You put a lot of effort into creating a great piece of content. You spent hours researching and organizing information to make it engaging and unique. It was a tough job, but you’re proud of the results.
Now that your work is done, you want to ensure it reaches your target audience. Just doing the basics won’t cut it for long-lasting results. You need a solid plan for promoting your content over the long term, driving immediate traffic, and setting the stage for future visits.
Here are some simple and effective ideas for distributing your blog post that you may not have come across multiple times this month. Let’s dive in.
Better Content Distribution Ideas
1. Follow a social media sharing calendar
Most content marketers already understand that sharing a blog post just once isn’t enough. It’s crucial, and here’s why.
We’re all aware that social media reach has changed. To make sure your posts reach a significant part of your social audience, you need to share them multiple times.
Enter the social media calendar – a helpful tool for distributing content. You might know you should use one, but do you actually use it for every post? No slacking, right?
Let’s explore the main benefits of integrating a social media calendar into your content marketing strategy.
- It ensures you are on track of which content is performing well. This way you can upkeep your content consistency as well as quality.
- Your posts are well timed and you don’t miss posting dates.
- All distribution channels are used equally (social media calendars prevent you from spamming only one and neglecting another).
- This distribution tool prevents that your posts are poorly written and not well researched.
Your team should establish a schedule for how often you promote each post – both long and short term. You can either use a dedicated software, a spreadsheet, or a DIY calendar.
2. Mention companies featured on social media
Sure thing!
Yes, I get it. Why am I talking about such a basic, well-worn promotion and content sharing method?
Because it’s not as basic as it seems.
Lately, people have been saying this strategy is so overused that it’s pointless now. But that’s not true.
Even if it’s not a sure thing that companies will go all out promoting your post, you still need to get it in front of them and make them notice you. One of the best and easiest ways to do that is by giving them a quick mention on social media.
A mention can be good or bad. Either way, it’s still a chance to shape how the public sees your brand (brand awareness), content, and lets you connect with your audience.
It might not guarantee success, but companies can’t share your content if they don’t know about it. We’ve been saying this for years.
3. Pin social media posts to your profiles
Let’s talk about social media reach. There are many ways to make a post more visible.
A great but often overlooked method is pinning posts to your profiles on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Other networks have similar options to highlight specific posts.
This ensures that a particular post from your page or profile stays prominent, likely at the top. So, regardless of time passing or new posts being added, it remains one of the first things your profile visitors see.
Pinning posts also gives a fresh look to your old content and keeps your page visitors always informed. It’s useful for announcing company news, showcasing conversations and campaigns, or promoting specific content. For an extra boost to new posts, pin them to your profile right after publishing.
4. Send to your coworkers
Sharing posts on your company’s social accounts only really takes advantage of a fraction of its real audience online.
The power lies in your coworkers.
Think about the networks they have and use. Almost all of us will have connections in our industry on LinkedIn, and lots of professionals use Twitter for work as well – even just a little bit.
Take advantage of that by enlisting coworkers to help you promote new posts. Their function will therefore be the same as that of a marketer promoting your content.
At Mention, the whole marketing team uses Twitter and LinkedIn professionally in some capacity. (Meaning, they’re mostly serious and I tweet about TV 5,000 times per week :X)
So it’s built into our formal blog post promotion processes to let the rest of the team know when a new post is up. We’ll usually send a quick group message in Slack:
There are also great tools like GaggleAMP, that help you automate the process while still letting your colleagues customize the messages so that they’re authentic.
Tip: If you’re asking coworkers to share posts manually, check out tools like ClickToTweet or HrefShare to give them easy, one-click options.
5. Submit to social bookmarking sites
First, let us briefly explain what social bookmarking means. It is a content distribution strategy submitting images, video content, page or post links to social bookmarking sites, blogs, social sites etc.
Finding the popular social bookmarking sites for your blog’s niche will also be a really productive thing to do one day. Social bookmarking therefore is an effective way to improve search engine ranking and increase the domain authority of your blog or website.
Sites like reddit, Twitter, Tumblr can bring massive traffic and act as great marketers as well as brand builders.
And beyond traffic, posting in forums and bookmarking sites helps you build authority and community. Since the sites revolve around conversation more than promotion, sharing your post as a conversation-starter can get a lot of readers very engaged.
Tip: to make our own shares on social bookmarking sites go further, we usually share the discussion question and link on Twitter and ask for comments.
6. Add a link to your email signature
Most discussions about content marketing in emails usually focus on email marketing, and that makes sense, right?
But there’s another aspect – the personal, one-on-one emails.
I’m not talking about those marketing emails that pretend to be personal but are actually sent to a whole list.
I mean the ones where you actually sit down and type out a message. I know, it sounds old-fashioned, doesn’t it?
Consider how many people you email daily, and think about how many of them are part of your target audience. Among influencers, marketers, partners, and your company’s customers, there’s a significant number of people who might find your posts interesting.
So, here’s a secret tip: adding a link to your latest post in your email signature can bring attention to your content. Tools like WiseStamp can do this automatically by creating a stylish email signature linked to your blog’s RSS feed.
7. Answer questions on Quora
Good content marketing means helping your audience by answering their questions, right?
If people are asking questions online, it’s likely on Quora.
Quora’s main purpose is answering questions, even though it’s not mainly for promotion. You can share your blog post if it answers a question.
Write detailed, helpful responses that answer the question, and include links to your content. This can bring traffic to your blog post and help you connect with your audience.
On Quora, it’s all about conversation, so just putting a link won’t get you big wins. Summarize the relevant parts of your post to keep in line with Quora’s purpose – giving helpful answers.
8. Email interested readers
Lastly, content distribution is one more way where you can combine advocates and influencer marketing.
A popular blog post promotion tactic is to use something like BuzzSumo to find influencers that have shared similar posts from popular publications, right? You can take that and remix it.
The link above teaches you why advocates are as valuable as influencers for some marketing activities – because the existing relationship means they’re more likely to say “yes”.
The same goes with sharing blog posts.
Instead of finding influential strangers who’ve shared blog posts from other influential strangers, look into your own community. Throw another post your company has written on the topic into BuzzSumo, instead of mentioning content from a different publication.
Then suggest your new post to people who have already shared your content – content on the same topic, no less – in the past.
You could even automate it a bit and use email marketing segmentation to send a newsletter or a campaign with the post to those who’ve opened similar campaigns in the past!
Add Something Extra
These tips for sharing your new posts can make them more noticeable. I’ve faced the challenge of increasing traffic by using the same methods everyone else does.
Have you experienced this too?
What if we consider the less common ideas, the ones we read about but don’t attempt or have stopped using? How might tactics like those mentioned earlier impact your traffic, leads, and conversions?