Generating content is the first step in engaging your audience, but your job isn’t quite done once the content is out there. In order to get the most out of your content, you need to understand how to market what you have. Employing content promotion strategies can help boost your reach. Here are 10 ways you can expose your content to more prospects.
1. Ask For Contributions from Top Influencers
By publishing content, you automatically leverage the attention of your existing audience, but tapping into a bigger influencer’s larger base can open up your content to a wider crowd. How do you do this? Simply cite and link to top influencers when applicable. When you mention these influencers, you have a good chance of getting them to share the content, thereby exposing it to their audience.
Related Class: Finding Influencers to Amplify Social Reach
2. Give Those Influencers Meaningful Incentives
If you hope for an influencer to share your content, you must be prepared to give something in return. Give influencers an incentive, whether it’s a promotion or a product review, or any other form of mutual exchange. In turn, they are much more likely to help build your audience by sharing content on their platform.
3. Engage Niche Communities
It would be great to achieve mass appeal across a wide range of audiences, but that’s not how you should focus your attention. Instead, focus on the smaller segments that your content appeals to most. You might have content that specifically appeals to online marketers or the tech community; if that’s the case, seek out places where these people tend to gravitate, and stay active in those communities.
4. Using the “Skyscraper Technique”
One way to create content with a built-in audience is to use the “skyscraper technique”. The idea behind this method is to find the best content that’s already published by your competitors and build on it. Any content can be improved on with better design and more in-depth material. This isn’t the same as plagiarism, or spinning: borrowing ideas and making them better isn’t stealing. It’s how all writers, artists, thinkers and innovators thrive.
5. Create Hero Content
Rather than focusing on quantity of content, work on bigger and better content. Concentrate on producing resources that can be marketed and promoted, and spend the effort getting it out to the community.
Related Class: Creating and Curating Content People Love
6. Use Native Advertising
Native advertising is paid content that fits into the standard structure of a site. Native advertising usually performs better than something like a banner ad, as long as it doesn’t come off as pushy, or clash with the tone of your site.
7. Use Broken Links to Your Advantage
When you write powerful content, find other sites that have linked to similar articles, and identify those with broken links. You can use extensions to identify sites with broken links or broken redirects. Then, contact the staff to suggest your article as a replacement for the broken link or redirect. It may sound counter-intuitive, but it works. If they agree, that backlink will help your SEO for that particular page, thus improving the visibility in Google’s organic results for that article.
8. Buy Niche Property
If you are already a large Internet business, buying niche property is a viable option for you. While obviously an expensive prospect, acquiring an existing site that focuses on your market is a great way to quickly expand your platform and get your content out to the right audience.
9. Give Incentives to Sharers
Contests and access to exclusive content are both great ways to increase your audience’s engagement. If you provide them something in exchange for sharing your content, you can gain considerable growth directly from that incentive.
10. Use Snip.ly
Snip.ly is a tool for creating banners on the bottom of your content that links to other articles and resources on your site. This is a great way to keep site visitors around longer, which helps garner clicks and improve usability metrics.
Content promotion strategies can significantly boost your audience reach, which means more clicks, leads and sales. While I’ve touched on a number of these methods, don’t get overwhelmed: dedicating yourself to just one or a few can have a big impact.
Nick Rojas is a self-taught, serial entrepreneur who’s enjoyed success working with and consulting for startups. Using his journalism training, Nick writes for publications such as Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and Yahoo. He concentrates on teaching small and medium-sized enterprises how best to manage their social media marketing and define their branding objectives.
Want to learn more about any of the subjects mentioned above? Here are some relevant classes: Finding Influencers to Amplify Social Reach, Content Marketing Strategy for Social Media, Creating and Curating Content People Love
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