Best Content Promotion Strategies: Asking Experts

Though creativity cannot be taught, it can certainly be nurtured. Find a routine that works for you. Routines can be positive if they reinforce a healthy, creative mindset; they can be counterproductive if they actually keep you from being creative. While breaking your routine once in a while to force new ways of thinking is good, what if growing/learning/experiencing new things was built into your routine as a given? The people who speak negatively about routine have probably not developed a routine that puts them on a path of internal growth. The key is to discover creative rituals that put you in a more creative mindset

Repurposing content is a popular content strategy because it allows you to turn one piece of content into many, often bite-sized, pieces of content that you can circulate across multiple platforms. One method I use actually doesn't start with blog content – it starts with video. If you are a thought leader in your space, you can leverage your existing Facebook following to direct traffic to your site and drive opt-ins. This involves:

1. Creating pre-hype by offering your followers a "teaser" (e.g. "Tune in tomorrow to catch my Facebook Live on '3 Strategies for Better Local SEO'")
   
2. Conducting a tutorial via Facebook Live, bumping up your reach by encouraging followers to comment, like, and share your video.
   
3. Include a link in the video description to a downloadable asset/content upgrade to generate leads. Remarket to these people via Facebook ads and/or email.
   
4. Download your Facebook Live video and post it on YouTube. Include a little YouTube SEO magic to generate traffic that way. Again, include a link to your content upgrade in the description.
   
5. Write a blog article targeting keywords relevant to Facebook Live (to generate organic traffic). Embed the YouTube video in your blog post.
   
6. Create graphics that include quotes from your video or article. Post these graphics to social media with a short description, and a link to the article in the comments section.
   
7. Repurpose your blog article as a LinkedIn article and/or on Medium, being sure to add a link to the original article.
   
8. Optional: create an additional downloadable asset to include in your blog post to capture leads this way.
   
9. Gather feedback from your audience to improve the article, or conduct an additional Facebook Live on a branch-off topic.
   
10. Once you have enough tutorial videos (in sequence), you can turn this into a free (or paid) email course that you can advertise on social media or via paid ads.

Create a valuable piece of content and repurpose it in the most meaningful way possible. Do everything you can to stretch the value out of the content you create. For example, consider creating a comprehensive guide → educational website page/blog post with a form to access it → short YouTube video that you can feature at the top of the website page/blog post → series of fresh social media posts using snippets of content from your website page/blog post.

Once you have a quality piece of content in your possession, do everything you can to increase its exposure. Repurposing content allows you to extend the value of your content by changing it to serve a different purpose, like transforming the messaging of several blog posts to create a guide or reusing content from your guide to help you create an educational video series. The messaging is the same, but the channel or format in which it's consumed is different.

Mention and link to an influencer in a blog post and then notify them through Twitter or email. The influencer may share the article but if you repeat the process a few times, you'll be on their radar and they may decide to invite you to future collaboration or return the favor by mentioning and linking back to you.

My number one content promotion tip is effective pre-outreach. If you already have a relationship with a blogger or influencer, they're much more likely to share and link to your content. Pre-outreach can take months before you ask for a favor but it can be speeded up in a number of weeks. By leaving a handful of blog, Twitter or LinkedIn comments, you'll appear under their radar. The better your responses, the more you'll get noticed.

The two main reason people reject promoting your content is that it isn't relevant, or they don't know you. Make sure your content is relevant and once you've caught their attention through pre-outreach, you'll be one step ahead of 95% of the other content promotion requests they receive.

The best way to boost your content promotion is through connections with influencers and relevant bloggers - a few shares from the right people can skyrocket your results in terms of social media shares and traffic back. Join communities, social media groups and develop relationships with relevant influencers and bloggers - it might take a while, but these relationships will prove valuable time and time again.

Simple:
Partnering up with micro-influencers within our niche combined with the use of content aggregation platforms like Zest.is and GrowthHackers.

