4 Savvy Tricks to Promote Your Content

What’s worse than trying to write great content when you feel uninspired? Trying to promote your great content when it seems the world couldn’t care less.

All marketers get this feeling from time to time, but that’s no excuse for giving up the good fight. If you’re looking to draw some attention to yourself, use some of these oh-so-fabulous tricks:

Drum up some ads
No, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get your content seen. The trick is to place them on sites where your target market will actually click on them.

Try major content sharing marketplaces such as StumbleUpon or Reddit. While you can submit your content to these sites for free, paying for a few ads targeted at your audience will tremendously increase traffic to your site.

Make sure the graphic you create is relevant to the audience on the content sharing site and readers have a clear idea of what you want them to do (i.e. comment, share on social media, visit your website, etc.)

Rev up your social media efforts
You have social media accounts and at least a little bit of a following. Reach out to them! This is absolutely free for basic interaction, and a little strategy can take you a long way.

Work on scheduling tweets and posts at peak interaction times, and don’t be afraid to make several posts throughout the day with different comments. For example, if you’re sharing an infographic on skyscrapers, break your tweets down into three niches: traveling, construction, and a generic one about the tallest buildings in the world. Include relevant hashtags to make it easier for people to stumble upon your tweet.

Stay interactive and present, but not pushy. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Share your linkable assets
A linkable asset can be anything from a video to an infographic to a blog post. You can share these links on social media, forums or even other websites.

Linkable assets are still one of the most popular ways to get links back to your site to boost your search engine rankings and to spread the word about your products or services. The best linkable assets include three criteria:

• They can be used in a variety of topics
• They give valuable and interesting information to the reader
• They lead the reader to want to take an action at the end

For example, this linkable asset about habits can be linked to on family sites that want to inform readers of the statistics on habits, on drug sites informing readers about how habits turn into addictions, and on self-help sites to help those who have a bad habit of any kind.

Notice, the video ends talking about how a habit turns into an addiction, and the text under the YouTube video encourages the viewer to visit the 12 Keys site for more information on how to overcome an addiction.

Combine your content with current events
The key to this trick is finding an angle on your content that is relevant to current events. Journalists are always trying to take a unique angle on the news and you can provide them with that story (if you’re quick enough).

I’ll use this example from Red Ribbon Week, the longest running drug prevention campaign in America. To hook my client onto this timely bandwagon, I created a motion graphic on the economics of drug abuse and tailored my pitch to journalists to include Red Ribbon Week. I also targeted supporters of Red Ribbon Week who have blogs or a strong social following that would be willing to share my motion graphic with their readers.

What have you done to promote your content lately? Do you have any tricks that I didn’t cover? Let me know!