Part #2. The best content promotion strategies
I'm sure you have researched the topic of content promotion before and have seen
a ton of tactics, strategies and even so-called "growth hacks."
And just when you think you've learned it all, you stumble on a new case study showing you
how someone has generated a bazillion visits to their blog with a brand new amazing tactic.
Sounds familiar?
Well, you're not going to get any of that in my course.
First of all, it is very important to understand that there's no tactic or strategy that will make
an afwul piece of content popular.
The quality of your content always comes first!
And secondly, if your content is objectively awesome, it will promote itself.
Which is something that we have covered earlier in this course and I showed you qute a few
examples from our own blog.
So instead of pitching you some super-smart- secret-ninja-killer content promotion tactics
that will make you a superstar by tomorrow, I'm only going to briefly review a short list of
the most popular content promotion strategies and explain what they're good for.
In fact, most content promotion strategies can be organized in just six categories.
Reaching your existing audience.
Reaching relevant communities.
Content repurposing and syndication.
Guest blogging.
Outreach.
And paid promotion.
Let's review them one by one.
#1 Reaching your existing audience.
Generally, you do that by sending an email newsletter to your blog subscribers and posting
a link to your newly published article on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and
any other social network where you have some following.
But if you're only starting out, your email list is super-small and you don't have a lot
of followers on these social networks.
Which means you cannot expect any traffic and backlinks to magically appear out of nowhere.
So it does make sense to start building your audience as early as you can!
If you invest time and effort into building your email list and your social following,
they will later become your most effective content promotion methods.
#2 Reaching relevant communities.
You can do that by submitting your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn,
Google+, etc.
You can also submit it to a proper subreddit or any other relevant forums.
And finally, there's a new trend for creating Slack channels in different industries.
So you can join those and plug your articles there.
In theory, that sounds like a holy grail of traffic.
But once you actually try it, the harsh reality will kick in.
The thing is most of these communities hate self promotion.
You might get away with mentioning your article once or twice.
But if you overdo it, you'll almost certain be banned.
So instead of joining a hundred communities with a single goal to spam them with your content,
I'd suggest you to pick 5 or 10 of the very best ones and become an active member there.
Once the moderators notice that you consistently provide value to the community, they will
pretend they don't notice that you plug your own articles now and then.
And besides, if you make enough friends within each community, they will start plugging your
articles into conversations without you having to do that yourself.
#3 Content repurposing and syndication.
It's not too hard to repurpose your content into different formats (audio, video, slides,
images, etc) and then submit it to appropriate platforms.
Even if no one will ever find your content there, you still get a bunch of nice backlinks
to your article, right?
And besides, if the original content is awesome, why should the repurposed version be doomed
to oblivion?
Back in 2016 we have published a cool tutorial teaching people how to do SEO audit.
To this date, that article has generated over 60,000 visits.
But guess what, we also created a short 15-minute walkthrough based on that very article
and published it on YouTube.
That video has generated 10 times more views than the article - that's over 600,000 views.
In fact, a lot of the traffic to our article was actually generated by this video.
It ranks #1 in YouTube for the keyword "seo audit" and keeps generating more views and
more traffic to our blog every day.
I've also seen similar results from repurposing your content into a slideshare presentation.
And you might also consider repurposing the best articles from your blog into a podcast.
In other words, you should try a few of these formats and see what works best for you.
#4 Guest blogging.
I don't think I need to explain guest blogging to you, right?
In my opinion, it is one of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks and sometimes
even a bit of nice referral traffic to your blog.
I won't expand on this topic right now, as we're about to have a full section on guest
blogging in the very next lesson.
If you have a hard time getting published on other blogs, you can try answering relevant
questions on Quora or any other Q&A sites that exist in your niche.
Or you can simply leave comments on other blogs, referencing your own articles.
Most bloggers hate to see comments with links, but if the comment is genuine and the article
you're referencing is awesome - they might let it slide.
Other than that, you can also try to get cited by journalists.
There's a nice service for that, called Help A Reporter Out.
And we have a nice case study about it on Ahrefs Blog.
And finally, if you have already achived some noteable results in your industry you can
try pitching yourself to podcasts and interviews.
which often leads to quality links and refferal traffic with little time-commitment.
#5 Outreach.
This strategy is an absolute must.
If you don't have outreach in your content promotion checklist, you're seriously missing out.
The basic rule of thumb is to send personal heads up to everyone who was mentioned
or referenced in your article.
But don't ask them for links or tweets, it's your content that should be the motivator, not you.
An entirely different strategy is to reach out to everyone who has linked to similar content.
Or who has mentioned similar topics in their own articles.
These are very powerful outreach methods, which deserve special attention.
So the last lesson of this course is fully dedicated to outreach.
And we have one last group left.
#6 Paid promotion.
As discussed previously, paid promotion is an absoute must if you consider your blog
a business tool, not a hobby.
Almost every major social network has their own Ad platform - Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin,
Pinterest, you name it.
I'm sure you're also well aware of Google's own advertising options.
These things are quite obvious, right?
A somewhat uncommon advertising option is a paid email newsletter.
In our own niche of digital marketing quite a few websites offer this service, but the price
per visitor is always way higher compared to Facebook Ads or even Google Ads.
So we have never paid to be included in someone's email newsletter.
And that wraps up my review of the most common content promotion strategies.
I hope that now you have a much clearer picture of how to promote your next piece of content.
Or re-launch the old one.