Even when you create great content, it might never be seen if it’s not promoted and shared. Content promotion is critical to the success of every piece of content as well as being crucial to the success of your content strategy in general. The more views your content has, the more likely you are to make a sale.
To make sure content gets seen and has a chance at generating leads, use these 10 unpaid, organic content promotion tactics.
1. Send the content to your email list
One simple way to promote your content is to send it to your email subscribers.
Email subscribers are three times more likely to share content on social media than leads who have come in through other channels, according to QuickSprout. Moreover, you are six times more likely to receive a clickthrough from an email subscriber than someone on Twitter, for example.
When you have a new piece of content, paste a snippet of it into your email and add a link to read more. Include a subject line with an interesting statistic or quick fact from your content, and use A/B testing to see which email versions receive more opens and clickthroughs.
2. Pursue guest-posting
When you guest-post, you write original articles for authoritative websites. If the site allows, you can also include links back to your own content within the post.
To find guest posting opportunities, go to your favorite blogs within your industry and see whether they have a page about guest-posting. Or you can type in your industry name + “guest posts” or “contribute” into Google—for example, “marketing + guest posts”—and see what opportunities pop up.
You can also find guest posting opportunities through Pitchbox, a platform for reaching relevant websites and sending them your content. Just specify a few keywords, and Pitchbox will populate a list of dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of websites you can reach out to, along with their contact information. It also allows you to create automated email templates to send initial and follow-up emails.
Before sending your pitches to a site, make sure it has a low Moz Spam Score, high domain authority, and a strong social following. (Pitchbox provides that information for each potential opportunity.)
3. Use relevant hashtags on social media
When promoting your content on social media, use relevant hashtags. Look up popular hashtags around specific topics on Hashtagify, then integrate them into your social media posts. Your content will now become discoverable to people searching for content via those hashtags on those topics.
4. Mention influencers in your content
Before you create a piece of content, come up with a topic or content format that will give you the chance to include influencers.
For example, do a roundup blog post that poses a question to influencers and include their answers in the post. Then, when the blog post goes live, ask each influencer to share it on social media feeds. Tag them in your own social posts promoting the content.
To find influencers, reach out to people who publish or otherwise appear on websites that are big in your niche. Check out the size of their social media following as well. Tools like BuzzSumo make it easy to find and analyze influencers, follow them, and see what content they share.
5. Make an infographic to go with your content
Infographics are relatively easy to make and fun to share, and they can immediately boost your content. They can increase traffic by 12%, according to Demand Gen Report, and they are shared and liked on social media three times more than any other type of content.
You can easily make an infographic on platforms like Canva and Venngage, then post it to social media or place it within a blog post.
6. Ask employees to share
When you promote content, you’re likely tweeting it out or posting on LinkedIn from a company’s page. Perhaps your CEO or founder is also posting it. But to maximize the content’s reach, ask your employees to share it.
Send out a link to the content via an internal messaging channel or in a company email, and encourage sharing.
7. Syndicate your content to other sites
Syndicating your existing content is a great way to gain exposure. You just have to be careful how you go about it.
The downsides of syndication are that Google may ding you for duplicate content, and the syndicated content could rank higher than the original content on your own site.
If you’re going to syndicate content from your blog, make sure you inform the site that’s syndicating it that you’re not submitting original content. Also, to avoid a penalty from Google, within the post include “originally published on” then your website name.
8. Create interesting graphics and memes
Some people are too busy to read text content, or maybe they’re just visual learners. To appeal to a broader audience, produce interesting graphics and memes based on your content, then share them on visual social media platforms, such as Instagram and Pinterest.
You can use imgflip to create memes in minutes, or Canva to quickly create graphics, including charts or graphs. Include eye-popping statistics, fascinating facts, or informative quotes from influencers that appear within your content.
9. Include a link in a popup box on your site
When people visit your website, prompt them to click on your content through a popup. Include a question about your content that will entice people to click on it: for example, “Do you want to learn how to increase website clicks by 85%?”
A popup must be eye-catching to be valuable. Make sure it’s designed well and it features a pop of color.
You can use a few different types of popups, including entry popups, which show up when someone enters your site; scrolling popups, which appear when people start scrolling down your page; and exit popups, which appear when visitors are about to leave your page.
Experiment with different types and versions, then use the ones that receive the most engagement.
10. Post on LinkedIn and Facebook groups
LinkedIn is the place to promote B2B content. Fully 94% of B2B marketers on the platform use LinkedIn to distribute B2B content, according to LinkedIn.
When you create a new piece of content, post it in your LinkedIn groups, since it may be relevant to other members. Do the same on Facebook, which is a platform for both B2B and B2C promotion. Recently, Facebook made it so that company pages can create and manage groups, so it’s simple to get that content out to followers without having to pay for promotion.
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Creating content isn’t enough to bring in traffic to your site. But with these 10 promotional tactics, you can make sure your ideal audience sees your content.