Alright, so you’ve created an excellent piece of content for your website. It’s fresh, it’s original, and it communicates something valuable to your customer. Excellent! Now where’s the traffic? Isn’t that why you took the time to craft this exceptional article in the first place?
All the marketing experts out there will tell you that content is king and your competitors are seeing the leads pour in thanks to their fancy new blog. So how do you take advantage of the content marketing trend in a way that yields results for your business?
Welcome to Content Expansion
To be honest, actually creating the content is the easy part (don’t tell our copywriters) and only accounts for about 20% of the effort for making it successful. The other 80% of the success in content marketing comes from promoting your content once it’s published.
What most people do is write a good post (it really needs to be epic content, nothing mediocre) and then publish it to their blog. They might share it on Facebook and send out an email, then the final step is to sit back and wait for the people to come rushing in to read your words of immense wisdom and desperately plead with you to take their money. Right?
…but that’s not what usually happens.
With all the tools and social platforms out there on the wide wide web, don’t you think there should be a bit more to promoting your work to the world? Well, good. Because there is more …quite a bit more, actually.
So let’s dig into the resources available to you to maximize your content and grow your brand’s influence across the web.
Step 1: Push it Yourself
The first and most important thing you can do to get your content in front of a larger audience is to make it available on as many platforms as possible. Every blog article you publish should automatically be pushed, posted, and bookmarked to several places, not just your own blog and Facebook page.
There are literally hundreds of websites and networks out there for you to catalog and share your content but here are a handful of the most important;
- Facebook (duh)
- Google+ (Google loves Google)
- Tumblr
Don’t forget Instagram
You may not think a blog article can get traction on a photo-sharing app like Instagram but you’d be surprised. It’s been the fastest growing social media network on the web for months. Marketers are seeing plenty of success with posting the blog image, perhaps with the title in the graphic, and putting the link in their Instagram profile (the only place Instagram allows you to post a link). The caption of the post would of course refer people to the profile for the article.
The process of pushing your content out automatically can be automated with tools like OnlyWire, which uses your blog’s RSS feed to post to up to 40 different high traffic platforms.
Remember: every platform has a slightly different audience, so with each additional platform push you expand your potential reach.
Step 2: Recruit Others to Push it too
After you’ve made sure that your content is getting syndicated and shared on all the major channels yourself, it’s time to recruit some help.
The single most important lynchpin in marketing has always been, and continues to be, the harnessing of key influencers. These are the people that your industry and audience are already actively following, watching, and paying attention to. Influencers are your gateway to a very important part of building customer relationships: TRUST.
Your audience trusts these major influencers and if an influencer recommends your product or shares your content, it conveys a heavy dose of trust to your relationship with this new pool of customers. You want to build awareness and trust with new audiences by piggy-backing on these notable niche influencers, and that’s why you pursue the fabled “Guest Post”.
No, guest posting is not dead. And despite concerns that the almighty Google will eventually find a way to penalize this white hat SEO tactic, it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
Put simply, guest posting is networking for content.
- You build a list of places where you’d like your content featured. These are websites, blogs, and platforms where the major influencers of your market are hanging out and sharing content.
- You reach out respectfully to the webmaster or content editor of these publications with a request or submission inquiry.
- You provide value to that publication in the form of a piece of quality content based on your expertise.
If you can provide value to a website or magazine and their audience, most of them are glad to have the added content for their audience and won’t mind if it links back to you. These are special channels for promoting your content because, unlike the platforms you hit up in Step 1, these come with added Trust.
Step 3: Recycle and RePurpose
Content is simply the information being conveyed and can come across multiple mediums and formats. That’s where Step 3 comes in. It’s important to get the absolute most out of each and every piece of content on your site. Afterall, you put all that time and energy into creating it!
Look back through your published and promoted content to identify the Top 10 performing posts in the last 6 months or a year. See if you can take that information (which is obviously proven to be valuable to your audience) and turn it into an infographic, a webinar, a YouTube video, or an ebook.
This additional content will bolster your stockpile and it builds on content and information that’s already of value to your audience.
On the promotional side, it’s alright to Tweet about old posts to remind folks of the value still lurking in the archives of your site. Promotion can be ongoing if the information is timeless and useful. Never let a good piece of content die. Always continue to leverage it by reusing it and re-purposing it in new forms.
Conclusion
Content is still king, because that’s what we go to the Internet for. As a business or brand trying to make a splash on the web, it’s important to amplify the reach of your message as much as possible with a steady and consistent approach to Content Expansion.
For more information about how you can leverage your website and social media profiles to grow your business, get in touch with our Marketing Team.
