You’ve got a great product, but a landing page on its own is not going to drive registrations.
So you start a blog, you create well-researched content that highlights key features of your product. You’ve also done your share of keyword research and made sure the post is SEO-optimized.
You notice some sign-ups, and things seem positive, but that early activity begins to decline. You produce more content, see a brief increase, and then it falls again. You can’t keep making fresh content all the time; that’s not practical. Eventually, you’ll run out of ideas, right?
What’s missing is the distribution of your content. Distribution is really the wind in the sails of your content. Without it, your content barely makes a splash.
Why Content Distribution Matters
There is so much content online today, that one blog post won’t have an impact just on its own. According to Techjury, 4.4 million blog posts are published every day. Given those figures, just publishing a blog post is a drop in an ocean of content out in the world.
That’s where content distribution comes in.
Content distribution is the act of getting your content in front of new audiences. The more and more people that engage with your content, the more likely they are to learn about your product/brand and help your organization grow.
This helps you to maximize the reach of your content and get the most out of it.
However, content distribution isn’t a new concept. This means your competitors likely have effective content distribution channels already in place. You’ll need to effectively distribute your content across domains, across platforms, and even across brands to really get noticed.
The better you distribute your content, the greater your edge over your competitors.
So we’re going to look at 3 distribution channels you need to take advantage of today.
- Promotional outreach
- Repurposing content
- Co-marketing projects
Promotional Outreach
You want more people accessing your content and learning about your product, right?
When you can capitalize on organic traffic, you’ll see a steady stream of traffic coming to your content. A big part of ranking organically is securing mentions across authoritative domains.
It’s also a great way to secure referral traffic.
So you probably already know what I’m going to say…
You need to secure some mentions!
There are a couple ways to do this.
Some people outright buy backlinks, and the cost can vary from $20 to $4000! I would never recommend this, it falls into the black hat SEO category. You can’t always be certain of that publication’s blogging practices and transparency. It can result in a Google penalty which can take a year’s worth of hard work to recover from.
Alternatively, you can use platforms like PRNews.io for predictable, high-quality mentions on reputable pages. You will need a reasonable budget for this, however.
You can also go the old fashioned route: asking people.
That’s right, just asking people.
You can email authors and editors of blogs creating content that complement yours. One way to do this is to create a list of related content using Ahrefs, then collecting email addresses with a tool like Hunter.io. Then use a tool like Mailchimp or any Mailchimp alternatives to set up your email campaigns.
This takes time, patience, a bit of research and tact. The last thing you want is to send emails that are poorly written, spammy, generic and every other sort of ‘bad’ an email can be.
Send emails that are straight to the point and demonstrate value to the person you’re contacting. Usually with a campaign set up, I still go through each individual email, make sure my email copy is relevant and then send it off.
With cold promotion outreach emails, the outcome is not reliable. However, you end up connecting with like-minded marketers and content creators that may be open to helping you out in the future.
Repurposing content
Only certain types of people read blog posts.
Others prefer anything from live webinars, to infographics, to eBooks. Basically, people consume content in different ways. With one single blog post, you’re only accessing a sliver of a much larger audience.
Repurposing content is a way to take one piece of content, and turn it into the cornerstone of a much broader content strategy. It lets you establish your authority around a topic, it signals to Google that you’re the expert (not your competitor), it increases your visibility, and it builds brand trust and awareness.
For example, if I repurposed this blog post, I would make a timeline visualizing a content distribution campaign. So even for anyone who didn’t read the entire blog post could have a neat visual aid to refer to and get started. Infographics are always a popular option, very shareable, and often get syndicated (more mentions for you).
I could put together a live webinar or YouTube video breaking down the process in more detail, sharing it on social media or running ad campaigns to promote it. I could package my slide deck as a helpful free resource for anyone that needs it. Depending on my audience, I might opt to host a podcast regularly instead, and invite some experts to share their insights.
The possibilities are endless of course. In order to decide where to get started, consider your audience – what do they like, which social platforms are they most on, what kind of content engages them the most? To get started, check out Ross Simmond’s guide to repurposing content.
Co-marketing projects
Co-marketing is a great way to increase your brand’s exposure. Co-marketing just means you’re working with another brand to create a joint piece of content that you both promote to your audiences.
A simple example of a co-marketing project would be an eBook or marketing toolkit that you and another brand collaborate on. For example, this marketing toolkit from Mention and Wishpond. It’s attractive, compact, and has helpful collateral to support your holiday marketing efforts.
What I like most about co-marketing ventures is that both brands are repurposing and repackaging existing content in a new way. This saves you time and energy, it’s an opportunity to update old content, and you push your existing content a little more. That’s exactly what Mention, drawing inspiration from their holiday marketing campaigns content to guide their toolkit content.
With co-marketing projects, they are usually a lead-generation play. This means you’re trying to generate as many leads from the content and sharing the email list for your own campaigns based on the content. It’s important to determine some common goals and expectations, this way both brands hold one another accountable for promotion.
Now, there’s no need to have all of these distribution channels in place, right away.
Did I talk about any of your preferred content distribution approaches? Or is there something that you’d like to share? Let me know what you think!