“If you write great content, people will find it.” While that’s certainly a nice dream of a world in which marketers can just focus on creating outstanding content, it’s just not accurate anymore.
Over 2 million blog posts are published to the web each day. Making it much harder than ever to build an audience and get people to notice you. According to an older blog post by Neil Patel, content creation is only half the battle – the rest is gaining notice.
no traffic = no conversions
So while it’s tempting to celebrate after you finished publishing your newly created content for lead generation, you’re not done just yet. You can’t just put a piece of content up on your website and hope that people will find it, you’ve got to actively promote it to your audience.
But that’s where a lot of us get stuck. What else can we do to get people to notice, and hopefully convert on, that new piece of content you created?
promotion cycles and feedback loops
It takes a lot of work, but the good news is that traffic often leads to more traffic. Once we get our first set of visitors, some of them may lend a hand and help us with our content promotion.
- When visitors write about us on other places on the internet and link back to our site, it helps our search engine rankings;
- When visitors subscribe, our list grows and future email marketing is more effective;
- When visitors follow us we gain social influence, making our social media efforts more effective.
A visitor from one channel might help us with generating traffic from another channel, creating a feedback loop. The idea here is to create a self-perpetuating cycle of actions taken by you, generating traffic, then actions are taken by visitors, then more traffic and eventually leads and sales.
But to get this process started, we first need to give it a jump start ourselves. Below you can you find a big list of places and ways to promote your content. This list, however, is meant as a starting point. Try a few, or use them all. As always, there isn’t just one thing that makes a piece of content (or a business) successful.
Although these tips are not in a particular order, we recommend posting your (lead generating) content, then promoting it for a day or two in different ways before sending it off via email. The social visitors may leave comments, which makes the post look better when your email subscribers come to visit.
Social Media
Posting on social media is probably one of the first things you think of and which you are already doing. However below are a few ways you can take your promotions up a level. Make sure though that no more than 20% of your messages are self-promotional, you don’t want to come over as just a spammer to your own content.
Facebook
#1 You can pin a post to the top of your page that has the same branding as the cover image, and has a link towards your freshly created content or your landing page
#2 If you created more than just a blog post and an entire landing page for lead generation including a white paper to download, you can change your cover photo to be branded for the piece of content you just launched. Don’t forget to post a link back to your piece of content in the description!
#3 Post several times a week to the piece of content, varying the images you use in each post.
Twitter
#4 Tweet your content. Although tracking of your content is an important item to see how certain messages are scoring better than others. Sometimes it helps to no tweet using a URL shortener. People viewing your content will see the domain in the link and this is good information which can help you build more trust.
#5 After you tweet, follow a few people who are interested in the topic. If you use Twitter search or Followerwonk you can search for people that include relevant words in their bios around the topic. When they look at your profile after you followed them, they will see a relevant tweet at the top of your stream and they are more likely to follow you.
#6 Mention people who are already following you or outside your follower network in your tweets to make them especially aware of your content
#7 Tweet with a quote from your content. If your post contains data or statistics, use these to make a tweet with a quote. These are always interesting little gems that people tend to share more with their network.
#8 Use relevant hashtags or create your own hashtag around the campaign. This allows you to monitor conversations around the content and answers any questions specific to your content.
#9 Feedback loop / meta-promotion: If your posts start to become successful, Tweet and post about how people seem to like it. “Wow, this one is getting a lot of comments today” [link]”
#10 If people share or comment on any social network, thank or mention them on another network where they don’t follow you yet. For example, if people like the content on Facebook, thank them on Twitter. They’re likely to start following on the second social network since they’re already familiar with you.
#11 Tweet using images. According to Share As Image, tweets using images are 150% more likely to be shared and images generate 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts!
LinkedIn
#12 Post a link to your content on your Company Page, don’t forget to include an optimised image if possible.
#13 Join relevant groups and discussions. This one is a bit tricky and can be considered a bit spammy if you don’t do this correctly. Groups on LinkedIn are meant for valuable discussions amongst professionals, so don’t go posting links to your content in all sorts of different groups. Just like we mention in our previous article on “9 Lead Generation Ideas to Boost Sales Now” and answering questions on Quora, try to be helpful. Try pose a discussion related to your content in a relevant group. Get a lively discussion going, this will be way more effective than just posting links.
