28 great tactics for promoting online content

Content distribution has been a big topic all around social media.

As Mark Schaefer’s book “The Content Code” explains, “Great content isn’t the finish line; it’s the starting line.”

We spend so much time and inspiration on creating our content, and then once we hit publish we forget that we must work to share that content.

Here are 28 tips on how to extend the reach of what you publish online:

Promote your content on social media

This is probably the first place we all go. You hit publish, and your automation tools push your post out on social media.

Then you forget about it and run off to the next piece.

Nope. There has to be more planning. The folks at CoShedule say having a social media sharing schedule will double your traffic.

Here’s what they suggest:

1. Upon publishing —Social media message is sent when blog post goes live.
2. Same day —Initial social media messages trickle out to your accounts over the next two or three hours.
3. Next day —Messages are shared again on the appropriate social media channels.
4. Next week —Another series of messages are pre-scheduled and sent.
5. Next month —Even more social media messages are pre-scheduled for the following month.
6. Next _____ —Additional messages can be scheduled for the three-month mark or beyond.

Here’s what I do:

1. Upon publishing —Twitter: I schedule this through IFTTT to go out with #new, the title and the featured image once the blog is live. It’s also pushed to Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google Plus the day it publishes.
2. Same day —Twitter: I’ll use the Click To Tweet quotes to send out a few times later the same day, but by using the quotes versus the title these have different ledes (opening or enticing paragraphs) and don’t seem like I’m pushing the same content over and over. (I try to have at least one quote in each post.)
3. Next week —I’ll pre-schedule reoccurring tweets over the next few days, and over the next two months from my personal handle (if it’s evergreen).
4. Next two months —Again, using prescheduled tweets with different ledes and different images (if there are any), my posts are hitting my personal feed for a good two months.
5. Ongoing —From here I let Revive Old Post take over, which helps our evergreen content to “live forever.”

RELATED: Free download: 11 Essentials for a Stellar Online Newsroom

Other tips:

• Changing your lede helps the content stay fresh; try to come up with three different ways to pose one title.
• Ask questions. For instance, for this post, I could change my lede or pose a question (depending on the platform and the space it affords) to say, “Are you doubling your content distribution efforts with a promo schedule?”
• Add hashtags to help searchers find your content.
• Tag people, and ask them to weigh in, but only if you have a good relationship; don’t spam people.
• Use pithy quotes or stats from the article as a new lede.
• As mentioned, use Click To Tweet to create snackable, shareable bites.
• Reference your article—when relevant— in online conversations. Again, don’t be spammy.

Promote your content to your list(s)

If you have a marketing list (and you should), use it.

Many people share weekly newsletters or several times a month. Use this as a vehicle to share your latest post(s).

Here’s what I do:

1. We have a monthly newsletter with themes, so I share a post from the prior month only if it fits with the theme we’re working with.
2. We have a subscriber-only blog email that delivers our blog to straight to inboxes. This is a highly segmented and highly engaged list. How? We give subscriber-only gifts— templates, workflows, tricks and tips—to those on our list as a bonus for the blog post’s theme. In this email we have two places with ready-to-tweet links.

Other tips:

• Have an RSS feed set up on your blog so subscribers can add it to their aggregators.
• If you decide to take it a step further, as we did with our subscriber-only list, make sure those links tag your brand, use any branded/relevant hashtags and are trackable. We use Bitly and Click To Tweet’s link generator to make this happen.

Promote your content through syndication

Our posts are syndicated through a few platforms, includingB2Community and SteamFeed.

This means nearly all our posts are republished on these sites with permission.

Many sites do this for free; some do it as a paid service, such as Outbrain.

Here’s what I do:

• I research well-trafficked sites offering syndication (B2Community) and ask to be a part of the program.
• I vet offers from sites asking to syndicate my content (SteamFeed and a few others that are on a post-by-post basis). In some cases, I get paid to let other sites use my content.

Promote your content through advertising

As we ramp up with advertising efforts for our clients, this is an area I have to beef up in 2016.

There are so many ways to promote your content. Here are some of the easiest/most common:

• Facebook ads
  • Facebook custom audiences (show ads to your lists)
  • Facebook lookalike audiences (show ads to people similar to those people on your lists)
• Remarketing ads (Facebook or Google—ads that “follow” users with cookies)
• Twitter ads
• Google AdWords

There you have it! These 28 tips are only a starting place, but a solid one.

Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments section.

Brooke B. Sellas is an in-the-trenches digital marketer and owner at B Squared Media. Give her a shout on Twitter. A version of this article originally appeared on {grow}.

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