Advanced:
An additional hack that can help you nurture visitors although a kinda technical one is to use an email automation platform that will be able to track user actions on your website.

For example, when they visit a specific content piece on your blog you can trigger an automation that will email a sort of mini content digest that includes other relevant articles to the one your visitor has been reading! (It's required that you use a registration process on your website, to identify users).

I don't believe there's any hack that you can apply to all kinds of content. However, what I do know is that whatever hack you want to use, it'll only work if your content resonates with the audience. Hence my #1 rule when it comes to creating and marketing content is that your content should speak to one persona only. If the content speaks to one persona, you're going to be able to resonate with them better. After that, the hack per se would be finding a community/group online where such personas can be found and then you should try to seed the content through an influencer out there. It's not easy but if it's done well, it can work really well.

For lots of quality social shares (and clicks) from many big-name thought leaders with the ability to target just about any industry, QuuuPromote is hands down the most bang for your buck to promote content. At $25 per article for 30 days worth of exposure to various personalities Buffer feeds, you would have to pay considerably more to get the same number of social shares and clicks by paying to promote your posts directly on any social network. I typically get 100's of quality and relevant shares for each promotion.

Community is the best vehicle for promotion. Build a community that trusts your brand by regularly offering content that is relevant and valuable to the audience you are targeting. The discussion within, by and around that community creates a natural buzz, starting a lovely ripple effect that moves out to the networks of your community.

To generate and maintain that buzz, it is vital that you are a good communicator and that you communicate consistently over time and with a personality that appeals to your audience.

Check out this podcast episode if you want to learn more about this strategy.

Never stop promoting your content. Most people continually create content, only to promote it for a few weeks and then let it die inside their blog archives. Instead, create evergreen content that you continue to promote and update so it stays relevant. Use feedback from your audience to improve your posts but updating and improving posts is one of the most underrated long-term promotion tactics we have seen.

Partner up with other players in your niche to do cross-promotion of your content. In other words, build relationships with relevant businesses that are not your direct competitors. There are lots of benefits you may bring to each other. For instance, cross-share your content via socials and newsletter, collaborate creating content, exchange guest posts, etc. Share your audience and get wider exposure in return, it's a win-win.

My number one content promotion hack would be to leverage content sharing platforms. Two sites that I think are worth highlighting are Viral Content Bee and Zest. Viral Content Bee is great for generating social signals. Zest is probably the best platform I know of for driving visitors to your site. It's also a great place to search for content ideas for your site or a guest post.

My biggest content promotion hack is what I like to call my pre-linking strategy. Whenever I publish a new article on my blog, I'm carefully taking the time (during my writing process) to thoughtfully link to other influencers, brands, and startups that I want to build a relationship with. That way, once my new article goes live, I have an excuse to reach out to that person or company to let them know about their feature on my blog. This kicks off the new relationship from a place where I've already provided them some cool value—which makes me stand out from the dozen other people who pop into their inboxes immediately asking for something. Starting a relationship off like this makes it much easier to later explore more in-depth content promotion partnerships like guest posting or regular social sharing of each other's content. My advice is to play the long game and build real relationships.

One of our most effective content promotion strategies is that we repurpose our content in a lot of different ways. Repurposing content is a smart way to target more people and drive loads of traffic to your site.

Coming up with original, insightful content is challenging, and we try to make the most out of each content piece, whether it's an infographic, a blog post or an eBook. For example, we regularly repurpose our blog posts into videos, which we then share on various platforms, including YouTube and Facebook.

We also create a lot of infographics based on our blog posts, often using our very own platform. Visual content like infographics is great for sharing on social media. And the best part is that our infographics actually show people what they can create in Visme.

We at LeadQuizzes send surveys to our email list asking for an expert opinion or advice on a particular topic. Then we write an article that includes and quotes some of the answers received. After the article is published, we reach out again to people whose insights we've used and ask them to share the article or link to it. We also tag and mention them on LinkedIn. This strategy has helped us secure more backlinks and produce content more efficiently.

