Why Promoting Content is Important
In his post “The 80/20 Rule for Building a Blog Audience” marketer and entrepreneur Derek Halpern notes:
If you spend time writing a piece of content, and that content only gets 1,000 readers, chances are there are one million other people in the world who can benefit from what you wrote.
Why then, would you spend more time creating content when you already have something that your ideal customers can benefit from?
Halpern has an 80/20 content strategy, that is, he spends 20 percent of his time creating it and 80 percent of his time marketing it.
While this is a fantastic strategy if you’re new and need to grow your audience quickly, content marketing experts warn that sticking to this strategy can mean that you’re under-serving your existing audience.
So how can you grow your audience while still focusing on creating massive value for your existing readers and followers?
Here’s a plan: Give yourself quick wins with an automated strategy and a checklist.
Promoting Your Content: 5 Quick Tips
1. Send it to Your Email List (Time taken: 3-5 minutes)
One of the best ways to get immediate traction with your content is to send it to your email list. Your email subscription list is typically comprised of people who have signed up to receive updates from you because they like and trust you or your brand and want to hear from you.
These are the people who are most likely to add high numbers to your social shares, to read your content the moment it’s published, or to forward it to others who may benefit from it.
Your email subscribers are most likely the most engaged of your audience, so it’s always a fantastic idea to share content with them on a regular basis.
2. Schedule it on Social Media over a Period of Weeks (Time taken: 5-10 minutes)
A social media editorial calendar can be a fantastic thing and one most business owners swear by, especially if they run small operations with little help.
When you publish a post or a piece of content, one of the best things that you can do is to spread out the promotion over a period of time using tools like Buffer or Hootsuite.
3. Email Everyone who is mentioned in your post or article (Time taken: 5-10 minutes)
A fantastic way to not only connect with your audience, but to connect with other people in the industry and their audience, is to mention them in your articles and blog posts and then let them know when you’ve done so, in order that they can share with their readers if they so choose.
To find someone’s email address quickly:
- Look through their website for a “Contact Me” or “About” page to see if you can find it there.
- Try LinkedIn. Often, people who want to be contacted will put their email address up in order to be found.
- Google combinations of their name with “@websitedomain.com” (in quotes) to see what comes up. For instance, if you were looking for my email address, you’d be able to find it very quickly by using the search term [Gabe “@connect4consulting.com”]
4. Syndicate Your Content (Time taken: 10-15 minutes)
Building partnerships with larger media organizations is the ideal way to syndicate and share your content. This however, will take lots of time and effort.
While you’re working on building those, don’t forget to utilize the free networks like Medium and LinkedIn that offer you similar syndication opportunities to reach new audiences.
Medium has a great guide to publishing on its platform and the things to keep in mind. Read it here.
And in this fantastic post about publishing to LinkedIn, Noah Kagan lays out the following tips:
- Make your titles between 40 and 49 characters long
- Make your posts on LinkedIn visual! Add 8 images
- Don’t add video or other multimedia assets to your posts
- Use “how-to” and list-style headlines
- Divide your post into 5 headings in order to attract the greatest number of post views
- People like to read long-form content on LinkedIn – 1,900 to 2,000 words long
- Don’t get your audience all fired up
- Make your content readable for an 11-year-old
- Promote your LinkedIn publisher post on other social networks!
- LinkedIn likes get you views, shares, and comments
- Publish your LinkedIn posts on Thursday
You shouldn’t syndicate every single post. Choose posts that may resonate with unique audiences. It’s a great way to bring interested readers over to your website. I also don’t recommend syndicating new content immediately.
5. Create Quick and Easy Graphics to Share on Social Media (Time taken: 10-15 minutes)
If you’re using images in your posts anyway, a quick and easy win is to share the headline or quote from your post along with an image. If not, you can quickly and easily do so in Canva or many of the other image-creating resources mentioned in this post. We’ve found that it’s incredibly helpful to share images in your social media posts, since according to a 2013 Pew Research Study, nearly half of all Internet users have reposted a photo or video they found online.
This can help you gain traction on image-oriented social sharing networks even if you don’t have much of a presence on them.
