Content marketing doesn’t stop with creating great content. You also need to learn how to promote it.
Today, you’ll learn how to do the promotion part. Here are the content promotion strategies that worked for me.
There are several promotion strategies that you can implement depending on the stage your content is in. Today, I have divided my content promotion strategy based on when the content is published.
DAY 1: When the Content Has Just Been Published
Once you click the ‘publish’ button, there are two things that you must do. These are:
Promote Your Content on Social Media
Promote Your Content to Your List
Here are the details of each step.
Promote Your Content on Social Media
Social media promotion is perhaps the easiest way to promote newly published content. All it takes is a click of a button and your content will get instant exposure from all of your followers.
Start with Facebook. Share the content to your page so that your followers may be notified that you have just published new content.
Then, do the same with Twitter. But this time, try to tweet 4 times all throughout the day. Be sure to space your tweets by putting 4 hours between them.
You can easily schedule your tweets with a tool called Hootsuite.
You just need to create an account and then add your Twitter account.
You can then add a tweet and specify the time of publication.
As you can see, this will make your life easier.
An untapped social media network is Google plus. It can be really effective if used well.
Here’s what I do. When I publish a post in G+, I tag some people who may be interested in the content.
I also add some hashtags.
The result is astonishing. You get all these people who are highly interested in your content just from using the right hashtags.
Promote Your Content to Your List
Another strategy for promoting newly published content is to announce it to your list. This is an amazing strategy because one email can trigger a wave of instant traffic. If you’re lucky, you may even get some shares and backlinks. To achieve great results, I recommend the best email marketing software plus use affiliate program software.
There are two ways to do this.
First, you can send a monthly newsletter to your list. This way, they have the expectation that you will be sending an email per month.
Some subscribers like this because they know that a newsletter is coming to their email and they don’t perceive the incoming mail as spam.
There are a different ways to do this.
Option 1 is to create a newsletter where you send 1 article to your list. This should be done in a way that your subscribers don’t need to click through your website to read it. From here, you have the option to add more articles as links or add summaries with a ‘Read More’ link.
Option 2 is to just write a teaser with a link to the full article. This can be an introduction or you can create an email that entices people to click on the link – Go with whatever works for you.
Option 3 is to create a teaser but link the email to a landing page. This is good for email segmentation. You can then ask them to opt in or just click a button to see the content.
Option 4 is to integrate your autoresponder with your RSS feed. This will instantly publish an article each time to you create new content. The problem with this is that it tends to have really low engagement. The email is not personalized and it is often ignored. It is the easiest option but is the least effective.
Out of the four, I love option 3. But you can also go with option 1 or 2. Try to avoid option 4 if you can.
DAY 2-7: The First Week of Your Newly Published Content
Now that you are done with initial promotions, it is time to prepare for the real thing. This section will prepare you for your daily content promotion routine.
STEP 1: Gather a list of Influencers
Most promotion methods have died with the change in Google’s algorithm. Back then, methods like directory submission and web 2.0 submissions work. But they are no longer as effective today.
But there is one type of promotion that remained.
It is called ‘influencer marketing’.
What is influencer marketing?
It is the process where the main goal of promotion is to get influencers to promote your content. This can come in a form of a backlink or a social share.
Why is this effective?
It is effective because it taps a source of quality traffic – influencers. These people have the ability to engage their visitors. So a small promotion (whether it is a tweet or a even a simple Facebook post) can usually generate a wave of traffic to your website.
However, influencers can vary from niche to niche. Today, you’ll learn how to find these influencers without using overly complicated tools. For influencer research, I love to use these three tools.
Do you want to find the most shared content in your niche? BuzzSumo will find it for you.
Its mechanism makes it the perfect tool for influencer research. It instantly uncovers the most shared content for any keyword. This makes it easy for you to find the influencers in your niche as they are the common producers of highly shared content.
Here’s how you use it. Just type in a keyword in the search bar and click on Content Amplification.
It will instantly generate a list of highly shared content. From here, you can visit each website and collect the information of the authors. They are likely the influencers in your niche.
For this purpose, it is nice to have a spreadsheet. I love creating a spreadsheet that has the following columns:
Author First Name
Author Last Name
URL
Website Name
Email
Facebook Profile
Twitter Profile
LinkedIn Profile
G+ Profile
Instagram Profile
I try my best to complete these information as I do my influencer research.
