7 Ways to Promote Your Content Online

So you’ve written the best blog post since sliced bread. You’ve got a strong call to action, descriptive subheadings, a catchy title and the perfect sprinkle of bullet points. The only problem is that no one seems to be reading it.

Where did you go wrong?

This is a mistake I see time and again. People put so much effort into creating content that never gets seen because they didn’t bother to promote it properly, or didn’t know how. There are loads of ways to easily promote your content online, so there’s no reason people shouldn’t be interested in what you’ve got to say.

Let’s take a look at these 7 content promotion options:

1. Social Media Sharing

The easiest first step is sharing your content on social media. That means Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube; there are plenty of choices out there. What’s important is that you choose the ones that suit your business. Each social media platform has a different audience and a different purpose. You need to make sure you’re targeting the right one.

Just posting your content on social media isn’t going to make it go viral, though. If you don’t support your social media, you’ll be lucky to get a single view out of this. In order to get a good audience coming through from social media shares, you need to have a strong social media presence. That means investing in your social media, which has benefits aside from content promotion. If you don’t have the time to manage social media a great tool to help your to automate your content sharing is with a tool called Meet Edgar. This basically helps your to develop a library of your content that automatically posts like a value conveyor belt!

2. Social Media Groups

Whether it’s a group you’ve set up yourself and invested in, or a group that already exists, this is a surefire way to make sure your content is reaching the right audience. Social media sites like Facebook, Linkedin and Google have group functions that let people come together and unite over their common interests. If your content is relevant to their group then you can post it here for almost guaranteed attention.

It’s important to remember that these groups are designed for people to be social and share thoughts, opinions and company. They don’t take kindly to people spamming their channel with sales pitches. If you’re creating useful, informative and interesting content then this won’t be a problem for you, it’s just what everyone’s looking for! Just beware of trying to post your more sales-y blogs and webpages to these groups. If you think your content fits that description, maybe try something else instead.

3. Guest Posts

Don’t have time to build up an audience for your own blog? Why not use someone else’s? If you’re paying attention to your industry, you’ll know who all the big names are and where to find them online. Most of the time, you can also piggyback off their success by offering to write a guest post for their blog or website.

Guest posts help them as well as you: you get to show your content off to a larger audience, and they get to offer their audience something extra. Even more than most content marketing strategies, it’s important to ensure your content isn’t sales-y if you want to use it as a guest post. Their site isn’t there just for you to advertise your stuff on, so make sure that your content is relevant to their audience. Imagine what you’d want to read, and write that.

Not everyone will be open to guest posts on their blog, and not everyone will advertise it. It doesn’t hurt to ask, though, so if you can’t see an official stance on it, it’s still worth dropping someone an email to check.

4. Influencers

Not every great influencer maintains a blog for guest posting, but you can always find them somewhere online. Just like guest blogging lets you use someone else’s blog audience, contacting influencers lets you take advantage of someone else’s social media following.

If you know who the big names are in your industry, and which social media they use the most, then try getting their attention by directing them to your content. If they like it, they’ll share it with their followers and boom! Instant audience.

Just remember, no one likes being spammed constantly, especially with content they’re not interested in.

Don’t just ask them to share your stuff. Try to build awareness with them. Share and comment on their stuff. Get on their radar and then ask for the share or their thoughts.

If at first, you don’t succeed, try somewhere else. Even if they do share with their followers, don’t think that they’ll do it every time. It is best to spread attention across a number of different influencers, and the ones who like your content for the first time will be sure to come back and share your content by themselves later.

5. Paid Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising has the potential to massively boost your audience very quickly, and it doesn’t even cost much if you do it right. Although it’s normally reserved for marketing strategies that offer an easy-to-measure ROI, using a little bit of cash to spread your content further on search engines and social media goes a long way.

Paid advertising is the quickest, most open and most surefire way of reaching your audience wherever they are. It’s great for a short term boost to gain attention for a piece of content. After you’ve used paid advertising to gain an audience, you can keep them by continuing to create great content. As your audience grows, you can rely less and less on pay per click and more on traditional social sharing.

Paid advertising is a great solution to a short term problem, but probably best not to rely on it for the long term unless you can be sure that your content is worth the cost.

6. Advice & Comments

The most often overlooked way to promote your content online is by using it as advice to answer someone’s questions. There are plenty of people looking for advice, from general question and answer sites, like Quora, to specialist discussion boards for your industry. Gaining influence by answering people’s questions is great, but it’s even better if you can back it up by pointing them directly to your blog, video or whatever else you’ve made. It’s a guaranteed hit for anyone looking for an answer to that question and potentially anyone else who happens to be browsing.

Don’t try to force it, of course. Like all content marketing, the content you offer has to be natural and, above all, useful. Offering useless content as an answer to someone’s genuine question is going to backfire on you. With enough great content, though, and by paying attention to what people are looking for online, you can get a lot of good attention for your content.

7. Search Engine Optimisation

Never to be forgotten, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a passive and almost effortless way of promoting your content online. People still use search engines for most of their questions online before they head anywhere else, so if you can create relevant content and have it show up on Google to answer their questions, you’ll generate a steady drip of interest in your content. Over time, and with more and more content created, you’ll build a passive reputation. Before you know it, suddenly, you’ll have plenty more interest in what you’re doing from people who find your content helpful time after time.

With all the different ways you could (and should) promote your content online, there’s no excuse for creating content that never gets seen. Work content promotion into your marketing strategy and get on it right away! Far too many people are missing out on what you’re creating.

Conclusion

So in order to see success for your hard work you need to put as much effort into promoting your content as you do writing it. There are lots of ways to promote your content. Some will give you a quick win and others are more of a long term strategy like social media automation and SEO.

The beauty of content is your give value, demonstrate your authority in your field and build a long sustainable traffic source (evergreen content) for your site and business. It’s a beautiful thing 🙂

So go get promoting!

Thanks For Reading

Matt

PS – I’d love to hear how you promote your content effectively and the results these have brought you.