7 Ways You Can Improve Your Content Promotion

Creating good content is paramount but without a good promotional campaign set in place then even the most informative and well written piece will flop. In general, you should spend double the time promoting your piece as you do writing it.

Seriously, I’ve known people who agonise over a piece for weeks on end, terrified at the very prospect that it’s going to go viral who then go on to sharing about it once on twitter in the most unimaginative way possible and then don’t understand why their cluttered ignobly down the dark mineshaft of Twitters algorithm.

What follows then is a guide on how you can best wring out your content for an entire month.

Yes, I know, the idea sounds ludicrous! Nearly everyone knows that you should be pushing out content biweekly so what is this yokel on about? See while most “experts” might recommend that, the fact is that with the internet oversaturated with content its harder than ever to get seen. Therefore, it’s better to put all your best energy into one informative and authentic piece and push that for the month.

1. Get on Buffer

If you don’t know about Buffer or Hootsuite or any social media management system then you better learn quick. Their a vital tool not only in managing your presence on social media but scheduling your content too.

I’m a fan of Buffer myself so I can attest to its usefulness, it basically allows you to connect multiple social media platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, to the app and from there schedule posts to go out whenever you want.

2. Develop your headlines

Before you consider putting out your content sit down and come up with up to 25 headlines. Develop a mixture of tried and true headlines based around tried and true examples, here are a couple.

• How to Start_That will help you_
• Will _ Help you _?
• 20 ways_ can help you _

You see the different variations there? The first is a how to guide, the second a question and the third a list type of headline.

These are tried and true formats you will see across multiple blogs and they work trust me. But what you should also do is try to be creative in designing your headlines, don’t be afraid to be quirky, funny and controversial.

Out of those decide which one is the core headline, the one that will be the URL that you will use, other than that also pick three of the best headlines out of your list to use.

Once you’ve come up with 25 headlines for your article under those different themes you will then use these in the next stage.

3. Scheduling your promotion

For the first four days throughout your major social media sites set posts to go out promoting your latest piece. You should aim for one post each day, with the first day that you actually publish your content seeing up to two or three posts going out promoting it.

Use your three different headlines with three different promotional pictures in each.

After those first four days, wait another four and begin posting for the next four days, at the end of that wait for eight days and finally continue scheduling content again all the way up to the thirty days from when you posted your content.

From there you should also develop posts into quirky, humours and controversial messages.

4. Your social messages are key

You need to view each social message as being a CTA (Call to Action) to visit your blog. You can’t just spam out, “check out my new piece” again and again and expect that to get you anywhere.

No, just like how you need to write good content you need to write good social messages.  You should for example create humorous social messages that can amuse your audience while promoting your article, and then in your next scheduled post develop one that offers them a benefit.

Remember your audience doesn’t care about you, they care about themselves and the issues they face so put yourself in their shoes when designing these messages.

5. Hashtags

This relates specifically to Twitter but hashtags are imperative in ensuring your post gains maximum reach. You should have up to two hashtags that you plan to utilise throughout your promotional cycle. You also want to make sure that these are fully optimised hashtags. What do I mean by that?

Ritetag.com. RiteTag allows you to analyse the hashtag you plan to use and tell you the exposure it gets, the higher the better obviously and it can also give you some suggestions of other hashtags based on the when you’re searching for too.

6. Native Posting

Okay so you’ve poured all of your heart, soul and alcohol into your latest piece, set up your promotional campaign and now you’re sure its going to be a hit! But wait a second, why just post it on your site?

Sure you’re blog is the heart of your content and whenever you send out your url it’s the url to your blog that you want as you need that site traffic.

But there’s no reason you can’t post that same content on a site like Medium or LinkedIn, in fact it can be a great thing to do. You see it’s all about exposure, brand building and networking.

Joining other communities allows you to engage with a whole network of bloggers and other authors and gives you the potential of reaching out to an already established audience of readers that uses a site like Medium.

7. Promoters

This is a very important step in promoting your content. Sit down on an excel sheet, or a word doc or even with a notebook and draw up a list of names of people you think you could ask to become promoters. What is that exactly? Its people who when your post goes live, like & and share your content.

You can do this in two different ways. The first is done after you publish your blog on LinkedIn Pulse, once that is done you can make a comment and within that comment begin tagging those promoters.

Now this is important, make sure you actually get their permission before doing so! I recommend tagging up to 25 promoters for Linkedin and marking down the date in which you tagged them so you do not accidentally retag them for your next piece. The last thing you want to do is start spamming your promoters.

Next head into twitter and create a manual tweet using your best headline and your best picture. A trick with Twitter is that you can actually tag up to ten people within a picture saving up on a lot character space. Tag your highest followers and that should see a higher amount of engagement and reach.

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