A robust content promotion strategy has become a non-negotiable element of a successful content marketing plan.
Simply throwing your articles out into the social jungle doesn’t yield much. Go ahead, pop on over to Twitter or Facebook and search for the terms you’re targeting. It’s a wasteland of content that people put time into with little to no engagement. If you’re putting your own content online — you probably know this already.
Some businesses choose not to keep their social accounts updated, or even worse, many choose to stop creating content.
Where to Promote Content
If that’s you, stick around. This post highlights 5 places to promote content that could improve engagement and send the right traffic your way.
Where: Social Groups
In the early 2000’s, chat rooms were all the rage. Now (and for the foreseeable future) social media groups are a top internet gathering place. People come to find and share opinions, forge connections and promote what they care about.
Facebook groups are often the most active, but you can find thriving sub-communities on LinkedIn and Twitter (through lists, hashtags, and private group chats).
How:
Finding a list of groups that are relevant to your content and goals won’t be difficult, but finding one that will be right is challenging. For instance, there are a large number of Facebook groups for realtors.
(Screenshot via Facebook)
So, if you’re a business that sells to realtors, the group may be skeptical of you. Closed groups can be more active than open groups, but the expectation in closed groups is that content focuses less on blatant self-promotion.
Commitment: Medium
What you share in the groups you join should be highly valuable and mostly NOT from your own content. The self-promotional content that you do share will be better accepted if you’re known for showing genuine interest and sharing knowledge about the group’s topic of interest.
Proving you’re there to benefit the group takes requires gradual, thoughtful action: responding to others’ posts, curating content (not just yours), and knowing what you’re talking about. In other words, it takes a serious time commitment, but the payoff can be well worth the investment.
Where: Medium
Medium is a site where people can share their writing and ideas — kind of like a social media site mashed up with Blogger. It’s a great place for businesses to repost content where it could find more eyes.
How:
- Once you sign up for Medium, you click on your account avatar. Then, click “New Story” and an intuitive writing editor pops up.
- Copy/Paste your content (Medium is very good about transporting images), check to see if everything made it, and if you’d like to make any changes.
- When you go to publish the post, you can add a handful of “tags” so people searching for relevant topics are more likely to discover your post.
(Screenshot via Medium)
Commitment: Easy
Copy/Paste, a bit of formatting, and publish. Easy-peasy.
Note: You will likely want to wait a week or two before reposting your blogs to avoid confusing the search engines. Some companies put their actual blog on Medium and don’t have one hosted on their own domain.
Where: YouTube/Live Video
You may think, “We don’t do videos right now.” But don’t skip this section. Numerous reports over the past decade have shown the importance of creating video content. And as history has played out, we know they were largely accurate.
Key Stat: Cisco predicts by 2020 more than 80% of internet traffic worldwide will be online videos.
It’s where the people are, which means it’s worth your time, effort, and money.
How:
There are a couple of ways you can do this.
- Sit down and create a 2-5 minute script discussing the points you want to cover in your video. At your desk, on your couch — doesn’t matter.
- Create a video using a tool like Lumen5 or a slideshow highlighting the best points of your article. You could even voiceover the slideshow, meaning you wouldn’t even need a camera.
Commitment: Medium to Hard
Using a tool could cost money but will make the process much easier. Purchasing a camera and other equipment is costly. Creating a slideshow with a simple voiceover is inexpensive and effective — but requires time.
Where: Email
Not building an email list is perhaps the gravest online marketing mistake a business can make, followed closely by those that have an email list but fail to utilize it. Having a list and not sending them regular updates about content is a travesty.
Infrequent communication destroys open and click-through rates. Sending a weekly or bi-weekly update of content published is a fantastic way to get eyes on your content.
How:
Craft your email in a way that creates an interest in your article. Don’t just say, “Here’s this week’s blog.” Show them why they should read it and don’t forget to ask them to share it (both in the email and via share buttons on the post itself).
Commitment: Easy
You can’t get much easier than sending an email to a list of people who have already said they want to hear from you.
You spend a lot of time creating engaging content that’s valuable to those who read it, but if your content isn’t getting views, you’re not getting the traction that you should be from your effort. Employing these tactics is a sure-fire way to get more mileage from your carefully-crafted content — and get a bigger bang for your content marketing bucks.
Photo via: Shutterstock