#14 If you have your own group, send out the offer to your white paper or your blogpost via the weekly announcement to all group members
Other Social Channels
#15 If you have something visual related to your content (like a picture, an infographic or something similar) try posting it to Pinterest. Volume might be low at first, but it is still traffic driving towards your content with little effort.
#16 Create a Flipboard magazine with relevant content to your niche. You can easily include links to your own article in there to get it viewed by another big audience.
#17 Create SlideShare presentations around your content. SlideShare has a high-ranking domain and people often use SlideShare to find educational content. Don’t forget to link back in the description of your SlideShare content to the original article with more background information.
#18 You can use niche voting sites in your industry where content creators and influencers gather. This can help your content be discovered by your target audience who may want to share your content to a larger targeted audience. Some good examples are Reddit (with lots of different sub-Reddit for all sorts of niches), growthhackers.com (anything growth hacking related), inbound.org (anything inbound and marketing related) or DesignerNews (for anything design related).
Your Website
Lots of people overlook how they can optimise their website to promote new offers and content, but it’s most likely one of your biggest marketing assets.
#19 Add social sharing buttons next to your content, this way people enjoying your content can easily spread the word.
#20 As you create more and more content, try thinking of adding a content library. A page on your website dedicated to the different categories of content you create.
Organic Search
Optimising your content to be found on search engines can do wonders for your business.
#21 Increase traffic from search engines by optimising your page for the keywords you want to rank for. Of course this does not mean you should be stuffing your page with these words, but make sure to include them in your page title, your copy and URL.
#22 Link to the posts from other posts. This could be a link under “related articles” at the bottom of some of your other popular, related posts. Or it could be a link within the body text. Either way, make sure the text within the link includes the key phrase you’re targeting.
#23 Make it a guest blog post on another site. If another site has more visitors than yours, the post will be seen by more people. If the site has a more powerful domain than yours (more high-quality inbound links), the post will rank higher. If the site has a more engaged audience than your, the post will get more comments and shares. When you guest blog, don’t forget to put a link back to your site in your bio. This will help increase your domains authority and helps all of your future content rank higher.
Emailing (segments of) your current database will increase their engagement with your company.
#24 Email (segments of) your own database about the content. In your email, try to encourage them to share the content with their friends and colleagues. Don’t forget to make it easy for them to include sharing buttons and simply ask them to forward it along to people they know who might be interested.
#25 Send an “in case you missed it” follow-up email. Three days after sending, send it again to everyone who didn’t open it the first time. Use a different subject!
#26 Personal, manual, one-at-a-time emails. If you have a few very high-value connections, such as prospects in the pipeline, it is absolutely worth it to send each of them a personal email with the link. Few people do this, but many people should. Using this personal tactic is not just good for sharing your content, but also to have another touch point with them and make them even more engaged with you and your company.
#27 Include a ready to tweet message in your emails. This way all that people have to do is click once to share a tweet with their network.
#28 Use LinkedIn to help recover from bounces. If you get a hard bounce on your email list, the subscriber may have changed his or her job. Find them on LinkedIn, restart the conversation, then offer to add them to your list again.
Paid
There are a lot of different ways to spend a small amount of cash and get some paid promotion to amplify your message.
#29 Use Facebook retargeting features to target people who have already viewed your site or are within your (email) database. This is a great way to reengage people who are already interested in your company.
#30 You can boost any organic post on Facebook by simply pressing the boost option. Make sure though that your Facebook ads are very targeted to spend your money as efficient as possible. For example use Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences to promote content to people similar than your existing fans.
#31 Create promoted Tweets on Twitter to appear in targeted Twitter users’ news feed or search results.
#32 On LinkedIn you can use Sponsored Updates to promote the update on your company page with the link to your content.
Internal Promotion
As your company starts to grow and you have more and more employees. Don’t forget to include them in the promotion of your content, their reach may be larger than you think!
#33 Send an internal email after you put your content live. Just like sending an email to your email subscribers link to the content, add easy to click Tweets to share and ask them to share the content to their audience on any social media platform they are active on.
These are just a few ways our team promotes our content — we would love to hear the unique ways you promote content as well in the comments below.
