Promote the Heck out of Your Content

Written by Alice and Annette

This week, we promised to talk to you about getting more eyeballs on your content and how to promote your content online After all, it’s the reason you publish content, right? You want people to read it, of course. The problem is content doesn’t get read all on its own and you have to do the work necessary to ensure your content gets out there.

Here’s a little checklist you can keep handy to use each and every time you publish a piece of content. You want to make it go as FAR as possible, so in many cases, you might repeat some of these steps for certain pieces of content.

1. SEO

Search Engine Optimization should be the foundation of your content promotional strategy. Making sure your content is properly optimized for the major search engines can pay off for months and even years after you first post it.

2. Paid Ads

Promoting your content with paid ads (such as with Google’s AdWords or Facebook Ads) can be a great way to find entirely new readers and clients who might otherwise have never discovered you. It’s easy to cap how much you spend, and to measure you effective your ads are.

3. Affiliates

If you have your own affiliate program (you should, if you don’t), you can get your affiliates to promote your content. Best of all, you generally only pay for this promotional assistance when it results in sales or signups.

4. Facebook Page

Are you currently maximizing the effectiveness of your Facebook Page? Selective promotion of your new content on Facebook can unleash a wave of new visitors, as your Facebook connections share your posts with their friends, and those people share with their friends.

5. Twitter

Do you post a lot of new content on your website? If so, then posting links to some (or all) of your best content on Twitter can be a great promotional channel.

6. Be a Guest Blogger

You can extend your profile by making guest posts on other websites. Being a guest blogger gives you instant credibility, and helps you reach individuals who might not otherwise know about you or your site.

7. Bring in a Guest Blogger

On the other side of the equation, you can bring in an outside writer to make guest blog posts on your site. Guest bloggers can help their followers discover your website.

8. Share it on LinkedIn

One of the highest value social networking sites is the professional site LinkedIn. If your content has a professional topic, you might consider posting links to your LinkedIn profile.

9. Pinterest

Depending on the nature of your content, you might be able to expand your audience by posting photographs to your Pinterest account.

10. Email it to Your List

This is probably the most important and likely the most effective one and hopefully you’ve got a thriving mailing list. If not, then you need to start building yours right away! If your new content meets the parameters of the list that your readers signed up for, then send out a quick email to let those people know about it.

And remember, just like everything else, promoting your content does take work. There’s absolutely no doubt about it, but it’s the fun part of the job…getting out there and sharing and talking to people. If you’d like to focus on the marketing side of things and let us take care of the writing, we’d be absolutely delighted to help you. Check out our monthly services and see how we can help meet your content creation needs.

Oh and by the way, there are many ways you can get help with the content creation and publishing process and we’ll have some great ideas for you next week. Until then, have a great one.