Content Marketing: 50 Ways To Promote Your Content

You’ve slaved away over your site’s content marketing pieces – don’t let that effort go to waste by failing to give your creations the promotional bump they need to get found. You’re just getting started when you finally hit publish or share. Does an author put their blood, sweat, and tears into a novel, sell it to five people, then move on to the next project? Nope. Promotion is the name of the (word) game.

Promoting your content isn’t nearly as much fun as creating it, but it’s a vital part of content marketing success. In fact, many prominent marketers and digital gurus suggest you spend much more time on promotion than you do on creation.

“It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more.” ~Derek Halpern, Social Triggers

Derek Halpern from Social Triggers recommends the 80/20 Rule: spend 80% of your time on promoting your stuff, and the other 20% making it.

But since there’s no “one size fits all” promotional approach that’ll suit all businesses, I’ve compiled these expert tips on different strategies you can use to get your crackerjack content seen by as many eyes as possible.

There’s so much you could do, but some things work better than others. Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff. These are 50 of the best based on my own experience in digital advertising and content marketing.

On Your Site

Proper content promotion begins at home.

Before you even start thinking about things like social media marketing or PR, there are a few things you’ll want to do on your own website and with the content you produce to make promotion as easy as possible in the future.

Make your social sharing buttons prominent

Generating and encouraging social shares is one of the best channels by which content promotion occurs. But how do you expect your audience to take the crucial step of posting your content pieces on their favorite social sites if they can’t find your social sharing buttons? If your website or blog’s current theme doesn’t prominently feature social sharing buttons, look to tools and plugins like Share This or Shareaholic to do it for you.

Another wonderful tool is Click to Tweet. Copy and paste the witty quip or fascinating SEO statistic you want your users to share, click “generate new link,” and use it in your content. Instant shareability of your best and most memorable lines in one quick click.

Social shares not only generate traffic and backlinks for your site – social media users grew by 320+ million between 2017 and 2018, or one every ten seconds – but they also increase your credibility and spread brand awareness. Encourage and improve social sharing as much as possible.

Make your buttons prominent, easy to find, and optimized for your audience in terms of placement and available options.  

Include calls-to-action

You know the easiest way to get someone to do something? Ask them.

In the same way that people won’t go out of their way to share your content if you don’t make it easy for them, visitors are unlikely to take the actions you want if you don’t explicitly state what they are.

Think of it like you’re closing a sale: if you don’t ask for it, odds are you aren’t going to get the deal. Increase the likelihood of your readers acting on your content piece by including a relevant call-to-action (CTA) at the end of each piece.

“The CTA is your final instruction to your reader.” ~Kathryn Aragon, Content Strategist

Make it clear and active. Highlight the benefit to them. Remove friction. Experiment with personalized, smart CTAs … Hubspot found that they perform 202% better than traditional ones.

Improve your headlines

If you look at BuzzFeed’s success, it’s easy to see how important content headlines have become. An interesting analysis by HubSpot’s social media scientist Dan Zarrella validates this assumption. After reviewing more than 2.7 million blog articles, he found that 16.7% of web pages actually receive more social shares than they did clicks, proving that people don’t always read what they tweet. What did they respond to? The headline alone.

Take advantage of this effect by making your headlines as effective and as eye-catching as possible.

A compelling headline can get you shared and read.

“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” ~David Ogilvy

Mention influencers in your content

As you build your content pieces, identify and link to influential authority figures within your industry that you can either quote or share examples from within your text. Look to major figures, of course, but don’t forget the micro-influencers (no more than 10,000 followers) in your particular niche. It’s often easier to make waves rather than just ripples with their fans.

Including influencer mentions will help get eyeballs on your content – either from the authority figures themselves or from the people who follow their work online. Keep it legit, though. Use influencer mentions only if they support the original intent of your content piece; don’t pack them in just to suck up.

Thinking of a paid micro-influencer promotion? It’s more affordable than you might think: 84% charge $250 or less per post, while 97% charge $500 or less.  

Involve influencers in content creation

Mentioning influencers is a great way to set your content up for promotional success, but better yet, why not get these authority figures involved from the start?

