Now is the time when creating high-quality, interesting, and useful content is just not enough to make it perform well from a content marketing perspective. Today, we need to make sure that we engage in content distribution in the right way to achieve real results. Did you know that almost 95% of all content doesn’t generate backlinks at all? Only a bit more than 1% of articles do that effectively and generate 75% of all social shares to be exact.
It’s now apparent that there is no need to create a lot of great content to get success. Most significantly, we need to help our audiences find our well-crafted and useful content. Without distributing it properly, we can’t win a battle.
In this article, I am going to show how to promote and distribute your content in the right way. Let’s dive in.
- 1. Audit Your Website
- 2. Create Amazing Content
- 3. Use The Power Of Guest Posting
- 4. Engage Your Visitors Through Different Channels
- 5. Get The Most Out Of Paid Advertising
- 6. Build Beneficial Relationships With Influencers
- 7. Use Email Marketing
- The Bottom Line on Increasing Content Distribution and Promotion
- Content Distribution FAQs
1. Audit Your Website
Before promoting and distributing your website, it does make sense to make sure that it is SEO-friendly and has a good UX. Unfortunately, a lot of marketers skip this step that can prevent you from achieving good results. That’s why it’s important to double-check your website before you get down to content distribution and promotion tactics.
Here are some basics you should focus on:
- Test your website’s loading speed on all devices.
- Check out whether your media library has image files that are smaller than 2MB. If you have larger than 2 MB, try to use compressing tools to optimize your images.
- Make sure that your website looks attractive on both desktop and mobile versions.
- All your website pages should be accessible to search engine crawlers.
- Choose an SEO-friendly CMS and mobile-friendly theme for a kickoff.
- Finding all possible technical errors from hreflang tags to duplicates.
To conduct a detailed website audit and better understand which mistakes are critical, you can use SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool to point out all errors that you need to fix including all issues mentioned above.
You can also use different Google tools such as Google Page Speed and Mobile-friendly tests to debug performance issues and get actionable tips on how your page may be improved.
2. Create Amazing Content
Once you make sure that your website is SEO-friendly, you need to create great content to rank on Google. We know well that it’s not enough to write a pure text, adding infographics, images, or video can add more value to your content and help you promote your brand well.
When you understand which kind of content you want to create next month, try to put it all together and start creating your content plan. That can help you control the overall content creating process and evaluate which one performs the best with time. Before you start crafting your plan, you can follow these tips to make your content top-level and engaging:
- Don’t produce content just for content’s sake.
- Create evergreen content. It will never go out of date and can be always relevant to your target audience, no matter season or news cycle. For example, you can use the content made by famous experts in your niche and craft content based on dissenting opinions.
- Cover only topics that can draw a lot of customers’ attention. For example, you can look for trending search queries in your industry or steal some topic ideas from your competitors.
- Use different community forums like Quora, Reddit, YouTube, or Pinterest for finding hot content ideas and creating quality content.
- Repurpose your old content that performs well. For example, you can present the same content ideas using infographics or webinars. You can also transform your videos into how-to guides or presentations that you can upload to Slideshare to get more exposure.
Once you create great content, you can benefit from using different content-sharing platforms like HubPages, Scoop.it, Medium, AllTop to help it fly off the shelf and drive more organic traffic.
3. Use The Power Of Guest Posting
Another effective way to promote your content and build quality backlinks is to take advantage of quality guest posting opportunities. Even though many websites amplify their guest posting policies and don’t accept poorly written guest posts, you can always change your guest posting strategy and put more effort into creating flawless content. Otherwise, you can hire a professional copywriter to write this piece of content.
Regarding guest posting options, fortunately, there are a lot of different opportunities you can choose from. The best-known option for finding these sites is to scrape SERPS including relevant keywords to your niche like that:
You can also think of business partners, customers, or other smart link builders in your niche that can be interested in exchanging blog posts. If you don’t have them, you can use different LinkedIn, Slack, or Facebook groups to find those who also want to build quality links. For example, this B2B blogger boost Facebook group offers a lot of guest posting options and content ideas that can help you with the overall process.
The other way to build connections is to find a list of famous experts and players in your industry and start negotiating partnerships on a paid basis or other terms (offer a free service or product).
To find more options, you can check out what your competitors are doing to reach good results. For that, I use Ahrefs to check out which websites they are contributing to. Or if you know some famous writers that work on behalf of the company, you can go to BuzzSumo, enter his or her name and look for all the publications. These are easy ways to find all websites that accept guest posts.
Once you find relevant guest posting sites or partners, try to send personalized outreach emails. Take some time and learn more about a partner or website’s rules before contacting them. Let them know that you get a good understanding of what they do and have an awesome value proposition to offer.
Using guest blogging to build backlinks is a very effective way, especially when you work together toward a common goal.
4. Engage Your Visitors Through Different Channels
As a website owner or marketer, we want to make every possible effort to engage our visitors. Fortunately, there are various techniques and ways to do it, and you shouldn’t underestimate any of them. Guest blogging, crowd marketing, SEO, and business listings can help you attract more potential customers. What is more important is the ability to move them through the sales funnel and create a good retention strategy. That’s where social media and email newsletters come into play.
A newsletter signup widget can be a must-have for those who want to keep your audience engaged and get quick feedback. Try to use well-crafted emails to make them sign up with the option to get updates, news, or published articles first hand. That will give you a chance to increase your customer base and use this data effectively for your future marketing campaigns.
Don’t forget to manage your social media profiles effectively. To catch more new customers, you can benefit from contests and giveaways that can really perform magic. People like free stuff and win something valuable to them.
