Let’s face it. Your business needs to be producing content. Quality content can serve many purposes including increasing your brand awareness, building trust with your audience and boosting your site’s SEO value.
The only caveat is that you need people to actually see your content – preferably a lot of people. Creating content becomes an ineffective task when no one is seeing it or engaging with it.
In order to increase your audience viewership and engagement, you need to heavily promote your content. Here are some of the best ways to promote your content.
1. Include Links In Your Email Signature
This is one of the best ways to promote content if you’re looking for a subtle approach. People spend so much time sending and receiving emails each day. You probably come into contact with 50 to 100 people via email every day.
If you have to send email replies anyway, you might as well include a link to your blog page or a popular piece of content that you want to promote. You can update the link weekly with the newest piece of content or simply a piece that you want to heavily promote at the time.
2. Send an Email
Don’t underestimate the power of having an email list. If you send a weekly newsletter, you’ll obviously want to include a link to the content you want to promote as well. You can also use your emails to preview your latest content.
I’ve seen some people do this and it can generate great results. Basically, if you’re promoting an article or blog post, include the first paragraph or so to hook your audience, then add a ‘read more’ button so they can click through to the actual post. You can also include a link that will enable them to pin it to Pinterest if they want to save your content to view it for later.
If you’re promoting a video, try to tease it in your email and include a visual so your subscribers will feel led to click through and view it.
3. Use Push Notifications
Push notifications are brief messages that can reach audiences anywhere and anytime – even if they’re not on your site. Your audience will have to opt-in to receive push notifications but once they do, you can send them new content automatically.
You’ll want to make sure you don’t over promote content if you’re going to use a combination of push notifications and your email newsletter. Also, make sure your content is high-quality, helpful, and easy to understand as this will encourage people to share the content on their end as well.
4. Email People Who Were Mentioned in the Content
If you mentioned a specific person or resource in your content, reach out to them and see if they’d like to share the content with their audience. It’s worth a try and you can have a virtual assistant (VA) or another team member spend time on this outreach for you.
If you’re consistent, you can likely reach someone who has a large following and is willing to help you promote your piece.
5. Pitch to Roundups or Run Your Own Roundups
Some sites post roundups of the best content for the week, month, etc. and you can easily pitch these sites to include your content.
Leverage social media sites like Twitter for this or see if the site had a form where you can request to be added to the roundup. Again, you can have your VA do this if you don’t have the time.
Another thing you can do is create your own roundup by including quotes from other industry experts and colleagues. When the content is ready for publishing email those who participated to help you promote the content. Each person can share it with their audience which will multiply your promotion efforts.
6. Create a Social Media Publishing Schedule
Promoting your post on social media is still a popular way to get the word out. However, it’s important to realize that one isolated social media post is not enough anymore (I don’t think it ever was enough).
You need to create a social media publishing schedule so you can post multiple times across your social platforms. You can use tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and CoSchedule to help you automate your social promotion schedule.
Summary
As you can see, there are several options when it comes to considering the best ways to promote your content in 2019. You’ll want to diversify your efforts and focus on getting your content to as many eyes as possible. Use your network, your team, social media, and outreach efforts to do this.
