Promote Your Content
Episode #9 of the course Content marketing fundamentals by Courtney Goes
I hate to break it to you, but the saying, “build it and they will come,” is a lie. It doesn’t matter how good your content is; if nobody knows about it, they won’t come. A strong content marketing strategy and targeted creation plan only make up the first part of the equation. The final part is amplifying your content to make sure it’s found.
While some of this comes down to the work we did in previous lessons on clearly defining your audience and sourcing topics they’re already looking for, you’ll still want to get as many relevant people seeing your work as possible.
In Lesson 5, you outlined the channels your audience uses, so these are where you need to focus your time and energy. Reflect on how they prefer to access information, where they prefer to access it, and how often.
Is it during work hours, as your audience goes about their typical day, or at home? How often do they log onto social networks? Which ones? Determine the channels your audience is frequenting online and then publish on those to reach them.
To give yourself the best chance and help boost your efforts, keep these in mind:
1. Remember about timing. The saying goes that timing is everything, and content is really no different. Understanding when your audience prefers to consume content is just as important as knowing what and where to publish it. Be ready to do some trial and error to learn when it works and when it doesn’t.
2. Automate. Once you work out the best days and times to post, automating it will save you a lot of time. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite are excellent for this and allow you to schedule posts across all social platforms.
3. Consider influencers. Most people focus on targeting their end audience, but it can be incredibly valuable to spend some time also getting to know those who influence your audience’s content consumption as well. Work out whom your audience trusts. This could be industry analysts, friends, colleagues, thought leaders, or peer reviews.
4. Repurpose, reuse, recycle. Get more bang for your content buck by repurposing the content you create into various forms. For example, one video could also be turned into multiple shorter blog posts, a slide deck, a PDF guide, and a podcast. Leveraging the content you create as you go, as well as refreshing and reusing past content, will help you create more than you thought possible.
5. Use metadata. Your metadata is key to making sure your content is easily findable by the right people at the right place at the right time. Use SEO-optimization tools or take the SEO Fundamentals course on Highbrow to make sure users can find your content both through search engines and searches within your own website.
Don’t be nervous or modest about promoting your content—it’s essential in order for it to be found and leads to a snowball effect, whereby the more people who see it, the more it’ll keep growing.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s final lesson, where we’re going to look at how to measure the success of your content and make adjustments if you need to.
See you then,
Courtney
Recommended reading
10 Steps to Boost Traffic through SEO
Recommended book
SEO 2017: Learn Search Engine Optimization with Smart Internet Marketing Strategies by Adam Clarke
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