There is more to This Content Marketing Thing than just Clicking Publish

Content marketing has already proved that it can be a powerful way of building your brand visibility and generating leads but a lot of marketers continue to talk about creating great content like it’s the only thing that you need to do when there is so much more to it than that. The truth is that clicking publish is not enough and it never was.

I’m sure you’ve seen it, marketers with blogs that are that popular that they only need to click the publish button and wait for all the tweets, likes, +1’s and links to poor in.

When someone is in a position like that, it’s easy for them to forget that for most bloggers, marketers and business owners – clicking publish just isn’t going to

Paul May from BuzzStream did a great job of highlighting the reality about content marketing here and mentioned a number of important points that really ring true.

The main one being – for the majority of us, if we want to get traffic, social shares and links when we publish a post then we’ve got to go out there into the world wide web and actually promote our content.

Some of the best content is left to gather dust in the far corners of the web simply for the fact that it hasn’t been promoted.

Surely, you would want to make your content visible rather than letting it sit there right?!

Below I am going to show you a number of tactics that you can use to get your content visible to the right audience along with some examples of what has worked well for me and what I believe can work well for you.

#1 – Put the right content in front of the right people

Knowing who exactly you are targeting is extremely important in business and it’s extremely important in content marketing too.

If you know exactly who it is that you’re targeting then you can find their online hang outs, who is active within the industry and how you can put your content in front of them.

The other side of this is writing content that you know will be a hot topic for your target audience and cause some debate – which ultimately leads to more traffic, more shares, links and visibility.

A few months ago, the marketing agency I manage launched a new service, content marketing was one of the tactics that we were focusing on and our MD, Jason Brooks wrote an opinion piece that threw the question out there – “Is Google+ The Key to Building Links with Guest Post after Penguin 2.0?”

How did we promote it?

We shared the content using various social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+1.

We also shared the post on several niche social networks, including BizSugar and Inbound.org.

The post was then imported into my Triberr account – If you’ve not come across this before, it’s a platform that allows you to link up your Twitter profile (along with Facebook and Linkedin) and join tribes of like-minded bloggers, marketers or business owners that will see your content and get the opportunity to share it with their followers.

What about the results?

Above image taken using Linktally to generate the tally of shares.

Why did this work so well?

Considering the site is a few months old and doesn’t have many posts this is quite impressive but there are a few things that immediately stood out:

The majority of our following on Google+ and Twitter consists of marketing agencies and industry professionals from the marketing and SEO space
The post also caused a lengthy debate between a number of people in Google+ which resulted in traffic, further discussions and shares

This shows that when you target the right people with the right content you can cause a stir, get a conversation going (in this case on Google+ mostly) and ultimately get a great deal of visibility that you wouldn’t get under regular circumstances.

#2 – Feature or write about industry influencers

When you start any content marketing campaign, one of the first things that you should do is map out the influencers in your industry – think about the type of people that you follow and whose opinion that you value.

I recently published a group interview on my blog where I invited a number of industry experts to talk about how they build reader engagement with their audience. You can view the post here.

I started by inviting a number of influencers within the marketing industry to answer a number of questions on improving reader engagement – something that all of the people I asked did very well.

In the end I managed to publish responses from Seth Godin, Anita Campbell, Neil Patel and 30 other industry experts.

What did I do to promote it?

I reached out to everyone that took part using social media sites such as Twitter and Google Plus – sites that would notify them that they’d been mentioned.

This was then followed up with an email to let the participants know that the post was live, where they could find it along with a call to action.

The call to action was to help share the post and vote for the post on BizSugar.

What about the results?

In just over a day the post was the 2^nd most popular post on BizSugar in June:

The post has gained quite a significant amount of traction on social media:

The post also earned some good links according to Ahrefs.com (Majestic shows more referring domains, but I prefer the graph in Ahrefs):

It also helped me get contributor of the week on BizSugar.com:

You can find the post here.

Why did this work so well?

When someone is featured on another website, it can have a profound effect on their social following.

It shows that they are more of an authority on a subject because more people value their opinion.

The more times you’re featured and the more times your opinion is validated, the more of an authority that you will be perceived to be in the eyes of your followers.

Also, when you create an extremely valuable resource generally people are more inclined to share it because they know their followers will find value and appreciate the content being shared with them.

When someone is featured in an extremely valuable resource alongside some other big names, especially people that they look up to then they are compelled to share the content with their following and in some cases even go out of their way to share it more than they would with a regular mention.

I must warn you, not every person you include in a post like this will share and you will get varied results depending on the niche or industry that you operate in.

What other types of content can you use?

Regular blog posts, interviews, group interviews, industry roundups and infographics all work well.

The rule of thumb here is that generally, the more people you involve in your content, the more potential people that might promote it.

#3 – Build and maintain relationships with influencers and industry peers

A lot of people approach this blogging thing like it’s something you can do without any interaction or involving other people at all.

It used to be the case that people would just setup a blog, fire a load of rough content up and blast as many anchor text optimized links at their site as possible to rank in Google and then just sit on a beach somewhere without doing a thing – just sipping back mojitos while their bank account fills up with money.

For a time it worked and people made bank, we’re talking obscene amounts of money – but the problem that they have now is that Google has forced people into making effort, writing good content, building good links and generally treating our business the way it should be treated.

Whether your blogging to earn money, run an offline business or something else – the shortcuts don’t exist anymore.

Well, that’s not exactly true because there are certain verticals that are still dominated by spam, partly due to the fact that Google treats different industries differently, the ranking signals for one industry can differ drastically to another – but those that are still using nasty link building won’t get away with it for much longer.

Google left the door wide open and people saw an opportunity and for a lot of businesses it was a case of either use nasty link building tactics, rank and earn money or don’t use those tactics, don’t rank and don’t earn money.

People weren’t thinking of the big picture and it boils down to this – the user experience, whether it’s a slick site that gives you a great experience or a site that people simply find valuable and learn a lot from.

You need to get social, you need to connect and network.

Business owners have networked for years offline and used it to pass business to each other and generally help each other out – it’s worked great and it works great online too.

Here’s an example that I have mentioned before, but it highlights just how powerful it is to build relationships:

Shortly after I started Blogging Wizard, I got an email from Dev from WPKube.com asking me to include one of his posts in my weekly roundup.

I agreed and asked him if he’d help out by sharing the roundup with his followers – Dev did just that and we’ve helped each other out ever since.

We’ve shared each other’s content, mentioned each other’s content in posts on our own blogs and in guest posts, voted for each other’s content on the likes of BizSugar, Blokube and Inbound.org etc.

Now, I’m not saying that this will always happen – some people don’t nurture relationships and would possibly just share the post to get a link that one time which is fine, no harm done right? But others will and the lifetime value of that relationship will be priceless.

Build relationships, network with your peers and help each other out.

#4 – Map out a systematic approach to promoting each piece of content

When I publish a post, I give it the same care and attention that I give to every other post to ensure that it gets the best chance to get more traffic, shares and comments.

There is more that I could do for each post, I could do a guest posting campaign for each post along with a number of other things, but it’s just not realistic with the amount of time I have available.

The main thing is that you don’t just publish a post and hope it takes off, that’s why there are so many great pieces of content on the web that don’t see the light of day.

Put together a check list for yourself of all of the possible ways you can promote that piece of content. Include things like niche social bookmarking sites like BizSugar, promotion to your mailing list, any sites mentioned in your post and all of the usual social media sites you’re active on (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Pinterest and any others for example).

Also include any communities that you’re a member of that might find your content valuable.

Then, the next time you publish a post, go through this check list and get your post promoted on everything in your list.

There are so many more ways you could promote your post, but I haven’t included them because in the majority of cases most of them just aren’t feasible to use on every piece of content and that’s the idea of this check list.

A list of sites or tactics to use to promote your content that you can use on every piece of content you publish.

If you’re looking for some sort of ultimate list for promoting your blog or blog post – I’m working on it, but that’s a post for another day

Key takeaways

So to summarise all of this for you, remember these 4 key points –

Create the right content for the right people
Write about industry experts and ask them to help you share the content (the more the merrier)
Relationships with fellow bloggers are your friend, build them and nurture them
Don’t just hit publish, map out an approach to promoting each piece of content

And here’s a 5^th – if you want to connect with bloggers directly and get a lot more shares on your posts then get involved by joining Triberr and be part of my Tribe.

What do you do to promote each of your blog posts consistently? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.