You can also start building your own communities. Make sure to regularly publish your updates, achievements, articles, video reviews, and other useful stuff. Give them a chance to easily create posts and share your content on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. To increase engagement, you can always take advantage of paid social media advertising and get more new leads.
If you sell any services or products on your website, you can make your visitors take one step further by offering some discount, free shipping, or getting a free consultation in exchange for subscribing to your email newsletter.
5. Get The Most Out Of Paid Advertising
Paid advertising can still be an effective way to promote your content and supplement your organic strategies. Paid distribution can have a compounding effect. Sure, it will cost you more money, but if you want to get quick results and hot leads, that can work fine. For instance, Facebook and Instagram have ads, Amazon offers Prime delivery for those who don’t want to wait for the delivery, and influencers have sponsored posts.
Once you decide to promote your content, you can follow these tips to get the most out of paid advertising:
- Use Google Analytics data and surveys to build detailed buyer personas for your business and create ads that will resonate with your target audience and drive conversions.
- Try excluding mobile apps, when you promote your site via GDN. Your ads can be shown within mobile apps that are mostly used by kids. I mean whether they click or not on your ads, you can lose both your money or time.
- You can try investing in different video ad types for your targeted location using YouTube and social media. For example, you can check out whether in-stream ads perform well for your needs.
- Use Facebook’s lookalike audience option to target new customers.
- Effectively prioritize mobile-only promotions as advertising on mobile devices. I mean that mobile promotion costs less than promoting on desktop devices.
You can use paid advertising for different cases: buy your product, join your community, cover an important event, directly pull traffic to your website, or just highlight some contests or giveaways.
6. Build Beneficial Relationships With Influencers
Influencer contributions are another effective way of paid promotion to share your content, products, or services with your target audience in their personal accounts. People still show a lot of interest and trust products when they are recommended through word of mouth. Influencers are very active on social media and share their thoughts and opinions about different things.
Today influencer marketing takes a huge role in content distribution and promotion as it can reach out to a broad audience who can be interested in the subject and the influencer’s opinions. Fortunately, influencer marketing doesn’t mean that you should always pay influencers to share your content with their loyal followers.
You can collaborate with them for free and build long-term relationships if you have something valuable to offer in return. For example, you can invite an influencer as a special guest to join your webinar, podcast, or Facebook live event, and then he can mention it in his social media account or blog post.
To find the most powerful influencers for your topic, you can use some specialized tools like BuzzSumo or influencer marketing platforms. You can also use popular keyword phrases in the search, Instagram hashtags, or YouTube videos with thousands of views to find popular posts and authors who published them.
Notice that macro-influencers can’t be always effective to collaborate with them despite their follower count. I mean that they can cost a lot and you can’t always get the expected results for your sponsored posts. That’s why it’s important to pay a lot of attention to the engagement. You can find a lot of great micro-influencers in your niche and start building fruitful relationships with them.
7. Use Email Marketing
Email marketing isn’t fully underestimated for a few reasons. A lot of marketers think that it’s too complicated to get it right both from technical and content creation points of view. Secondly, they don’t know how to effectively build a list of subscribers.
I am not going to give you some actionable strategies on how to do that because you can find a lot of useful blogs, posts, guides, and videos on the Internet by yourself. I just want to say that email marketing still gets a fraction of the love in the content marketing community and still generates enough inbound marketing leads. With the right automation software tools, you can speed up and improve the overall marketing process and grow your business.
The Bottom Line on Increasing Content Distribution and Promotion
As you can see, there are a bunch of different ways for effective content distribution and promotion in the modern digital media landscape. What we should consider is the fact that every website and every niche are unique and have their own specifics.
Once you decide to choose content distribution and promotion channels, make sure to do some testing to check out what works the best in your case. Try to figure out the topic, your audience expectations, and the intended results of your efforts. Without these things, you won’t make great progress.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Content Distribution FAQs
A content distribution strategy is a plan for how you will get your content seen by your target audience. It includes both the channels you will use to distribute your content and the methods you will use to promote it. There are many different ways to distribute content, including social media, email, paid advertising, and search engine optimization. The best distribution strategy will vary depending on your industry, target audience, and resources.
There are three primary types of content distribution strategies: paid, owned, and earned. Paid distribution is the process of placing advertising on third-party platforms in order to promote your content. Owned distribution refers to the channels that you control, such as your website or blog. Earned distribution occurs when your content is shared organically, typically through word-of-mouth or social media. While all three strategies can be effective, the best approach will vary depending on your goals and resources.
These are the 4 types of distribution:
1. Intensive distribution – when a product is made available in as many outlets as possible, such as with fast food or other convenience items.
2. Selective distribution – when a product is only carried by a limited number of outlets, often due to the high cost of the product or the need for specialized training to sell it.
3. Exclusive distribution – when a product is only available from a single retailer, such as with cars or major appliances.
4. Franchise distribution – when a company grants permission to another business to sell its products, often in exchange for a percentage of sales.
There are a variety of content distribution tools available to content creators and marketers. These tools can help to improve the reach and engagement of your content, and can also save you time and effort in managing your content distribution. Some common content distribution tools include social media platforms, email newsletters, and RSS feeds. Each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to choose the right tool for your needs.
Content distribution is the process of getting your content seen by as many people as possible. It involves choosing the right platform for your content, promoting your content through social media and other channels, and measuring the results to see what’s working and what isn’t. By making smart decisions about content distribution, you can ensure that your hard work pays off in terms of reach and engagement. And that, in turn, can lead to more leads, more sales, and more success for your business.