Instead of sourcing existing quotes from your chosen authority figures, reach out to them directly and gather their input on subjects of interest within your community. Posts like, “Hear What Six SEO Gurus Have to Say About Google Hummingbird” make content promotion easy, as each of the authority figures mentioned brings his or her own audience right to your digital doorstep.

It’s good for them, and great for you. Find the influencers in your niche, engage with them, and leverage their existing audiences for your content.

Write a link roundup post

As an alternative, use this quick and easy strategy to create blog posts or social media updates that consist of link collections to relevant, engaging articles in your industry.

Creating a link round-up post – like the example above by Tor Refsland – doesn’t take very long, but it does pay off big when it comes to content promotion. Many of the sites you’ve referenced will share your article without any effort on your part, or at most it may take just a quick email to let them know you’ve included them. Either way, instant audience.

Build content that solves problems

One of the fastest routes to success in the business world is to solve a problem that’s plaguing a large enough group of people. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how crafting content pieces that help members of your audience can lead to the kind of viral sharing that makes content promotion effortless.

Want a shortcut to figure out what problems your audience is facing? Work with your customer service department (if you have one). Ask them what issues your customers are reporting, then build content that answers those questions and helps resolve their pain points. You can even add this process to your normal content workflow.

No customer service department? Look to see what questions and complaints you’re receiving on social media or your help desk solution. Even better, check out the questions being asked on your competition’s social channels. Or just consider the problems you know exist in your niche.

Identify, solve, and share.

In addition, you can use tools like Text Optimizer for question research. The tool uses semantic research to identify niche questions and help you optimize your content to include them.

Write long-form blog posts

According to IMPACT and countless other experts, you should be publishing long-form content (more than 1500 words as a general rule of thumb). Why? For starters, long-form blog posts get shared more often than their shorter counterparts. 3000 to 10,000-word posts generate the highest average number of shares according to a BuzzSumo analysis of 100 million articles. The lowest average? Posts of less than 1000 words.

While some frequently-shared examples run 10,000 words or more, you can err on the shorter side by publishing posts of at least 2,000 words. They tend to generate higher online visibility, more sharing, higher rankings, more value, and better conversions.

This is one case where bigger does mean better.

Create a video from your content

So, you’ve got a great piece of long-form content that you’ve published to your website and shared to your social profiles (which we’ll get into in a bit). Great start, but don’t stop there.

Take the information contained in your post and turn it into a video. Not only will doing so help you reach viewers who prefer to take in information in a visual format, it’ll give you the opportunity to create a “new” content piece for promotion without going to all the effort of researching something new. Consider:

• Cisco predicts 80% of all internet traffic will be video by 2021
• 93% of surveyed businesses reported gaining new customers as a direct result of sharing a video on social
• 76% report an increase in traffic because of videos
• Users watch almost five billion videos on YouTube every day
• 72% of consumers prefer video to text to learn about a product or service
• 80% of marketers report an increase in dwell time after the addition of video
• Videos on Facebook have 135% more organic reach than photo posts
• Including a video in an email can increase the click-through rate by 200-300%
• Social media users want to see video more than any other content type

Tools like Animoto, Biteable, and PowToon make video creation easy – no camera crew required. Video is simply a crucial part of content. Do it.

Build a podcast episode from your content

Once you’ve turned your long-form blog post into a video, keep going.

Could your content also be transformed into a podcast episode? Although it might take a little tweaking, transforming your content in this way puts it in front of yet another whole new audience without much extra prep work.

Podcast listening has been growing for both men and women over the past few years, so you’ve got a captive and expanding audience looking for good content.

Before investing in expensive equipment, give it a go using the voice recorder on your smartphone, editing with the excellent-but-free Audacity, and then uploading to a hosting provider like Libsyn, PodBean, SoundCloud, or Blubrry.

Starting a podcast might just be the best decision you make this week. The statistics paint a very rosy picture.

Postaga is an outreach tool that helps you find and connect with bloggers and podcasters. It can help you get your product or app reviewed on blogs relevant to your industry, and also get you featured on podcasts as a guest.