I have a recurring calendar event every Tuesday morning called "Content North Star" that reminds me of three things: "Original research always, Design is content, and Have something to say." The best content promotion hack is having something worth promoting. Something that has a unique "take" and genuine insights based on original data in a format that's well designed.

From there, it really drills down to "shoulder" content and what we can create around it to promote it as well. Promoting a blog post or video is great, but what if we create a Slideshare deck, a Medium post (to push big publications on their platform), a LinkedIn article, etc. all around the original article. Now we have so many assets to promote natively on each platform. Creating platform-native media to go with each big piece of content is extremely valuable. From there, a lot of our promotion is just about growing relationships with people who would want to share it and understanding why humans share things online. Let's be honest, most social shares are done by people who agree with the headline of an article and (often) haven't even read it.

As a bonus tip, I'd also add that you have to match the intent of people who want to read that article. I've utilized a really smart, age-old tactic from copywriters around the levels of awareness to make sure that the content precisely matches what a person is looking for when they're searching. SEO is increasingly overlapping with copywriting as a skillset and, as subsets of content marketing, it makes sense to continue to overlap tactics.

My number one hack to content promotion is social automation. Content promotion is exponentially more important than the article itself. Getting an article in the hands of an influencer is up there among promotion hacks, but I still lean on social as my top promotion method. There's a wonderful little tool called Missinglettr that automates the promotion process. I also build out IFTTT syndication to many different platforms to keep all social signals active. I firmly believe that having good social activity is a sign of trust, simply because it's natural to have a social strategy in the overall picture.

The amount of published content grows each year. Users become more selective. So, my #1 content promotion hack is following. Before publishing a new piece of content you should spend some time describing a clear value that users will get reading your content. Why does your content be better than published before on this theme? How the behavior of your audience should change after the reading? If we single out one key idea of the article/post, how will it sound? Only after answering these questions, I turn to launching email newsletter or posting content on social media.

Somebody says that the goal of the first sentence is so that a person reads the second sentence. Keep this idea in mind each time you promote your content.

Create content that leverages insights from influencers and experts in your space. This can be done by asking influencers to contribute to your content, or simply by referencing their unique perspectives and advice.

Once the content asset is live, reach out to the influencers mentioned and encourage them to share it. Not only will this boost your engagement on social media, but it will also help you get in front of new and highly targeted audiences.

Your ultimate goal should be to find credible and authoritative influencers, with large and relevant audiences, who will offer unique insights and increase the quality of your content. There are a variety of tools that can help you find key influencers in any given industry. BuzzSumo and FollowerWonk are two of my favorites.

Develop a comprehensive guide filled with videos, quotes, images stats, and great tips. Then, break it down into bite-sized pieces and share each one across your social channels and link back to the original guide.

Rather than simply sharing a url, you're providing valuable content that's customized to each platform. This will boost engagement and clicks, resulting in more traffic and backlinks to your ultimate guide.

Content marketing is a huge thing, and the distribution of the content plays a vital role. And that is why I take this seriously for every single piece of content I publish out there. In the beginning, I come up with a curated list of distribution channels where people are finding or reading similar kind of posts. Most of the time I share my content in relevant groups and communities to generate the initial traffic and send some social signals. For example, if I have a post on eCommerce marketing I will share that in relevant eCommerce Facebook groups to get noticed.

My number one content promotion hack is linking to influencers within the article and then letting them know about it. I call it The Link and Connect technique.

I know this is standard stuff, so standard that it is often neglected (because bloggers think it's ineffective); but it's actually a hack for those who understand the benefits of this practice. First, there are short-term benefits.

Webmasters whom you inform that you linked to them are almost always more than happy to share your article with their audience. It doesn't cost them a cent, and it makes them look good.

Second, there are long-term benefits.

So, as you keep deploying this tactic strategically bloggers will start to remember your name and your blog and will learn to associate you with something pleasant and helpful. This, in turn, opens the door to you get helped- by them. They will want to help you and it'll feel completely natural to do so.

