By the time the clock strikes midnight, there will be over 2 million blog posts published. Where does your content fit in the picture?
If you’re taking advice from people claiming that “fresh content” keeps Google happy, then prepare yourself a lonely blogging experience.
Content creation is just as important as promotion and it’s something that can’t be skimped out on.
If you’re smart, you’ll take Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice:
Work harder, stop making excuses, stop complaining and hustle.
So how do you promote your website? Simple. You amplify it using the right tools, strategies and a step-by-step process that produces results.
I created a 74 step SEO checklist that turned out to be my entire content promotion strategy. Using this strategy, you can expect make your content stand out in the noisy blogosphere by promoting your content to people who care about the topics you have insight on (download the printable PDF version).
Source: Money Journal
Create Shareworthy Content
Not all content is created equal. Content that gets shared has multiple variables. When creating content, you want to attack a problem with in-depth solutions to relieve people’s pain points.
One simple way to do this is to research historically successful content using Buzzsumo.com.
Buzzsumo allows you to type in a keyword phrase and see popular articles that have been shared around the web.
This is powerful because it gives you topics that have a proven track-record of getting shared. You can use these as a foundation for your next post.
It is vital to know who you are going to promote your article to prior to creating it. With this knowledge, you can target influencers who have already shown interest in a topic.
You can discover this information with Buzzsumo’s “view sharers” function. This tool shows everyone who has shared a specific article on Twitter. Use this information to start forming an outreach list of already interested candidates.
Stalk Forums To Understand Pain Points
Speaking to your audience is always more important than communicating with search engines. While tools like Google’s Keyword Planner are great for getting traffic estimates, forums give you an understanding of the real language your ideal customers use.
You can use this search query to find where your target audience is and speak to them using their exact language.
inurl:forum “keywords”
For example, if you are teaching guitar lessons to future rock stars, you can dissect pain points from their conversations. In this forum, there is a common struggle with speed. If you pay attention to their language, they use technical words like “tremelo picking” and “shredding” over common phrases like “play faster.”
Use these keywords to speak directly to your audience and to rank for untapped keyword phrases in search engines. No modern software compares to this kind of manual research.
Send A Lot Of Emails
The reason why so many content promotion strategies fail is because people are lazy or afraid to jump out of their comfort zone. Sending 200 emails a day isn’t fun and the first few rejections might hurt a bit.
First, understand that rejection is inevitable and don’t take it as an attack on your business or yourself as a human being.
Using the outreach list you created before, you can begin drafting emails to these influencers. If you have a list of Twitter influencers who have shared something similar, your email might look like this:
It’s a non-threatening email and those who are interested will be happy to review it. If they respond, send them a link to your article and they will share with their communities if they find it helpful.
A positive response might look like this:
Open and response rates will vary based on the influencers you contact and your niche. I have had approximately 12-15% response rates depending on the topic and the authority of the influencers being contacted.
You can use a tool like VoilaNorbert to find email addresses of your outreach list candidates. Enter their name and domain and your friend Norbert will try to locate a valid email address.
Conclusion
By falling into the trap of the “publish and pray” approach, you will likely end up with another failed piece of content.
Contact influencers in your industry who have previously shown interest in a topic by sharing a similar post. Create stellar content that will help their audiences and have them spread the word about your brand.
While it is heavily a numbers game, the rewards will be based on the quality of your content and the sweat equity you are willing to put into it.
You will gain more exposure to a larger audience and also get on the radar of influencers in your industry. Be persistent and spend 8 times more of your effort promoting it instead of creating more content that will never get found.
The results will shock you.
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