I’ve always believed that content promotion or content distribution is the missing piece of many content marketing strategies.
After all, if no one is there to see, hear, or listen to your content, then it doesn’t really make an impact.
In the movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella was told that if he builds it (a baseball field), “they will come.”
Unlike what Kinsell was told, creating the content (or website) doesn’t mean they will come. They need to know or hear about the content.
Enter content distribution. Some people call it content promotion. The idea is to distribute the content to get the most views, and therefore, impact from the content.
Outbrain defines content distribution like this:
“Content Distribution is the act of promoting content to online audiences in multiple media formats through various channels. These channels can be categorized into three groups: Owned, Earned, and Paid.” Source Outbrain
Campaign Monitor defines content promotion as,
“Content promotion is the process of distributing blog posts and other resources via both paid and organic channels, which may include pay-per-click advertising, influencer outreach, PR, social media, email marketing, and syndication.” Source: Campaign Monitor
Essentially, the two are the same thing, and you need a strategy of some kind to execute the task.
Today, we are going to discuss a few simple tips to utilize content distribution for the content and attract the right audience to your website.
Know where your audience hangs out
A significant point to start with is to know where your audience hangs out. If you spend time distributing content to a channel that does not contain your audience, you may waste time and money.
A client of mine has been creating videos and posting them on LinkedIn for over a year now. He has received a great response because, mostly, his audience hangs out on LinkedIn.
He posts a short video, often with an entrepreneur or executive in his target audience. He gets a lot of views, and people have reached out to him via the direct message on LinkedIn.
Who is your target audience? Where do they hang out? By now, you know the Twitter crowd is very different from the Facebook crowd. Another thing to consider is that different people like to consume content via different methods. The likelihood that all of your target market is on one platform is highly unlikely.
Many people prefer video or podcasts. We have to account for that as well, and many people still get emails.
Do a little investigating of where your target market hangs out. You may find going to trade shows to be very valuable.
Repurpose content
Kim Doyal has beat the drum of repurposing content for a long, long time. She lays out nine ways that you can take a podcast episode and repurpose that in this article from several years ago.
It’s a significant part of your Traffic Kickstarter course.
Aaron Agius breaks down the whys and some of the hows (with examples) of repurposing content in this Hubspot article.
In the article, he quotes Derek Halpern from Social Triggers,
“You don’t have to create content, day in, and day out. You just have to work on getting the content you already have… in the hands of more people.” Source: Social Triggers
Then Agius follows up with a brief definition,
“And that’s the main idea behind repurposing content: Take something you’ve created, put a new spin on it, and give it new life.” source: Hubspot
As for the whys, Agius gives three: Reaching New Audiences, Reinforcing Your Message, and Improved Organic Visibility.
Ross Simmonds also likes to champion repurposing content. I have seen some incredibly insightful posts on social media surrounding doing this.
He calls it the Content Distribution Playbook. He even participated in a Whiteboard Friday for Moz, giving out insight for this playbook.
He has lots of thoughts on content distribution that you can find on his website, but here is a very rapid-fire piece in this Twitter thread.
ULTIMATE DISTRIBUTION THREAD
20 of my favorite distribution channels & tactics for spreading B2B content after hitting publish.
These are great techniques for brands who realize the job isn’t over when you hit publish.
Dive in, drink coffee, ask questions, & add your own.
— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) February 13, 2020
Backlinks help
Let’s take a page out of the SEO playbook. Fewer factors are more important to SEO efforts than backlinks.
Ahrefs even claims it may be the most essential factor.
“Backlinks are arguably the most important ranking factor.
“How do we know? Backlinks form the basis of Pagerank, which is the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm. And before you make the point that PageRank is old news, Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that PageRank is still used in 2018:” Source: Ahrefs
But that was two or three years ago. What about today?
In a Whiteboard video at Moz, Britney Muller indicated that creating content people want to link to is a high priority in 2020. In the video, she talks about targeting Link-Intent keywords. She says,
“These are searches people naturally want to reference. They want to link to it. They want to cite it in a presentation. If you can build really great content around those link-intent keywords, you can do incredibly well and naturally build links to a website.”
Source: Moz
Links still matter, and even though Domain Authority isn’t considered, links from sites with quality and authority will help improve your rankings.
Distributing your content through other people’s audiences can vastly help your backlink situation.
Enter Brendan Hufford, who advocates for the Dream 100.
“The Dream 100 is finding your one hundred dream partners and finding ways to work with them. That’s what makes this tactic amazing. It can work for podcasting, affiliate marketing, or (in my case) link-building. No matter what you do, this tactic is helpful.” Source: Brendan Hufford
In this article, he breaks down the failures he made early in his SEO career, how he learned about the Dream 100.
In a follow-up article, he talks about how to execute the strategy.
Even more, Brendan provides examples of how he executed the strategy for his own business. The short answer is to build quality relationships, but it takes more than that.
I encourage you to wade through the article to get a better grasp of how to execute the strategy.
Wrapping it up
Along with these thoughts, I would add that you can use Public Relations and Paid promotion to help with your distribution efforts.
Knowing where your target market hangs out, repurposing your content, and taking advantage of backlinks will get you kick-started. Not distributing your content will throw up a roadblock to traffic to your articles.
Promote your content! Your content marketing depends on it.