Finally, this means the overtime you'll get to the point where you get links and mentions passively, and that's every link builder's dream and a pleasant situation to be in. Because now you can focus a bit more on other, non-link building activities to further grow your blog.

The best type of content promotion is when others do it for you.

Promoting content to a new audience comes down to leveraging other influencers. And the best strategy is to build a relationship with them first. A great way to do it is to ask them to contribute their opinion to your blogpost. Then, after it is published you should tell them to check out the article and share it with their audience if they like it. This strategy usually works very well for promoting your content to a new audience.

My number one content promotion hack is to use Slack as a social media tool. You'll be seeing a "fresh content channel" on your related community niche. I do it a bit differently. I first go to Slack and change the related keywords in the "preference notification" setting. If a user asks a long-tail keyword related to my content, I immediately get notified which leads me to place my content to the right user. It's reactionary but goes to the right person at the right time.

Before you start distributing your content, it's important to know where your target audience is active. Once you know this, it's easier to decide on the right channels for sharing. Through my own target audience evaluation, I've learned that groups on LinkedIn, Slack and Facebook are effective channels for me. But you might want to reach someone else, for example, people in B2B marketing. So, in this case, you'd need to research groups that are related to this topic or industry. One group that I can recommend to be active for all B2B marketers is the Facebook group "B2B Bloggers Boost Group."

Avoiding the so-called spike of hope after publishing content requires a strategy that's going to move the needle for the long-term and not just give you a short influx of visitors.

So while I do ensure to share content on social media, I try and maximize the time spent on outreach and guest blogging with a view to building backlinks to both new and previously published articles.

While it takes time to master by testing and iterating your pitch you will eventually find a formula that works but avoid overly obvious cookie-cutter templates as an experienced webmaster or marketer can spot them a mile off.

If your own audience is small, tap into other people's audiences instead, yes it takes time and effort, but it's one of the best ways to invest the time you spend on promotion.

Remarketing on Facebook. With the help of Facebook Pixel create two types of audience: people who visited your site in the last 30 or 90 days. Promote your new content for the "90 days" group, while excluding the "30 days" visitors. Cheap and relevant traffic!

My number one promotional hack is pretty simple really. I try to make the most out of all of the work that I do by including links to some of my previous relevant publications in any articles I'm currently writing and then sharing widely on social media. For example, if I'm writing an article on current trends in team collaboration I may link to previous articles on secure communication, teamwork, etc.

This way, I'm able to give readers more in-depth content, while at the same time promoting my previous publications and myself as an authoritative author.

1. Find content discussing the same topic as your own, which are broken pages (i.e. returning an HTTP 404/410 or on a domain which no longer exists).

2. Filter to show the pages with the most number of referring domains.

3. Run a backlink analysis on the top 5 pages (provided they have enough RDs) and pull out a report.

4. Then reach out to all these pages which still link out to this dead page, informing them that they have a broken link on their page. And offer them your own URL as a replacement.

5. Continue down the list of broken pages and rinse and repeat!

Creating SEO-focused content is a very important part of our overall content strategy. With the help of keyword research, we come up with unique and proactive content ideas that can bring us a niche audience as well as quality organic traffic.

We also prefer to benefit from the data that we can get from our competitors' top pages and organic keywords. We discover new opportunities for content outreach as we also do backlink analysis and find out more about the platforms that our competitors are already in while we're not to improve our backlink profile.

What is more, we also create new partnerships in terms of content collaboration and get quality backlinks from different websites with high DA. These are the vital points as we believe that we always need to be one step ahead of our competitors and that's why we truly care about improving our content strategy and sharing valuable insights that marketing experts might find useful and share with their network as well.

If you want to spread the word about your content, invite niche influencers to share their thoughts on the topic. Once the piece goes live, reach out to featured influencers, thank them for the contribution, and ask for a social media share. In most cases, people want to return the favor, so they not only share the piece but also tag you which means building personal brand awareness.

