Have you written a quality post, but it has gone unnoticed? You drew an awesome infographic, but no one ever shared it? Spent six months creating a useful white paper, but no one downloads it? If your materials are really so great, but they still do not resonate with your audience, it can only mean one thing – you do not pay enough attention to the promotion of your content. But today in this article, you’ll learn about 5 tips for content promotion!

Creating content and promoting content should take about the same amount of time. Sharing a post on a few social networks is not enough! You should use all possible platforms and methods to ensure the greatest coverage of target users. Only then can you count on a viral effect.

Business Without Advertising

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark” – the same can be said of creating and promoting content “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark” – the same can be said of creating and promoting content

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark” – the same can be said for content creation and promotion

Free Ways to Distribute

• Vkontakte
  • Facebook

How to promote these sites, I will not tell – all too well know how to do it. I’ll just give some tips on the design, without which it is very difficult to achieve at least some serious results:

• Make a nice design for your group. Draw a beautiful avatar, group cover, navigation menu (if it’s page “Vkontakte”, use a wiki layout). A group that is beautifully designed inspires much more trust among users.    
• Pick a big and bright picture for the announcement every time. It should catch the eye and make the user hold his/her gaze.   
• Try to write such announcements, which encourage people to click on the link. Describe in a nutshell what the article is about, give an interesting fact or excerpt, intrigue the reader.

• Shorten all long links. You can do this with the following services: bitly or google url shortener.
• Use hashtags.

Twitter

Since Twitter has a limit on the number of characters, the recommendations for the design of posts on this social network are slightly different. The most important thing here is the text. More precisely, the phrase with which you should encourage the user to click on the link. To come up with such a phrase, try to use one of the following techniques. Also, if possible, try to make sure your tweet has room for a picture. Images can help you stand out from the rest of your feed.

Google+

Many people think Google+ is a dead social network. No one is on it, and promoting it won’t get you anywhere. Perhaps this is true.

It is possible to get traffic from Google+. Here, by the way, are some smart tips on how to do it. However, even if you are absolutely sure that your audience is not sitting in Google+, and you do not set a goal to develop a community in this social network, you still need to make a page in it. For two reasons. One – to assign Google Authorship and thus protect your content from theft. And two – to share your content and influence (albeit indirectly) the position of your site in search results. According to many experiments, Google +1 button has a positive impact on ranking.

5 Steps of An Effective Content Promotion

1. Livejournal

Livejournal – a fairly popular platform among Russian-speaking bloggers. I drew this conclusion on the basis of the traffic we get from it. Without taking any action at all to promote this site (other than to announce our new materials there) we constantly receive little traffic from it.

2. Fast Indexing

You probably know that “Google” and “Yandex” have special algorithms that determine the relevance and “freshness” of content (Google has the algorithm Freshness, “Yandex” official name is unknown, but in SEO circles it is called “admixture of the fast robot”). Thanks to these algorithms, search engines rank pages that contain the most complete and up-to-date information on a particular information request higher than others. For example, our article about 25 feature films on sales and marketing was at the top of Yandex’s “feature films” list the day after it was published, thanks to this algorithm.

Now imagine the situation: some great event happened in your niche. You, like all your competitors, immediately wrote about it on your blog. But not everyone will receive traffic, but only the one whose article is the fastest to be indexed by search engines, and will take a higher position in search results. How to do it? You need to add your article to “Yandex. Webmaster” under “Check URL” and “Webmaster Tools” from Google under “View as Google Bot” immediately after publication.

3. Digests

A digest is a compilation of useful content from the past week or month. Usually, this type of content gets a great response from the audience and they look forward to the next issue. Another indisputable advantage of digests is that they do not take much time to create (assuming, of course, that you constantly review thematic blogs and save the content you like).

Keep an eye on all the digests that exist in your niche, and if you see that your new post fits their theme, suggest that the authors include it in the list. Just do it carefully, not offhand. Before you ask for a favor, try to build at least some relationship with these people:

• Comment on their blog posts.
• Add them as a friend on social networking sites.
• Share their articles.
• Say nice things in a personal message.
• Create a way to get noticed.

Only after that can you ask for your post to be added to their digest. However, even this will not give you a guarantee that it will be included there. Your post has to be of mega quality and not promotional. So create such posts and you’ll never get rejected.

4. Banner Ads

On any site where there is banner advertising, you can find a special section for advertisers, which clearly describes the requirements for banners and conditions for their placement. The cost of placement depends on many factors: the popularity of the resource, its audience, location of the banner, its attractiveness, and how “catchy” its message is. Banner advertising can be very effective. The main thing is to choose the right sites, make an attractive design and intriguing lyrics.

5. Contextual Advertising

Most often, contextual advertising in Yandex.Direct and Google Adwords are used to sell products and branding, but these channels can also be used to attract traffic to informational articles. Moreover, it will cost you much less, because the rates for informational queries are usually much lower than for commercial ones.

Bottom Line

These are all good and effective methods of promoting new posts. But see for yourself. First, this list could go on ad infinitum. Secondly, where to take so much time to have enough and on social networks, and portals, and to write new useful content on another resource, and even ask questions and answer existing questions in special services. That’s why it all depends on you and your skills. And I hope in this article you learned how to promote your content qualitatively!