Content Marketing: Don’t forget the marketing side of content marketing

Everyone is doing content marketing. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 94% of all small businesses, 93% of B2Bs, and 77% of B2Cs use content marketing. That’s basically everyone.

However, not everyone is doing content marketing the right way. One of the quickest ways to kill your content is to do nothing after you take the time to write it.

Some people think that content marketing is all about merely creating content and waiting, a la field of dreams, for people to come and find it. This is the wrong way to approach content marketing and a good way to waste your time.

Creating content is only one half of the process of content marketing. The other half is the marketing part – getting out the word, spreading your message, and sharing your content.

Let’s break apart content marketing into its two main components parts:

1. Create content.
2. Promote content.

Which of those two are you doing or not doing? If you do a lot of promoting, but just a little of creating, then you are probably more successful than a company who does a lot of creating, but very little promoting.

Content promotion is just as important as content creation.

How do you promote your content? Here are a few easy ways to promote a single blog post:

1. Email newsletter
2. Marketing email to a landing page
3. Tweets. Be sure to tweet it several times and ask for retweets
4. Google+ posting
5. Facebook posting
6. Sharing in LinkedIn
7. Find influencers in your industry who can also share your content
8. Pitch site owners and other bloggers to see if they will share your content
9. Mention your content while commenting on other sites

If you aren’t doing any promotion, I recommend adjusting the amount of time you spend on content creation and allocating half that time to promoting your content.