Leverage your product: what we at Mangools realized a couple of years ago when one of our SaaS products skyrocketed is that leveraging its success to promote our content is probably the fastest way to get hundreds or even thousands of first readers.

Originally, we did this with a guide to the tool but nowadays we keep adding our cornerstone content. Of course, it has to be relevant to the product to constantly bring high-quality traffic to the blog.

Why not include an ultimate keyword research guide or SEO guide for beginners in an SEO tool, right?

You definitely should promote your content this way. Remember the goal is to find the sweet spot that will bring real value to your customers.

The timing of your content promotion can make all the difference. Before you commence a promotion, check these four things:

1. Are there any bank holidays in the market you're targeting?

2. Is there already another article that's getting most of the attention? For example: if Google makes a big announcement and that's dominating the platforms you're looking to promote on, chances are your content promotion effort will be largely in vain.

3. Some platforms take quite some time to approve or publish a post. Do your research beforehand. For example, if you know there's a 48-hour wait, and you want to promote something on Tuesday, you need to submit your content on Sunday.

4. If the platform features the best content in a weekly newsletter based on user engagement with your content on the platform, make sure you have enough time to actually get that engagement. It's better to have 5 days worth of time versus one day.

We make linkbuilding a top priority as a way to promote content, so we can get our blog posts and pillar pages in front of new, relevant audiences.

Our latest experiment involves using videos in our outreach to create a personalized, human experience for linkbuilding prospects.

We use HubSpot Video to create videos to send via email to influencers and authorities in our industry.

The video follows a simple format:

• A brief introduction (if they're a new prospect);

• A concise summary of the blog post or pillar page we think the prospect's audience would gain value from;

• A thank you for their time.

The email copy explains how the content will be beneficial for the prospect's audience and includes a link to the content being referenced in the video.

Increase your reach and get featured in roundup newsletters. Email is one of the most popular channels for content distribution. So make sure you make the most of it. One email content hack here is to build up relations with others in or around your industry that do roundup newsletters. Roundup newsletters might include their own articles, but also top publications of others. Each time you have an awesome piece of content, personally suggest them to include it.

You can prepare a summary and image in their writing style making it easier to publish. Or sometimes invite the people behind for a quote, making sure it gets included.

Your content page itself should always have a subscribe CTA, so the new traffic can also be captured.

Content promotion is a mix of different strategies, some of the tactics should be done when creating the content, like for example mentioning influencers in your content. I never use just one tactic. But If I must choose only one tactic, it would be "Using the power of online communities."

These could be forums, Q and A sites, social media groups. The content that I publish is in the digital marketing niche and I use marketing communities. There are some pretty good Facebook groups about digital marketing like B2B Bloggers Boost Group. Slack groups: Traffic Think Tank which is a paid group. Sujan Patel's slack group - Growth Slack is a great place to promote your marketing content as well. If you're in the online marketing industry, then you should promote your content in those 3 groups, many of the members are prolific marketers and industry leaders.

Let me summarize:

1. Identify where the industry leaders hang out, what are communities they are members of.

2. Post your content in a non-promotional and non-spammy way. Of course, number 2 depends on the community rules. For instance, Sujan's Growth Slack group has a channel called "promotion-help". There you can post your content, and it will get many shares by fellow marketers.

In other groups, you should come up with a reason why you post your content, you may ask for expert quotes or something else.

Always consider the community rules and stick to them.

Here, at Nightwatch, we've tried all the tricks in the book to make our content visible on the web. After months of experimenting with different approaches, including submitting content to "free submission websites" such as Zest.is or Readory, posting it to Facebook and Slack communities and counting on the help of influencers, we found 2 ways that work well for us.

First of all, we've realized how important it is to build relationships with other companies and bloggers from our industry. Once we've established relationships with them using outreach, we started to simply help each other in content promotion and collaborate. This once again proved the power of an engaged community.