Share a slide deck of your content on SlideShare

Same deal as above, but this one is especially important.

“Most social media marketers are focused on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. But are they missing the boat? Out of all of the social platforms out there, SlideShare is the most overlooked and underutilized.” ~David Waring, Co-founder of Fit Small Business

All it takes is a few extra clicks of the mouse to drop information from your long-form blog post into your slide deck; then, you’re rewarded with another “new” piece of content that can help spread your brand’s message.

Don’t have the PowerPoint (pro tip: stop using PowerPoint), Apple Keynote, Slidebean, or Prezi skills needed to set this up? Graphic designers on Upwork or Fiverr plus any other freelancing portal website can help you out for a very reasonable fee.

Using SlideShare for business is a modern-day no-brainer: 80 million users, 18+ million pieces shared, and 40+ content categories. Many of the best marketers working today use it to tremendous success.

Be one of them.

Release your content in PDF format

One final content transformation idea: before you move on to your next totally new piece, publish your long-form blog post as a PDF. Format it nicely, then add a button to your post offering the downloadable PDF version. Since many readers prefer to store content in this way, it’s an easy option for adding value without investing tons of extra time. Simple but effective.

Measure your Results

Once you’ve tackled some of those tactics, you need to make sure your efforts are paying off. To do so, don’t forget to track your content marketing KPIs like traffic, CTR, ROI, and conversion rate. An automated marketing reporting software like DashThis can really help you track all your data in just seconds, leaving you with plenty of time to try new content marketing strategies.

Upgrade your images

One-third of marketers consider visual images the most important content for them, beating out even blogging. Tweets with images get 150% more retweets, articles with one image every 75-100 words get double the shares as posts with fewer, Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement, and information paired with a relevant image is more readily remembered: we remember 10% of what we hear three days later, 20% of what we read, but 65% of what we see.

So if you’re in the habit of grabbing whatever royalty-free stock image you can find, it’s time for an upgrade. Generic-looking and amateurish stock images make you look generic and amateurish. Purchase higher-quality images through sites like Shutterstock, get in the habit of taking your own images, or spend some time searching for artistic Creative Commons photos that you can use legally to improve the look of your content pieces.

Practice good internal linking

One final note on how the activities you undertake on your website lead to proper content promotion: when you develop a new piece of content, go back through your archives of popular posts and add a link to the new article there and/or vice versa.

Proper internal linking is great for SEO, and some of the traffic your past posts already receive will funnel into your new posts and help get them seen and shared.

Your Marketing Plan

Once you’ve covered the basics on your website, it’s time to get down to the business of true content promotion. But what belongs in your plan?

Any of the following strategies – plus the social media marketing techniques described in the next section – should play a role:

Create a once-weekly blog digest email …

Once a week, or more often if your post volume supports it, put together a blog digest email that goes out to all your readers and shares your most recent posts. It’s an extra step, to be sure, but according to Neil Patel, it’s the most effective way to get readers to return to your website.

You’re almost 53x more likely to get that all-important click from an email campaign than a Facebook post, and 123x more likely than in a tweet, while 77% prefer email over social media for permission-based promotional material.

… But be careful how you structure it.

While blog digest emails can be powerful, if structured incorrectly, they can have the opposite effect.

“I don’t recommend having your articles as the focal point of your email newsletter – you’ll lose subscribers that way. The reason is because it’s not typically what people are looking for in a newsletter. [I]nclude your best or your most recent blog posts within your newsletter in a separate section. A separate section that includes the headlines of your last few articles and a link to those posts will do the trick.” ~Justin Olch, COO at Elite Email

Share the latest content in your email signature

Adding links to your recent content in your email signature is an excellent way to increase views. You can incorporate the link into text or add a CTA to a signature banner like on the image below.

Online signature generators allow you to easily incorporate email signature marketing campaigns into your content promotion strategy.

If you know your next publication date you can set up an automated banner campaign before the launch, run it in customer faced departments (sales, marketing, support), and measure the number of reads/clicks in the campaign dashboard.