NOTE: BuzzSumo is NOT free. You need to pay $99 a month to use it. This may not be ideal if you are a new eCommerce website owner. You can use the 14-Day Trial if your goal is just to research influencers.
Twitter is a great place to find influencers. Not only can you find highly shared articles, you can also find the most influential people in your niche.
For this purpose, I love using KeyHole. This is a tool that lists the tweets about a particular topic. But more than that, it has a most Influential section that list the Twitter profiles of the influencers in your niche – this gives you an instant influencer list which I think is amazing.
Here’s how you use it. Just type your keyword in the search bar and wait for the results.
You can then find the Most Influential Section and visit the profiles of the influencers.
From here, you can gather their information and encode it into your spreadsheet.
If you don’t have the patience to deal with tools, you can also use good old Google.
All you need to do is search for your target keyword and append ‘inurl:blog’ in your search query. This will generate a list of results containing blogs in your niche.
You can then click on the results to see the authors behind the blog. You’ll usually find this in the About Page.
Again, gather their information taking into account their email and social media information.
BONUS: Guest Posts
Did you know that guest posts are a great source of influencers?
For this, you will need a list of influencer websites. You should have gathered these using the tools I gave you above.
Then, use this query: ‘guest post inurl:site.com’ where site.com is an influencer website.
You’ll uncover a list of guest post URLs in that blog.
How can you use these?
Well, you can click on the URLs of the guest bloggers and visit their sites. They may be influencers as well.
I love this strategy because I get to find more influencers by just going through one blog.
STEP 2: Do a Content Analysis
You may also want to do a content analysis on your target influencers.
What this does is it guides you in crafting the right content and titles for your content marketing plan and it also helps you to determine the type of content that gets the most shares in your niche.
How?
You do this by reviewing the content in a blog.
This can be a detailed content audit or just a quick overview. The goal is to determine the most effective types of content. Is it a list? An in-depth guide? A case study? List the most effective content types in your niche. Add this list in another column in your spreadsheet.
This is an optional step but it can help you build better content in your website. With this, you’ll be able to create content that gets readers and shares.
STEP 3: Continue Social Media Promotions
Don’t forget to continue social media promotions in the first week. This is a crucial time for your newly published content and you need to get the word out to as many people as you can.
For this purpose, I love to power up Hootsuite and schedule posts all throughout the week.
I tend to promote a content again and again for you’ll never know when someone will see your tweet.
Then, I also take the time to look for places where I can promote my content. This can be blogger or niche groups.
STEP 4: Respond to Comments
You may also encourage engagement in your post by consistently responding to comments. This can be comments on your blogposts or in your social media shares.
DAY 8 AND BEYOND: Connect With Niche Players
Now that the first week is over, it is time to get into the normal content promotion routine. For this, I keep one thing in mind: engage with niche players.
I do this in two ways.
1 – Commenting
Commenting may not give you backlinks but it is a wonderful source of traffic. I found out about this when I decided to comment on influencer blogs on a regular basis with the goal of ‘warming’ them up for influencer outreach. It turns out that commenting can be a good way to generate targeted traffic.
My process is easy. I simply collect all of the related niche players or influencers in Feedly.
I use this tool because it allows me to have all of the blogs in one feed. This way, I can comment on one content after another without jumping from blog to blog.
I love this tool because you can also sort the blogs into categories. This way, I can have a different list for every client I handle.
Having all the blogs on Feedly is a nice way to have all your influencers in one location. You can also turn on notifications so that you can comment on a blogpost when it is newly published.
2 – Niche Community Participation
You can also participate in niche communities such as groups and forums.
Facebook and LinkedIn have interest-focused groups that allow you to promote your content. This is a great way to get targeted traffic to your content.
For the Internet marketing niche for instance, there is a forum called WarriorForum.com.
This is a perfect example of a niche community – it is a place where you can share your knowledge.
A good strategy is to provide a portion of your post for free either in the main forums or in the War Room (the exclusive section of the Warriorforum).
Take a look at what Brian Dean did when he had a list of untapped backlink sources.
This post has driven tons of visitors to his website.
Conclusion
Content promotion is not that hard. You just need to know how to promote your content when it is newly published, how to collect influencer information and how to promote your content to the right people. In content marketing, quality is always better than quantity. So always aim to get visitors who are highly interested in your niche.
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