Creating valuable content for your target audiences is a great way to increase website traffic, improve search engine rankings, and attract and retain customers.
But creating content is just the first step—getting that content in front of your audience is just as important, if not more so. After all, your content won’t do you any good if no one sees it.
Content promotion, which is the process of distributing website content such as blog posts and thought leadership via both paid and organic channels, can help your content reach as many potential customers as possible.
Here’s how to make sure your content gets noticed.
Choose which platforms and channels you’ll use to distribute your content, and create an editorial calendar to ensure you create and share content on a consistent basis.
Feature new content on your home page so visitors don’t have to search for your latest content, and to make your home page look fresh and current.
Promote your content on yoursocial media channels by writing a short blurb to get readers interested and providing a link to take them directly to the relevant post. You can also join social media groups related to the subject matter you cover and provide links to your content when it's pertinent to the conversation.
Include visuals with your posts to make your content more engaging—photographs, videos, illustrations, infographics, etc. Studies show that people are more likely to read, share, and remember content if it contains an image.
Include easy-to-find social share icons so readers can share the posts that resonate with them.
Find thought leaders and influencers in your industry and ask them toretweet or share your content.
Optimize your content for the right keywords to help people find your content and ensure that people searching for relevant topics see your content high up in search results.
Read and comment on other blogs in your industry. Focus on providing genuine feedback, but if you’ve written something similar, feel free to mention it, explain how it’s related and what value it provides, and post a link.
Mention people in your content and let them know when you do with a quick email providing the link to your content and an invitation to share it with their professional circle.
Add external links to related blog posts. This not only provides value to your readers and boosts the authority of your own content, it can also be used to forge connections with influencers in your industry.
Cross-link to your own content. Internal links—those that link readers to another page on your website rather than sending them to a different site—not only keep your readers on your site by helping them navigate to additional valuable content, they also improve your search engine rankings.
Write guest posts. Make a list of blogs that cover your industry and reach out to the owners to offer to write a post for them. Make sure it’s on a topic that’s relevant and interesting to their readers, and don’t use it to promote your company, products, or services—your company will get valuable exposure just by appearing on respected blogs.
Create an email newsletter and send subscribers consistent roundups of your new content, with links. You can also send an email to your subscriber list each time you publish new content, letting them know why the content will be useful to them and asking them to read and share it.
Write a post featuring a quote from a major influencer in your industry, then ask them to share the resulting post to their followers. If you can’t get an influencer to contribute a comment, consider doing a roundup post featuring opinions that have been published elsewhere, such as, “10 Content Marketing Experts Reveal Their Most Important Tip.” Be sure you mention where you get the material you use in the roundup, and link to the source article.
Check your social media analytics to see who has shared your content in the past. Reach out to thank them and let them know when you have new content you think they’d like. Make sure you follow them and share their content as well.