Look for niche networks

Rachael Sprung, writing for Hubspot, suggests that “the right niche network could remove any need to target your content promotion efforts.”

The following are seven she recommends, though you’ll want to seek out others if the sites referenced below don’t suit your audience:

• Quora
• Meetup
• Care2
• Gentlemint
• Cafemom
• ThirdAge
• Athlinks

There are niche networks for knitters, beer lovers, extreme sports and outdoor enthusiasts, creative types, real estate investors, technology professionals, film fans, and more.

Who are your ideal customers and audience? Try a quick search query using “[your industry or niche or relevant keyword] social networks.”

Get active with guest posts

It’s no secret that guest posting is a powerful way to promote your brand and your content, but what many marketers get wrong is believing that you need to post on high-volume sites to ensure visibility.

Instead, consider a HubSpot case study, which follows Bamidele Onibalusi, a writer and blogger who was able to secure 60,000 new visitors from search traffic alone in just six months of publishing 28 quality guest posts on medium-sized blogs.

“If you aren’t satisfied with your blog traffic but aren’t posting on other people’s blogs, you don’t have much to complain about. Start guest posting today, and see your influence grow.” ~Jeff Goins, Author, Blogger, and Speaker

Guest blogging done right is powerful. Very powerful.

Leave great blog comments on authority sites

If you don’t want to go to all the trouble of finding guest blog placements and then creating the content to go along with them, remember that it’s free and easy to leave a comment on the websites of most industry influencers.

Make sure your comment is substantive – and that the blogger in question allows links back to your website – and your fellow readers will follow your links to hear more about what you have to say. Even if they don’t allow links, comment marketing is still a great way to get your name out there, spread awareness, and build authority.

Repost content from your archives

Far too many marketers take a “one and done” approach to content promotion – meaning that they’ll produce a piece of content, run it through their marketing plans, and then move on to the next one. If that’s you, you’re doing it wrong.

Instead, make it a point to regularly promote great content pieces from your archives. Doing so will help new readers catch up on your old content, while giving you more promotional mileage out of work you’ve already done.

Tweets and posts are short-lived. Tweets can disappear in seconds, but even a well-received and retweeted one lasts on average about 18 minutes. Facebook posts? An average of 5 hours or less. Instagram posts get most of their engagement in the first six hours. Social media moves fast, and the content dies just as quickly.

Don’t assume that every follow or fan sees it the first time around. Repost your best stuff. Frequently. At a minimum, commit to reposting the next day, the next week, and the next month.

Submit your content to online communities

Sharing your site or your individual content pieces on online networks like Growth Hackers or Medium is a great way to get noticed by new readers and to build valuable backlinks as well.

Of course, the specific communities you’ll want to post to will depend on your particular industry, but finding and maintaining a presence on one of these sites can be a huge source of traffic. Just be sure you balance self-promotion with actual community engagement – nobody likes an aggressive community spammer.

Social Promotions

Now, let’s get into the real meat and potatoes of what most people think about when discussing content promotion – your social activities. Having a piece of content “go viral” on one of the major social networks represents a huge success for any business, but it all starts with the techniques described below. And, of course, there are no guarantees. This is prevalent in restaurant marketing. Sharing content and images of food and menu items is an important element of every restaurant content marketing strategy.

Up your posting frequency

I’m going to assume that you’re already posting your new content pieces to at least Facebook and Twitter, in addition to any other social networks where your audience is active. But are you posting frequently enough?

Everyone has opinions on the topic of frequency. 1-2 daily posts seems to be the sweet spot for Facebook, up to 15 tweets, once per weekday on LinkedIn, and 1-2 on Instagram.

Time your social promotions

When to schedule tweets, posts, stories etc with these social messages?

Since every industry has its own rhythms, you’ll want to use tools like Tweriod and your Facebook analytics information to figure out when your followers are most active. Time your social posts to go live during these windows using Buffer, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or any other program that lets you preload your social content.

If you’re going for general engagement, there are a number of studies out there that claim to reveal the “best” time for each major platform. Check them out here or here or here, but take them with a grain of salt. Do the work and find the ideal time(s) for your unique audience.

