If you don’t plan a content strategy for your website, you miss opportunities that can add significantly to your site in terms of traffic and to your business in terms of sales and leads.
In this line of strategy, one important aspect in the content marketing process is content promotion. We know that content is king, but I must say that content promotion is queen. The two work hand in hand to sustain and help each other to get site owners maximum benefit for the business concern behind the website/blow.
Where content creation is concerned, you can determine the strategy of your competitors by looking at their blog and the effect of their content assets to their businesses (e.g. natural links acquired from relevant websites).
However, in content promotion, things are a bit more complex. You will only have an insight of your competitor’s strategy when they published third party content to support their main content pieces on their websites. For instance, by simply looking at their backlink profiles, you can identify some contextual links from niche-specific blogs which may be acquired using guest blogging technique.
So it is important to have a good understanding on what is and how to be effective in promoting your blog content. You can’t just do reverse engineer your competitors’ websites and hoping to get some ideas on how they actually distributed their assets to their audience.
In this post, I’d like to share some tips on how you can effectively promote your content without copying your competitor’s promotional strategy.
Prioritize users on blogs and social
The most common mistake of internet marketers when promoting content is focusing too much on the number of sites they had contacted to and shared content with. Remember that the success of your content promotion is not based on the number of websites that linked to your page but on the users/readers you engage with.
User interaction plays a significant role in establishing a solid readership and followers of one business. Users would want to always connect with brands that initiated conversations with their target audience.
Unknowingly, engaged users can link to your content because it is human nature to give back something to someone whom you interacted with. You can’t scale user interaction but you can invest on it by having someone on your team/brand work on answering product/service related questions on your site, email or social accounts. The more that person answers questions, the more he and your team can identify what is missing in your content promotion strategy.
Repurpose your content
To get more eyeballs to your page, you have to convert your content into other formats. Content conversion is now popular these days given that it is easy to do and can help the site acquire more referral traffic from submission/content repurposing websites.
The good thing with converted asset is that you can still use it to attract organic backlinks to your website.
Use Topsy to find interested social sharers of an asset (e.g. slide deck) similar to your piece. Reach out to them by simply sharing your converted content. Never ask for a direct link so you’ll get a higher response rate from that kind of approach.
Secure the best spot on your blog for social sharing and lead generation activities
To generate leads and shares for your business using your content, it is important to place some sticky links or images on your website pointing to your best content assets.
Don’t forget to add some call-to-actions to cater the needs of your visitors when sharing your asset. Code a specific social sharing button of a community site and add it to your list of social buttons.
Conclusion:
Content promotion should never be a missing piece to your content strategy. It must be one of your top priorities when conducting a regular audit of your whole digital marketing plan, to be able to strategize, organize and distribute specific tasks to skilled team members.