Asides from creating content, you also need to promote your blog. Here are some methods you should consider incorporating into your content promotion strategy.
Promotion Strategies that Work
Besides creating great content, you also have to develop a plan to promote the content so that people will be able to find it. You need to plan out the exact steps to take to drive traffic to your blog and grow your audience.
Brand vs Content Promotion
There are two different ways to promote a blog. You can promote your content or you can promote your brand.
Everyone says that you have to promote your content, but in reality, you don’t have to spend a lot of time promoting every article that you write.
You should put the most effort into promoting your cornerstone content, i.e., content that you think people will link to or share heavily. For your best articles, you might want to use email outreach or even collaborate with influencers to drive more visibility to your content.
For other articles, you can run a lighter promotional campaign. Promote them by linking to them from other articles and guest posts and sharing them on social media. Sometimes internal linking to an article from other articles on your site is enough to get that article to rank in the search engines.
Most successful content marketers succeed by promoting their brand instead of promoting individual articles. Activities like guest posting, participating in communities and networking with other bloggers help increase brand exposure. Note that these activities aren’t necessarily done to promote an individual piece of content, but to promote your website as a whole.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a popular way to grow your content brand. Leo Widrich grew Buffer into a 7-figure business by writing 150 guest posts in 9 months. If you are just starting out with blogging, then guest posting on sites where your target audience already exists is a great way to gain visibility for your brand.
Guest posting works best if you do it consistently. A lot of people are disappointed when they don’t get a lot of subscribers or traffic when they guest post on a popular site. Neil Patel posted an article about his experiences after publishing over 300 guest posts and he mentions that the traffic all adds up over time.
Look at where your competitors and other influencers in your niche are guest posting regularly. Make it a goal to guest post for those publications as well and commit to contributing regularly.
I’ve found that you can get different results from guest posting based on where you post and what you write about. You’re more likely to get traffic and subscribers if you write about topics that are new and exciting to the audience of the blog you are writing for. Compare your content to the articles that other bloggers are writing about and ask yourself honestly if you stand out.
You’ll also get more traffic from blogs that don’t have as many contributors like you. Guest post on different blogs and see which blogs perform the best for you.
Relationship Building
Another important strategy that successful bloggers use is building genuine relationships with people. When you build real relationships with others, they are more willing to help you in return.
Build relationships by commenting on other people’s blogs and getting involved in the conversation in online communities. Share other people’s content and figure out how you can legitimately help out other people.
Most email outreaches I receive are really bad and involve people asking for something. Building relationships online is no different than building relationships with a person you meet in real life.
Relationship building usually works best if you are also creating amazing content simultaneously.
Social Media
How important is social media to your promotion strategy and how much time are you planning to spend on it?
It takes time to build up a social media following, but if you publish regularly, then social media could worth the time investment. Here are a few tips for growing your social following and using social media for content promotion:
– Publish regularly on social media. Consistency will allow your followers to expect content from you on those channels and keep them engaged.
– One popular strategy is to focus on growing your influence outside of social media and then letting people follow you on social channels. For example, if you get featured on a lot of popular blogs, your social media followers should grow naturally.
– Interact with and engage with other people on social media, but limit the time you spend on social channels.
Use social media scheduling tools so that you don’t spend too much time on social media. Here’s a list of tools that you can use to schedule your posts to various social media channels.
I’ve found that articles that I’ve written that get more social shares also tend to get more natural links. So even if you are more focused on SEO, social media is still a channel worth exploring.
SEO
A lot of businesses like focusing on SEO when they create content and sometimes they will create all of their content around SEO targeted keywords. Wordstream, which offers PPC software as a service, has done well with this approach. They rank for a lot of PPC and Adwords related search terms, which is great branding for them.
This approach can work well if you already have an established site or have someone actively doing offsite SEO work and getting links to your content. Articles that rank in the search engines can send ongoing traffic and that traffic can accumulate as you create more content.
Email Outreach
Another way to promote your blog is by using email outreach. You can email other bloggers to promote your content or to build relationships with them.
A lot of people are afraid to do email outreach because they are afraid that they will be bothering the other person. But it’s also important to note that most people won’t find out about your content if you don’t let them know about it.
Generally, email outreach might be a good idea if you feel like the content will genuinely be interesting to them or help them out. Another great way to do email outreach is to mention the other blogger and let them know that you featured them on your blog or to invite them to contribute a quote to a good article that you wrote.
Remember that you don’t have to use email outreach to promote content. You can use email to build relationships instead and increase awareness of your brand.
Paid Ads
Another way to grow your audience is by using paid ads. Some businesses use paid ads to grow a really targeted audience quickly. You can target people by interest, income and other demographics pretty precisely with Facebook ads and Adwords.
Other Techniques
There are plenty of other techniques to promote content, including collaborations, influencer marketing and even live events. Analyze what your competitors are doing and decide what techniques you will focus on for your own content marketing.
Cost and Resources
Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to do everything and content marketing can be costly and time consuming. Before diving into content marketing, we need to determine what resources we are willing to commit to making it work.
Content marketing is often a long term strategy and it takes time and some trial and error before you start to see results. If you are hiring people to do content marketing, be prepared to stick with it for the long term and make sure you have the cash flow to support the operation.
Decide on what tools you will need to use and other expenses. If you feel like you need clients and customers more quickly, consider looking into other approaches first, like cold emailing, collaborations or social selling.
Check out the rest of this content strategy guide or click here to return to the first page of the guide:
Objectives and Metrics – We need to set goals and define metrics to track our success so that we can measure our content marketing effectiveness.
Content Creation Strategies – Creating content on an ongoing basis is one of the biggest content marketing challenges. In this chapter, we’ll discuss ways we can create content that stands out and drives traffic.
Content Promotion Strategies – We need to promote our blogs to gain visibility and grow our following. This section discusses some popular promotion strategies and when to use them.
Types of Content that Create Engagement and Build Influence – Certain types of content are effective in creating engagement and building influence. This section will examine the types of content that other influencers have used to outperform other content marketers.
About Brian Liang