Use interesting excerpts

Developing the content for your social posts can be challenging – after all, how can you tell what type of message will get the most attention from your followers?

Most experts recommend creating social posts based on compelling excerpts to generate interest. Quotes, statistics, and leading sentences all make great social posts – especially compared to simply posting the title of your content piece and hoping for the best.

Neil Patel suggests creating at least 20 such snippets for each piece of content, with variations on the title, quotes and stats from the content, original descriptions, and more. You never know what will appeal to your readers, or what exactly others are searching for on Google.

Leverage hashtags

Despite what some marketing “gurus” will tell you, hashtags aren’t dead – they’re just being used in different ways.

“Using hashtags as a tool for joining and participating in conversations (as opposed to trying to boost the chances your links will be clicked) can be a powerful maneuver.” ~Steve Cooper, Co-founder and Editor of Hitched

The proper and controlled use of hashtags will get your stuff seen by more people. Most studies reveal that 1-3 hashtags is the sweet spot for Twitter and Facebook, and fewer is definitely better. Instagram, however, prefers about 9-12, after which engagement starts to diminish. Try using a Instagram Hashtag Finder tool to help you find hashtags at quickly and effectively.

Post images separately on Facebook

If you copy and paste a link to one of your blog posts to Facebook, the resulting message will contain a preview image – good, but not eye-catching enough to generate maximum viewership.

To really capture attention, try uploading your images separately and adding relevant content details to the picture after the fact. Check out this exampe of this example from the the Dog Book Company when it comes to promoting content with images. You’ll be rewarded with a large image post that’s nearly impossible for your followers to ignore.

Grab their attention – we love visuals, remember? – and don’t let go.

Create a Facebook lookalike audience

The choice of whether or not to participate in Facebook’s paid ads program is becoming less and less of an option as the social giant continues to whittle away at its organic post reach. But there’s another great reason to take advantage of the company’s paid ads – the ability to create and market to lookalike audiences.

These groups of people are rounded up by Facebook because they match certain characteristics of your existing followers. With a click of the mouse – and a wave of your credit card – you can get your posts seen by a whole new group of potential followers who are likely to be interested in what you have to say.

When creating the ad, simply click ‘Create new’ under Audience, and then choose ‘Lookalike Audience’, and follow the simple prompts. Easy-peasy.

Share to Facebook Groups

Similarly, Facebook Groups represent a great way to get around the network’s declining organic reach and engage directly with prospective customers. What’s more, the data shows Groups are delivering a lot more engagement than Pages.

Avoid being too self-promotional. Doing so risks getting your account banned from groups that could otherwise represent potentially strong sources of traffic for your website.

Join, engage, participate, and then occasionally promote when appropriate. You could even create your own Group, build the community, and share your content there to provide extra value for your fans and customers.

Post to LinkedIn Groups

If your audience is more business-minded in nature, you’ll want to make LinkedIn Groups a drop-off point for your content pieces, too.

The network hosts thousands of different groups, making it pretty much impossible that you won’t find one there that suits your interests or industry. From the homepage, click the ‘Work’ icon in the top right, then click ‘Groups’ to see the ones recommended for you by LinkedIn.

You can also look for groups by keyword using the search field, then click the ‘More’ dropdown menu on the results page, and select ‘Groups’.

Check out this post from Content Marketing Institute for ideas on how to promote your content on the site in a relevant, valuable way.

Connect with Twitter Chats

Participating in a Twitter chat can take some getting used to, but with practice, you’ll find that these real-time discussions represent great opportunities to connect directly with members of your target audience. Build your own, and join one in progress.

Ready to get started? There are a number of useful tools to ease you into it:

• Tweet Report’s Twitter Chat Schedule reveals the social conversations scheduled and on the books
• TwChat allows you to create real-time chat rooms
• TweetChat lets you create or join chats based on hashtags
• Tchat allows you to find and join chats that are happening
• Twubs lets you find or create chats

Share to Subreddits

Proceed with caution: Reddit is a tricky place to promote your content, as the community is highly suspicious of any activities that could be deemed self-promotional.

