The Secret Ingredient to 10x Your Content Marketing Results

Think about content marketing success like you’d think about baking a cake – only, instead of mixing together flour, sugar, eggs and butter, you’re combining great ideas with well-executed content to create marketing collateral that, like tasty baked goods, people want to enjoy and share.

But just as baking projects can fail if a single ingredient is left out, content marketing without one particular ingredient is a recipe for disaster.  Content marketing experts are fond of claiming that “content is king.”  And while I absolutely agree with this sentiment, it falls short in one major way.  Producing good content is important, but it isn’t enough.  Anyone can create good content, but most people are missing the one secret ingredient that propels content campaigns to success: PROMOTION.

Whether you’re working on new content or have underutilized pieces wasting away on your website, it’s time to start putting the power of promotion to work for you!  Give any the following strategies a try, depending on your unique audience and industry:

Do Your Homework

Certainly, when creating content, you’ll need to research your subject, gather up any images or other multimedia files you’ll use

SEO

While writing for SEO by stuffing paragraphs full of designated keywords is a no-go these days, that doesn’t mean that search engine optimization shouldn’t play a role in your content creation process.

Before you start writing, use keyword research tools like SEMRush, BuzzSumo and the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to find long-tail keywords related to the subject of your new content piece.  If it makes sense to do so, use your chosen phrase in your content piece’s title, as well as 1-2 times throughout the piece.  Don’t overdo it, but do enjoy the search traffic this can help you generate.

Practice your headlines

Regardless of what you think about Upworthy’s saccharine, click-baity headlines, there’s a method behind their madness.  Their ability to capture user attention via engaging headlines is one of the primary drivers making them one of the fastest growing media startups in recent memory.

So what makes them so successful (and how can you capture this effect for your own content pieces)?  As described in an Upworthy Slideshare presentation titled “How to Make that One Thing Go Viral,” every Upworthy writer is required to create at least 25 titles for each piece of content.  Only after this threshold has been reached can the team move on to testing the best candidates and (hopefully) attaining viral success.

The next time you’re creating a new content piece, give it a shot.  The only thing you have to lose is an hour or two of your time!

Tie in influencers

I’ll discuss strategies for reaching out to industry authority figures to get them to promote your content later on in this article, but I’d also argue that finding influencers to reference in your content pieces should be part of your pre-creation homework as well.

The first reason to do this is so that you can take advantage of content formats that leverage their expertise.  For example, you could invite influencers to guest post on your website, to do an interview with you that can be published to your site or even just to send a comment for a Q&A post that includes wisdom from multiple influencers.  Naturally, these authority figures will go on to promote their content pieces to their networks, sending plenty of new visitors back to your site.

However, even if all you do is mention their names, it’s worth finding ways to reference influential figures or brands in your content pieces.  Here’s an example to help prove this point…  Over the years, I’ve been offered tons of free software and subscriptions to services like MS Office, Evernote, SEMRush and countless other tools, just because I’ve mentioned them in my content.  They love that I take the time to share their products with my readers and they reward me with free copies as a result.  It’s a win-win for everybody.

So as you’re getting ready to create a new piece of content, think about whether or not there are any influential people or brands that you’ll want to refer to.  I can’t guarantee that doing so will get you free stuff, but I can promise you that it’ll make the influencer outreach processes I talk about later on a lot easier.

Social Media

It’s sort of a no-brainer to say that you should share your website content and blog posts with your social audiences.  So I’m going to assume that you’re already doing that and offer the following strategies to be sure you’re getting the most out of your social promotions:

Repeat your messages

Not all of your social followers will be online checking out your profile at the exact moment you hit the “Publish” button, so it’s a good idea to share content several times to prevent it from being lost in endless news feeds.  You’ll want to test different posting intervals, but the following guidelines should provide a good baseline for getting started:

• Twitter – Post every 3-4 hours for 3-4 days after publication
• Facebook – Post once a day for 2-3 days following publication
• Google+ – Post 2-3 times a week after launch

Don’t use the exact same message every time.  Vary your language and not only will you ensure your followers see the content you’ve invested in, you’ll learn something about the appeals they respond to best.

Call out companies

If you’ve mentioned a brand, company or influential figure in your content piece, let them know using @ mentions on Twitter or tags on Facebook.  If you’re lucky, they’ll appreciate the call out and will pass your piece on to their followers, increasing the reach of your work.

Hashtags

Hashtags aren’t quite the promotional tool they used to be, but it’s still worth giving the trending topics list on Twitter a quick glance before tweeting out your content.  It only takes a second, and tying your work to a popular tag can still give you a small traffic boost.

Format-Specific Resources

Depending on the type of content you’ve produced, there may be a distribution site out there just waiting to promote your piece.  As an example, if you’ve created a slide deck presentation, post it to Slideshare and promote the link the site generates for you.  Have an infographic?  Then you’re definitely going to want to check out sites like Visual.ly and Infographics Showcase.

If you don’t have one of these content types on your website, create them from your existing work.  While you may need to do a little extra research to find the facts and statistics needed to fill out a good infographic, you can easily transform your more comprehensive blog posts into presentations, video clips, podcasts and more.

Paid Content Distribution

If you’re having trouble getting eyes on your content pieces, you can always take the easy way out and simply pay for them.  Services like Zemanta and Outbrain have evolved in the past few years to give content marketers a leg up by allowing them to pay to have their content showcased on notable sites like CNN, NBC News, US Magazine and more.

When you use these types of sources, keep in mind that your top goal is to build an audience. And the best way to do that is to make your content pieces’ titles as relevant as possible to the posts on the third-party sites where they’ll be displayed.  If you can find something timely or buzzworthy to anchor your content to, you’ll get more clicks – and more clicks pays off for both your brand awareness and your ad costs.

In my experience, the trick to getting cheap traffic on sites like these is the click-through rate (CTR).  If you can get a CTR over 0.20%, you should be able to get high quality clicks for as little as $0.05 cents a piece.

Influencer Outreach

If you want to take a shortcut to building an audience for your content, go out and find people who have already done the heavy lifting!  Working with the influencers in your niche is an easy way to expand your audience and to increase your odds of content marketing success by leveraging a figurehead’s existing followers.

When it comes to reaching out to authority figures in your industry (whether you’ve already referenced them in your content pieces or are just getting the ball rolling now), there are several different strategies you can test:

Best of the best

Your goal with this strategy is find the most respected names in your industry and get them to share your content, either over their social profiles or through any of the other channels they use to educate their followers.  To start, create a list of all the different influencers you can think of.  Then, add the following information to your list:

• Size of social network following
• Estimated website traffic (measure with Alexa or similar data mining tool)
• Website domain authority
• Perceived influence among relevant audience (determine using Followerwonk or general Google searches)
• Share of voice related to other influencers

From your list, identify the influencers who not only have the best authority stats, but who have also demonstrated a willingness to share others’ content in the past.  Pick one or two to focus on and begin building relationships with them by sharing their content, commenting on their posts or reaching out in other ways.  I’ve been doing this for years, and now every time I tweet something, I instantly get 15-20 shares from my network.

If this sharing doesn’t happen naturally, you can also go straight to the source by emailing your authority figures and asking them to share your content.  Keep your requests friendly and light – like the following message:

“Hey [Influencer],

I just wanted to write and let you know that I really enjoyed an article you recently published on the subject of [some topic] – so much so that I quoted it in a recent article on my own site.  Can I ask a quick favor?  If you think the article would provide additional value to your audience, would you please tweet it out to your followers?  I’d really appreciate it!

Thanks for your time,

[Your name]”

Even if your request for a share is rejected, you can use this initial contact as the foundation for a relationship with the influencer.  Who knows?  Maybe it’ll lead to a share, an interview or even a guest post on your site down the road…

Plenty of smaller fish

There’s no doubt that engaging with authority figures can help get your content seen, but it’s definitely a slower content promotion path.  If you’re eager to see results faster, try the following approach to get your content in front of more smaller audiences:

• Identify 3-5 content pieces that are on a similar topic as your own and that have performed well in the past.  You can do this by seeing what comes up in the Google SERPs or by using sites like Topsy to find articles, posts and other content pieces that have earned plenty of links over time.
• Enter the URLs of these content pieces into a site like Ahrefs to find other sites that have linked to them.  Be sure to manually filter your list to remove things like forum posts and directories.
• Email the owner of the remaining link sources and ask that they link to your content alongside the original piece.  If your content piece has some compelling advantage over the original one, be sure to detail this in your link request and highlight how it will benefit the owner’s audience to see your content as well.

These linking sites may not have audiences that are as large as those held by influential industry figures, but even a few new links earned using this method can make a big difference in getting your content seen.  Pair this with the strategies described above, and you’ve got a surefire blueprint for getting the most out of your content campaigns through the power of promotion!

Have you used any of these strategies in the past?  Share your tips and recommendations in the comments section below!