads focus on targeting those who have already expressed interest in your brand. These ads use cookies to target those that have already visited your site, as these people are more likely to convert. As an example, say someone has been on your site or previously read a similar article on your blog to the one you want to promote, you can then retarget them with your new blog post or promote a guide download of the same topic.
21. Paid Social
Paid social is one of the most effective paid methods to promote your content and has all the benefits of social, but allows you to broaden your reach to expose your content to more people. There are many options across all social media channels, from Facebook ads and boosted posts to promoted tweets and sponsored updates on Linkedin – assess where your audience is to decipher where to dedicate your spend. You will create an ad based on the goal you want to achieve – to expand the reach of your article and get more link clicks and traffic to your content. Add a high-quality image to make your ad stand out, and test different ad formats to get the best results.
22. Content Distribution Networks
Stumbleupon, Outbrain, and Taboola are content distribution networks that promote related articles at the bottom of popular blogs and news sources. They can be used effectively to expose your content to larger, relevant audiences on higher authority sites, but you should be careful how you use content distribution networks as many articles can look spammy and clickbaity, detracting readers from your content.
Content Syndication
23. Republish Your Content Through Syndication
Content syndication allows you to get your blog post in front of a new and larger audience and make your content go further without spending time and money on writing a completely new blog post for a third-party site as you do when guest posting. Content syndication sites such as Medium and Linkedin Publishing allow you to republish your existing blog posts to expand your article’s reach and gain more exposure. Choose your highest quality and best-performing blog posts that resonate best with audiences to get the most traction and results from your promotion.
24. Submit to Content Communities
You can also syndicate your content by submitting your post to content communities like Inbound.org and Reddit. Join the community and share your content where it provides use to the conversation.
SEO
25. Target A Keyword
Promote your post through optimising it to be found on search engines as this is the first place where most of your audience will go to find answers to their question your article will answer. Start with the SEO basics by targeting a keyword and optimising your post around it – but don’t stuff it with keywords – write your article for humans and the related keywords will naturally fall into place. Then, use this keyword in your headline, meta description and page title.
26. Internal Linking
Link internally to the content you want to promote in other related blog posts and likewise link to other blog posts in the content you want to promote. This can be done within the body of your text and as a resources list at the end of your article. This will increase exposure for all blog posts and encourage readers to stay on your blog to discover more of your content. Internal linking also importantly adds link juice from previous quality articles to your new article to help it rank higher and promote your content in search results.
27. Link Building
Use link building to build links and authority to your blog post through such methods as guest posting and HARO. This will make your article appear higher in search engines and improve its visibility so browsers are more are likely to click on your article in search engines as yours is the best quality article at the top of search results.
28. Featured Snippets
By optimising your content for search engine features like featured snippets, people also ask, answer boxes, and related questions you can obtain position zero in search results, above all organic and paid results. Optimise your content for this position by ensuring your content already ranks well for the targeted search query, make sure you have the best answer to the search query, and format and summarise your article in a way that matches the current featured snippet you are targeting – such as in a paragraph or as bullet points.
Repurposing
29. Repurpose Your Content
Repurpose your content to introduce it to a brand new audience, expand reach, and encourage further sharing. There are loads of content types you can play with. Transform your blog post into an infographic, SlideShare presentation, video, webinar, ebook or guide. Then repeat these promotion techniques to market your new repurposed piece and attract even greater audiences.
Promote and Market Your Content
Try some of these strategies to market and promote your content. From social media, email, and outreach to paid search, syndication, SEO, and repurposing, don’t leave your content to turn stale on your site waiting and hoping for your audience to find it, read it, love it, and share it. Promote your content to expand its reach, expose it to new people, and get the most from your content marketing efforts.
If you have any questions about promoting your content or any other aspect of content marketing, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help. Let me know how you market and promote your content in the comments below.