That said, if you’re willing to jump in and establish yourself as a contributing member on the site, sharing your content on relevant subreddits can be a great way to connect with like-minded audience members. Using Reddit for your business can be like navigating a minefield, but it can be done, and it can be done safely.

Promotional Tools

In these days of seemingly-limitless new products and services, the use of promotional tools can, in effect, become marketing strategies themselves. The following twelve tools all deserve to play a role in your content marketing efforts:

Quuu Promote

Quuu Promote is social sharing made easy. With over 10,000 customers and 20,000,000+ pieces of content shared (and counting), it gets your brilliant stuff in front of more eyes on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For each platform, all you have to do is select the most appropriate interest category for your content submission (provided it adheres to their promotion guidelines), and Quuu Promote does the rest. You can track and monitor shares, clicks, and expiration date for each campaign from the convenience of your marketing dashboard. Real people see, share, and engage with your content on the platforms that matter most.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows you to search for topics or domains to see what types of content are performing well in a given industry, for a given keyword, or a specific competitor or site.

And while you can use it to submit your own content, try using its discovery reports to uncover topics you can build your content around to meet your audience’s demands.

Snip.ly

Snip.ly boasts an impressive user base of companies like Hubspot, Outbrain, Forbes, and Buffer, and allows you to attach a call-to-action to every link you share.

It’s a great way to retain traffic to your own web properties and content while sharing others’ updates, in addition to helping you convert this traffic into subscribers and customers.

Outbrain

True content marketers know that getting content shared is only half the battle.

That’s what makes tools like Outbrain– which helps you distribute content and then optimize via testing and conversion tools – so helpful.

Give it a try, and they’ll promote your content on relevant sites and posts to an audience already interested and engaged.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it bills itself as targeting “Thought Leaders,” “Content Marketers,” and “Knowledge Managers” – all of which likely encompass your role – and boasts over four million users.

Use the tool to curate fascinating content – including your own – and then publish it in an e-zine format to your blog or social profiles. Create an interesting enough collection, and the site’s followers will check back for your future publications.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream can supercharge your promotion by boosting your influencer outreach. It’s digital PR and content promotion brought to you by the good folks at BuzzSumo.

Brand24

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that helps you find and respond to online conversations about your brand or industry.

Every time you see your company mentioned, you’re looking at a golden opportunity to reach out and have your content shared across new audiences and to prospective followers.

Taboola

Taboola functions much the same way as Outbrain, getting your content in front of more eyes.

Viral Content Bee

Viral Content Bee is a free promotion service for Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. Share stuff created by others, and they’ll share your stuff for you. Simple and effective.

issuu

Similar to scoop.it, issuu is a digital publishing platform that allows users to curate their own internet magazines. With its strong visual focus, this tool is a great option for businesses in lifestyle, health, fitness, and wellness industries to get their content out and seen.

Flipboard

Currently on its third generation, Flipboard is the final magazine-style publishing system on this list. With over 30,000 topics being published and 145 million users, there’s a place and reader for content pieces from nearly every brand and industry out there.

Spokal

Content curation and automation is key to successfully harnessing its power in 2019.

Hootsuite and Buffer let you schedule social media posts to automatically go out, but only keep going so long as you keep adding new stuff. Edgar does that, too, but will also repost older material based on a “category” schedule, so you essentially never run out of posts. A platform like Spokal does all that, but with one extra special superpower.

Spokal’s social media plan lets you collect, curate, schedule, and repost content, but it’s also the only platform that automatically learns about your audience and their interests. It scores each piece by age and performance, with newer, more popular stuff getting reposted more regularly, while older, less-popular posts drop down the list and eventually fall right off of it.

That’s smart automation.

Active Outreach

If you’ve exhausted the content promotion methods and tools listed above but are still looking for more, you’re in luck – there’s a whole world of additional active outreach options that draw on traditional offline marketing techniques to generate digital content success.

