Marketing Core: Getting Started with Content Promotion

Sonia Simone

What’s the first task of every marketer? To grab the Attention of our potential customer. Until we have that, we don’t get an opportunity to deliver our marketing message.

So before we get down to it, first things first. We can’t talk about content promotion without pointing out an important fact.

None of this will work for boring content.

There is no shortcut or workaround. Your content has to be remarkable, period, in order to get the sharing and links that will make you successful.

It’s not a matter of being able to write something that could be published in The New Yorker. But you do need to be able to create content worth talking about. Otherwise — well, no one will talk about you.

We’ve talked before about what makes for remarkable content. For most scenarios, look to create a combination of:

1. A strong, unique, and memorable voice
2. Content that’s remarkably useful
3. Content that’s interesting and reader-friendly

Within that so-called formula is room for infinite variation. Make it your own, butmake it remarkable.

Important: You personally may not be the best person to create remarkable content for your site. If not, start beating the bushes for a contract writer. You might even consider entering into a formal business partnership with someone who does have a strong writing voice (and typically an audience to go with it). It’s that important.

Cultivate your network

Once you have something worth talking about, you need to go find some people to talk about it.

The first question to ask is,

Who else has the traffic you want?

Somewhere out there are people who have the attention of the audience you’re looking for. Your task is to figure out what you can create that will put you on their radar.

Sometimes, this is another blogger or content publisher in your topic. But sometimes it can also be a publisher in a related topic. For example, guest blogging expert Jon Morrow talks about an extremely successful guest post he wrote for Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog. He was promoting his own blog, On Moneymaking (which he has since sold). Her blog covered a different topic, but she had the readers he wanted.

The post reached the desired audience and delivered a terrific result — the traffic and subscribers Jon was looking for.

Understand why people share content

It’s very important to realize that influential people share content because it increases their influence with their audience.

That dovetails nicely with our description of remarkable content above. Content that has a distinctive voice, that’s useful, and that’s reader-friendly will also make influential people look smart with their audiences when they share it. Everybody wins.

You’ll also want to be sure to put a solid headline on every piece of content that you want to get shared and linked to. (Which typically means, virtually every piece of content you publish.) The right headline can make all the difference between content that soars and content that fizzles.

Nice guys finish first

You know that successful person who’s awful to everyone? Who makes a name for himself being rude, disrespectful, snarky, and just plain mean?

Yeah, he’s not actually successful. He probably gets a lot of social media attention — and he’s also probably broke.

It should go without saying, but when you’re building your network of content publishers, be a nice person! Be polite, be (genuinely) interested in what your network is doing, be friendly.

Your professional network can make or break you as a content marketer. And social media is already too full of name-calling jerks. Be a good egg. It will serve you well.

How about SEO?

Search engine optimization is a key strategy in content promotion. Fortunately,all of the same techniques you use to get social shares and links will also benefit you with search engines. Be remarkable, develop a solid network of influential content publishers, create lots of useful content, use powerful headlines, and you’ll find that 90% of your SEO work is done.

(The remaining 10% can be taken care of with Scribe — Here’s a link for a nice deal if you aren’t already a Scribe owner.)

Content promotion is a big topic

Don’t forget to pick up our ebook on Effective Content Promotion in the member library. It gives you more specific actions you can take to use alliances, “co-opetition,” and even your enemies to find a wider audience for your content.

And if you’d like to brainstorm some content promotion strategies, feel free to join us in the forums here: Content Promotion member forum thread.

Sonia Simone, CMO and co-founder of Copyblogger Media

About the “Marketing Core” lessons

Our “Marketing Core” course is part of your Authority membership. The course helps you build a strong marketing and content foundation over time. You’ll get fresh lessons each week by email for a total of 22 core lessons, and each week’s lesson will contain links to previous lessons.

Remember to keep a close eye on your email box for each week’s lesson!

Start with our high-level overview: Connect the Dots and Grow Your Business.