You’ve spent a lot of time coming up with content, researching it, and of course, writing it. Then you publish, and the work continues.
It’s important to create content, yes. But, it’s equally as important to promote what you already have. Coming up with a strategy to promote what you’ve already worked so hard on can be most impactful for creating traffic and raising your brand awareness.
Seriously, you don’t need to publish multiple pieces every day. In this case, less really is more. And you can get more out of the work you’ve already done than you would if you published a quickly thrown together piece every single day.
The trick is creating really in-depth pieces and then promoting it accordingly.
Why You Should Be Promoting Your Content
Think about your marketing strategy for a second. You promote your brand, you may pay for ads, and you probably spend time updating your business on listing sites and so on. These are all wonderful promotion habits.
You likely also have a social media profile, or two (or maybe even three!), and you likely share updates on there as well. Why do you do this? To be frank, it’s probably because you want to be part of the noise, and build your brand awareness while at it.
But why is this important? Well, content promotion helps you work less hard. What we mean by that is, you can use your existing content to retarget new audiences or repurpose it for new channels, without having to create new content each time.
Besides, sharing your quality content will help you focus on creating and maintaining strong pieces, rather than creating content just to have more content. More isn’t always better, you know.
To recap, promoting your content is essential because:
- Creates brand recognition and awareness: Your blog, social profiles, and website are your owned media, meaning you have the ability to share whatever you want on them. Sharing your content on multiple platforms helps you increase your brand awareness because it has the potential to be seen by new eyes on each channel. Plus, it makes it easier for others to find and share, too!
- Enables you to become part of the conversation: When someone does an internet search on the product or service you sell, does your name appear? Probably so, but it wouldn’t unless you had content out there. Your name is more likely to become familiar if you are pushing content out there. Also, it helps to share your content on social media because, if you aren’t sharing, do you even exist? Sharing in the noise seems counterintuitive, but it is essential. You never know who might see your content. No one will see it all unless you share.
- Makes it much easier for others to share you too: Part of why you need to promote content is because it makes it easy for others to see. Content that is seen can be shared. If you share on social media, for example, your content is not just quick to be seen but also easy to be shared by others. A quick retweet can get you in front of the eyes of a whole new crowd of people.
7 Ways to Promote Your Content
The benefits of promoting your content are pretty clear. It helps you get your name out there in a win-win sort of way. You increase your exposure, and people get to share content with their friends.
One key thing to remember is to always make sure your content is current. This means recycling old posts with new content. Tidying up your content can help you in the long run. You might even be able to consolidate newer things into your old articles, meaning you spend less time creating content, and potentially keep your existing content relevant (which can lead to better rankings!).
By focusing on your existing content, you’ll find that it’s much easier for working on SEO clusters and ultimately improving your authority on certain keywords. You can take your high ranking content and funnel it into more specific topics (revealing a ton of new content ideas for later on).
With that being said, the first step is promoting the content you have. Of course, you have a variety of options, let’s talk about the content promotion options you should be using.
1. Social Media
You have a few options for sharing on social media. You can share directly to your page or a to someone else’s page. You can also share to groups that you are in. This means, you technically have an infinite amount of ways to share on social.
You also have the option to schedule your content to share at later dates, with tools like Buffer or Hootsuite.
Social media is the easiest platform for immersing yourself in the conversation (around your business and niche), while also allowing you to reach more people at once.
As we hit on before, social media also allows your content to be easily shared. In fact, most content that becomes viral does so on social media. Think of memes, videos, hashtags, etc. Your content can thrive here; you just have to share it.
Similarly, you can run a rewards program to get people to share. Something like an influencer marketing program or an affiliate program can further incentivize people to share your content with others.
Social media promotion tips
- Target specific people with mentions and tagging
- Tweet by using a quote from the content
- Cross post, but change up the message for each platform
- Tag relevant businesses/people when you can (primes sharing)
- Add it to your content calendar to keep promotion of past content going
2. Email Broadcast
You likely have a newsletter or at least some sort of email drip campaign. Or maybe even just email receipts. Regardless of the type of email you send, you have the opportunity to share your current content. You may have seen some people share a recent guide or webinar in their email signature before, too.
Why is this? Well, simply put, people read your emails. Especially ones like confirmation emails and receipts. And if you regularly correspond via email, they’ll see your email signature too.
The thing about promoting content in emails is that it’s not so in your face. People may be intrigued enough to click on it, and at the very least, they know it exists.
Newsletters, in particular, are a great place to share your content. Think of a newsletter you’re subscribed to. It probably has the main message and then relevant articles linked throughout. Or maybe even listed at the very bottom.
Readers may not click on all the links, but they may be intrigued if something catches there eye.
Ideas for sharing your content via email:
- Newsletter
- Drip campaigns
- Email signatures
- Confirmation/Thank you emails
- Product update
3. On Your Blog
Your content has to live somewhere, and your blog is probably the best place for it. Your blog acts as your content hub. Articles, white pages, eBooks, newsletter subscriptions, etc. can live here. Also, it’s important to note that you can share other updates on your blog, like new services or products that are set to launch.
The trick is to make your blog as relevant as possible, meaning keeping your items updated or posting regularly can help with this.
No one wants to land on a blog and see a last published date of six or more months ago. Keeping your content up to date can be enough to get people to redistribute it.
You’ll find a lot of the top blogs recycle their content and update it to include new statistics because they want it to keep ranking. Part of this is simply updating and changing the date when you make edits. This can help your old content to continue to rank and become everlasting.
After all, it’s your evergreen content that is the money maker. Those timeless pieces are the ones that will remain shareable and drive traffic.
Another great way to promote content is by writing a roundup. Those who you get to contribute will be likely to share and even link to your content in the future (which is an excellent way to build your backlinks and promote your content!).
Remember people may subscribe or save your blog to their favorites, so updating it regularly by adding new content, or better yet, updating existing content will keep people coming back.
Tips for promoting on your blog:
- Update outdated information
- Ask people to subscribe
- Promote guest post content
- Write a roundup
4. With a rewards or referral program
Incentivizing people to share, will likely result in people sharing. You can spin it a variety of ways to promote your content and to get people to share.
For example, you may host a webinar and ask attendees to refer a friend to it as well. This could result in both of them receiving a free eBook or even a discount of some sort.
You may just ask for people to refer others to subscribe to your newsletter. You don’t even have to offer anything. In most cases, a subscriber would see the benefit in referring a colleague to your newsletter if they felt it was interesting and educational enough. You just have to ask.
By implementing some sort of rewards program or referral marketing program, you can get people to share your content. Promoting content this way helps you to reach a group of individuals who could turn out to be your best customers.
After all, “84% of people trust recommendations from people they know. Making them the most influential form of advertising,” says a study by Nielsen.
How to promote your content with referrals:
- Ask for people to refer friends to your blog
- Ask people to share your content with others
- Provide an incentive for sharing
5. Online communities
Aside from social media platforms, there are a host of different online communities out there. You can use this to your advantage and promote your content out there, too.
Sites like Quora, Growthhackers, and Reddit, for example, provide you with another avenue of sharing.
There are some boundaries for these sites, however. Quora, for example, isn’t okay with you being blatantly promotional. You’ll have to work your content into thoughtful threads, like answering peoples questions and then linking to your content for supporting material. Even then you’ll have to be careful. If your answer comes off too self-serving, they may delete your comment.
You can even turn to republishing content on sites like Medium, where you can essentially have a second blog for your content.
Online communities worth sharing your content to:
- Quora
- Medium
- Slideshare
- Youtube
- Growth Hackers
6. Paid Ads
So far we’ve seen a bunch of free options, but paid ads can work wonders too. In fact, you may find that you pay to promote certain content on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, just to get it pushed out even further. Display ads are another option for getting your content seen.
A paid post can be beneficial because you can target who sees it. In most cases, these all fall under an umbrella term called pay-per-click (PPC), meaning even though you may be seen by a lot of people, you only have to pay when someone actually clicks the post.
You’ll have to create specialized ad copy for the content you want to promote. You’ll likely want to include specific keywords in this copy, too. But all of this work could be worth it in the long run, especially if you’re trying to promote a pillar piece that can build up your traffic and also help establish you within your niche.
Another thing you’ll want to consider is driving paid ad traffic to a landing page first. You paid to get them to click—you’ll want to make sure they actually engage.
Tips for creating paid ads to promote your content:
- Use keywords
- Set a budget and choose who you want to target
- Make sure your ad copy is compelling
- Drive traffic to a landing page first
7. Guest Posts
Earn your backlinks where you can, meaning contributing to roundups and writing guest posts for other blogs is key.
If you can find a non-competing business with customers similar to yours, you can write content that will benefit them, while also driving traffic back to your own content.
Whether that be by including a supporting link within the content or simply adding the link to your blog within your author bio, you have the potential to not only discuss relevant new content but promote your own and build a new audience while doing so.
Another perk to writing guest posts, aside from building your brand awareness, is that you can become an authority in your field. You may be able to be found more easily in searches, which can build up your audience’s trust in you, and that can propel even more guest posts to happen (which means even more potential content promotion).
Tips for getting a guest post:
- Ask those who have reached out to you for the same opportunity
- Bookmark blogs that you have seen guest writers on
- Contribute to roundups when possible
- Ask your partners if they’d do a guest swap with you
In Conclusion
Promoting your content is essential in building up your name. It’s one thing to have a good product, but it’s another to write about it. By sharing your expertise, you are further establishing yourself and building up your social currency (and desire to be shared).
But, your content can only go so far, you have to promote it, too.