Email influencers mentioned in your content

Remember earlier in this post when I told you to mention influencers in the content pieces you create? Here’s where this strategy starts to pay off …

Once your content piece is live, fire off short email messages to the authority figures you’ve referenced and politely invite them to share your content with their audiences. Use Voila Norbert’s email finding tool to get their email addresses. You don’t need anything formal to do this – the simple template below will suffice in most cases:

“Hi [Name],

I just wanted to take a second to let you know that I really enjoyed the “[name of content piece]” article you shared recently. In fact, I liked it so much that I quoted it in my own article, “[name of your article].”

If you think that my piece adds something to the conversation, feel free to share it with your followers. I’d really appreciate it, and I think your readers would benefit as well.

Thanks much,

[Your name]”

Obviously, you’ll want to tailor your message to include the specific action you’d like the influencer to take, as well as alter the phrasing according to the relationship you have with the authority figure. And on that subject, building a relationship of some sort beforehand can really tip the scales in your favor.

In a Moz case study, Gregory Ciotti found that influencers he had contacted at least once (even if it was just with a tweet, a comment, etc.) were 63% likely to share a post, while those he hadn’t engaged with were only 18% likely to share.

If you want to dive deeper into this, I’ve put together a huge guide on cold email outreach that walks through strategies, tactics, templates, and examples. Alternatively, check out my Cold Email Masterclass. Blogger and influencer outreach is well worth the time and effort.

“When you write an article, every outbound link is an opportunity to start a professional relationship with the author of the article you link to. Above everything, you should select outbound links that add value to your article and are meaningful to your audience. But even after applying these criteria, you often have the choice between different content resources from different authors to link to.

Check these authors and go for the content from the author that is most likely to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. And make sure to reach out to the authors before the article is published.” ~ Stefan Debois, Founder of Survey Anyplace

Deploy traditional press releases

Despite their past use as a link spam technique, press releases aren’t dead. The key, though, is to only use them when you have something legitimately newsworthy to share – say, for example, the launch of an educational minisite or other “above and beyond” content piece.

When you do encounter these milestones, draft a press release and target it only towards the niche publications or websites that are most likely to be interested in featuring your launch. An industry-leading service like PR Newswire can make it fast, simple, and far-reaching.

Take advantage of earned media

If your traditional PRs aren’t getting you anywhere, try connecting with influential bloggers or journalists and making them aware of your content efforts.

“There’s three major ways a brand can promote content – broadcasting (owned media), distribution (paid media), and coverage (earned media). However, if I had to choose one, it would be earning content coverage from journalists and/or influential bloggers. They tend to have massive reach and their audiences trust them.” ~Chad Pollitt, Co-founder of Relevance

Earned media is oft-forgotten, but it’s as powerful, if not more so, than the other two promotion channels.

Test native advertisements

Native advertisements should be a consideration given that paying for views may be one of the only strategies left that can break through the amount of noise content marketers have generated online.

But, fortunately, the barrier to entry for this type of promotion is low. Sites like Nativo and StackAdapt make it possible to get your content in front of your desired audience for a lot less per click than you might think. Try some of the best networks. Then try some others.

Sign up for HARO

HARO stands for “help a reporter out,” and it’s a great way to get your brand’s name featured in a wide variety of publications.

Once you’re enrolled, the service sends out daily messages in which reporters share the types of experts they’re looking to interview for their posts. Respond to an invitation if your skills and experience match up, and you could see yourself quoted in top publications like the New York Times and ABC News.

Sponsor events

Event sponsorships are the last true opportunity marketers have to buy links for the purposes of brand and content promotion.

Sponsoring local sports teams, events, and non-profit organizations can generate links and media attention that aren’t inherently sketchy. Still not sure it’s ok?  Even Rand Fishkin of Moz condones the method. You help out the community, and the exposure and goodwill helps you. Win-win.

Don’t

This may sound controversial, but the best way to promote your content might be to … not. New brands can benefit by delaying the promotion of their content until they’ve built up a responsive audience.

Instead, these companies should focus on curating great content to engage followers, and then eventually shift to sharing no more than 20-30% of their own work.

There are dozens of other ideas, but these 50 will provide a rock-solid foundation.

What about you? Do you disagree with any of these suggestions, or are there other content promotion techniques you feel should have made this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below: