Content Promotion Checklist for Beginners

Key Takeaways

there are over 4 million blog posts published every single day so if you're just publishing high quality content and hoping to gain traction it probably won't be enough because no one will know your content even exists so today I'm going to show you how to promote your content with a simple yet effective content promotion checklist stay tuned [Music] what's up marketers so the checklist we're about to go through is something you can follow whenever you publish a new piece of content and I want you to know that you don't have to follow every step in this checklist but generally speaking the more things you do the more eyeballs you'll attract and the more traffic you'll get let's get started the first thing you should do is send an email to your email list and there are three reasons for this first content is non-promotional and should be designed to help your readers second some of the people on your list might be bloggers or journalists who have the power to amplify and link to your content and third they actually want to get updates from you otherwise they wouldn't have signed up for your email list so if you're not emailing them with your content you're doing them a disservice now if you don't have an email list then let me say it plain and simple start building one I won't bother going into list building in this tutorial but if you want to see a video on that let me know in the comments the next thing on our checklist is to share your content on social media if you already have a social following it's simple share your new content through your social accounts but don't just call it a day after you've done that there are a couple of other things you can do to get the most mileage out of social media and the promotion methods will vary from platform to platform so first off you should reshare your content since social media is heavily biased towards timing activities like Facebook shares or tweets generally have a very short shelf life this means that not everyone is going to see your content the first time you share it so you can do something as simple as retweeting your own tweet in fact buffer conducted an experiment and found that retweeting your own tweets increases reach engagement and clicks best of all you won't be a No your followers by doing this and this is something that we've tested at eight reps with decent success now rather than always sharing the same thing over and over again you can play around with the copy or featured images for example if you're promoting a tweet play around with the copy because it's the most prominent part of a tweet but if you're sharing on Pinterest you may want to play around with the actual image since that's the most prominent part of a pin the second thing you can try is to create sound bites from your content if you have a blog or in-depth piece of content you can pull out some of the key points and share them on social media as sound bites for example on Twitter we often share standalone tips and stats which help drive engagement garyvee does this by turning his long videos into short clips and image quotes there are plenty of things you can do so get creative and test things out with your audience now if you don't have a social following yet focus on building your social presence on just one platform where your target audience is rather than trying to dip your toes into every social network you'll grow faster that way the next tip is to email other bloggers you've linked to if you've created an in-depth guide chances are you've linked to useful resources or mentioned other Creators so in my opinion it's worth reaching out to let them know you can say something as simple as hey Bobby I read your posts on French press hacks and loved your tip on using drip coffee filters I included it in our post on why French press coffee is better than poor older thanks for the tip and I hope to mention send some well-deserved visitors your way Cheers sent the email isn't meant to be complicated it's simply a way of letting them know you appreciate their work which can potentially spark a relationship a share and sometimes even links back to your site the next tip is to submit your posts to online communities these are places like niche forums Reddit and Facebook groups these communities are generally tightly knit groups who are interested in a specific topic so by getting your content in front of them you have the opportunity to drive targeted traffic to your site now this doesn't mean you can or should join them and start spamming links to your site you'll probably get kicked out of groups banned or worse taint your reputation and you'll want to integrate yourself into these communities and it all starts with understanding the group's culture to do this start by reading through the group rules and follow them then focus on becoming an active and helpful member in the group leave thoughtful comments participate in discussions ask questions and answer others when you can add value the aim is to become a recognizable name in the community that way when you share your content it'll be better received all right the next tip is to answer questions on Quora if you haven't heard of Korra it's a popular Q&A site and in 2018 they reach 300 million monthly unique visitors to their site so in plain English this means you can potentially get your content in front of a lot of people just by answering questions now the problem is that Korra doesn't tell you how many people are visiting each page and answering every possible question would be way too time-consuming but what we do know is that Korra gets a ton of search traffic from Google in fact HR site Explorer estimates that Korra gets over 80 million monthly search visits which is an underestimation so to tap into this traffic you can find questions on Korra that are getting consistent traffic from Google and answer them with a link back to your content to find these pages go to HR site explorer and search for Korra calm next I'll go to the top pages report then I'll set the country filter to all countries so I can see the total traffic estimations to these pages so assuming I had a website on cooking I can enter a keyword like recipe in the include box which will narrow our results down to relevant pages and now you can see some questions worth answering like what is a good substitute for applesauce just make sure you answer the question and feel free to add relevant links back to your site if you're having doubts about the strategy then check this out I created an experimental site that got over 60,000 page views in seven months and the only traffic source I had was one link from a single Cora answer the next step is to use paid ads now paid marketing is awesome because once you start paying for traffic you'll get it almost immediately given the variety of targeting options you have on platforms like Facebook and Google you can reach new and hyper targeted audiences quite easily for example at href we've had great success at getting cheap engaged views using YouTube ads in fact our average cost per view is only 7 Singapore cents which roughly translates to about 5 cents in u.s. dollars so to translate this we're paying around 5 cents for someone to watch about 6 to 8 minutes of our video which is just bananas in my books now if you don't create videos Facebook ads are still pretty cheap I believe on average we pay around 15 to 30 cents per click so even if you're just putting in five dollars per day it can go a long way in getting more visitors to your site last but not least build backlinks a backlink is when another website links to one of your pages Google looks at this as a signal that the information being linked to is well trusted and the result higher google rankings and consistent passive and free traffic from search engines so how do you build them well we have an entire playlist with step-by-step tutorials on link building so I recommend watching those videos as well as our video on how to rank higher in Google I'll make sure to link those up in the description now I'm wondering if there are any content promotion tips or steps that I've missed in this checklist let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this video make sure to like share and subscribe for more actionable marketing tutorials I'll see you in the next one