Secondly, we've decided to always try to look for contributing thoughts from other experts in the industry and include them in our articles as an additional, valuable insight that we otherwise would have missed. We did that with the majority of our articles and it accomplished two things - 1) it enriched our content and 2) helped us to get free promotion from those who contributed, as they were willing to share the piece with their network.

Content marketing isn't anymore about having the most useful content (which shouldn't even have to be mentioned), but about creative ways to share it with the world. And building relationships is a sure way to increase your chances to go viral.

Crowdsource content and mention influencers. It's not groundbreaking, but it still works very well.

Over the years, I have published multiple expert roundup articles across a range of topics for personal and client websites. They consistently generate links, social engagement, and when used to rank for the right keywords, they can drive leads into the funnel.

I have a pretty simple promotional strategy for these:

1. Email all the people who contributed and let them know the article is live. I'll include a link to the post for them to read, a link to Retweet, and one to a LinkedIn post where I ask them to leave a comment. Organic reach on LinkedIn is strong, so if you can get some initial engagement, you'll reach a lot of people.

2. Mention all influencers on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

3. I'll build a Google custom search engine of all the domains of the contributors, and then search across those domains using keywords related to the topic of the post. If I find instances on their blogs where they mention the topic, I'll ask them for a link to the article. Because they are featured in it, the likelihood they link to it is much higher. Plus, you already have a warm relationship.

4. Post to community sites and ask contributors to upvote. I only do this occasionally for my absolute best content.

Building an engaged email list, who actually want to open and click.

There are a number of different 'hacks' I could suggest here, but the biggest jump into traffic stats always occurs when we send out an email broadcast.

I won't go into how my emails always have an open rate of at least 25%+ and high clicks here, but a few of my hottest tips are:

1. Don't 'spam' your list with an email for every new piece of content. Do it at regular intervals, with your most valuable piece (I broadcast once a week, but publish 3-4 new articles in this same time period)

2. Give away valuable content exclusively to your email list. For example, if we create a new lead magnet, or product, we often give it away to our email list (BTW: this is great for feedback). This keeps them opening your emails expecting more value!

3. Don't be boring. I often use current events to link my content and make emails more conversational.

4. If you're on our list (or one of our clients') you're my friend and I'll treat you like that.

5. Test times and weekdays, always schedule your broadcasts, don't send them when they're ready. Think about when your audience is most likely to 1. Open the email 2. Have the time to click and consume the content.

I really hate giving these tips out. My favorite hack, and please don't abuse the hell out of this, is to find "an inside guy" (or gal.) This hack might make some people angry because it's a bit grey, but it works well and doesn't hurt anyone. We'll just call them an insider.

Start by identifying your niche. Let's say it's the dog snuggie niche. Find all relevant forums, subreddits, slack groups, group texts, etc and seek out 3-5 "mid tier influencers." Don't go for the heavy hitters. Seek them out and get to know them. Invite them to dinner, send them an edible arrangement (ok just kidding.) Then find something they want, maybe they want you to invite all 500 of your friends to their Facebook page, or they are desperate for a link (I said this was a grey area.) Once you figure out what they want, agree to it in exchange for a share on X forum or a retweet etc. In case you didn't know this is called outreach, in one form. If you think this is a lot of work for one share think again. Last month I got a tweet from one of these mid-level influencers and was kind of pissed off that it only got 100 or so visits. 2 weeks later I come to find out that that tweet is now RANKING for a very strong keyword in my niche, and is pretty much pinned to the top of the SERPs.

One crucial part of promoting your content is getting it noticed by other content creators, who can link to it and use it as a resource in their own articles.

These mentions and backlinks show search engines, like Google, how valuable and insightful your content is to other writers.

The best ways to get your content noticed by other writers are to send out a press release and share your content with your network.

By getting your content under the noses of other creators, you give them the chance to see the value in your work and remember it when they're next creating an article on a similar topic.