The content promotion model that revives old content to generate more leads

Every single brand in the world, regardless of industry or service, benefits from better content promotion.

Good content promo ensures your ideal audience see your offer and trust your brand.

SaaS brands can demonstrate the benefits of their offer with better content promo
Service providers can generate leads who trust them with better content distribution
Product brands can increase the reach of their best offers with better content promotion

If you get your content promotion strategy right, you can easily turn a website that struggles to get more than 100 visits a month into one that gets thousands of visits per day.

I’ve been analysing some of the best content promoters in the game to create a system that…

Works regardless of industry
Takes as little time as possible
Generates compounding gains and never leaves a good piece of content behind

I’ll explain the exact process for this below.

But first, let’s look at…

Table of Contents

The mistake most content marketers make with content promotion

Spend any time in the content marketing world and you’ll hear “content is king” bandied around.

This is one of those really dangerous maxims that’s made its way into the daily use of marketers across the globe.

It’s dangerous because it’s based on truth, which makes it hard to disprove. While partly true, the idea of content being king doesn’t offer the nuance needed to do content marketing well.

A lot of marketers hear the above and think good content marketing is simply a case of producing more content.

If content is king, the more you have of it, the better it performs, right?

Wrong.

That’s a great way to get burned out.

The idea that content is all you need leads to the below model. You…

Create an arbitrary publication schedule
Stick to that schedule and produce daily/weekly/monthly content
Promote each new piece after it’s published on a handful of channels
Head back to step 2

It’s a hamster wheel of production. And it’s exhausting.

Content marketing departments and consultants across the globe are so concerned with sticking to a bullshit schedule they never java the time to ensure each piece is doing the job it’s supposed to.

And what’s worse is they have a long grace period to get away with lacklustre results.

Another dangerous belief in marketing is it takes Google ~6 months to rank your content.

Again, this is based on truth as demonstrated here on the SEMRush blog.

The result of these two axioms is pretty catastrophic.

You end up with a content team that has a strategy built around simple output of content.

And no one is expecting tangible results from it for ~6-12 months.

The first time anyone is going to look at the strategy to see what can be improved is a minimum of 6-months away.

That’s potentially 6-months of work for no reward.

Of course, then the strategy gets changed up and the cycle repeats.

A new strategy is implemented, and the 6-month countdown to expected results begins again.

In a world where fast businesses that run multiple experiments and adapt daily succeed, this content strategy dooms your business to failure.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the common content marketing approach gets worse…

Bad content distribution ensures you miss easy opportunities

Picture yourself on that content hamster wheel.

Churning out piece after piece week after week.

A few weeks into your strategy, you publish a piece that generates 2X as many leads as anything else you’ve published.

You give yourself a pat on the back. Crack open a cold one to celebrate and then…

… get back to your desk to work on the next piece of content.

Wait. What?

You’ve just had something provide a major win for your business and you… ignore it?

You move on to the next piece when you’ve got something that’s outperforming everything else?

Are. You. Mad?

This is surprisingly common when you base your content goals on producing pieces, not on getting results.

If you have something that’s working, don’t move on to the next thing.

Go back and make sure you’re wringing every last drop of value out of those pieces.

When we’re talking about content, that means continually going back to your best pieces and resharing them so your ideal audience sees them.

Don’t move on, but reuse, recycle, and repeat that piece of content.

Promote the winning pieces you have over and over again. Be unapologetic about doing so across multiple platforms.

Thanks to algorithms and engagement rates, the game is rigged against you.

You’re not spamming people by promoting valuable information, you’re doing them a favour.

By spreading your promotional material across platforms you’re expanding the number of people you’re able to help.

How to ensure your content promotion strategy continues to bring growth

Here’s the thing.

It’s real hard to continually promote the content you’ve produced that’s generating results.

And it’s impossible if you’re on the content hamster wheel.

I know because I’ve spent years as Chief Copywriter and Head of Content for various brands.

The most meaningful growth I ever experienced in these positions wasn’t from continually churning out content. But it making sure the best content was always in the feeds and spheres of attention of my target audience.

Way back, when I first started doing this I had no idea how to do this effectively.

But thanks to the trainings and insights from people like Chris Von Wilpert and Ross Simmonds, I started to understand what was needed.

I used their experience and built the below system which allows me to stay in my ideal audience’s attention with minimal effort.

Here’s how it works…

Step 1 – Produce less, promote more

Forts up, you’ve got to get used to this concept.

Success doesn’t come from producing tonnes and tonnes of content, but from producing high-value pieces and ensuring your audience is able to find them.

If you’re producing content right now and getting next to now results, here’s what you’ve got to do.

Slash the time you spend producing content by 50%
Take this new free time and put it into promoting your best pieces

It’s an easy change to make, and one that can help you get your ideas, brand, and offers in front of countless more people.

Step 2 – Turn single pieces of content into multiple promotional assets

This is what so many people just don’t do.

They spend hours crafting a wonderful piece of content and, after hitting publish, they send a generic tweet with a half-arsed link back to the piece.

And then they wonder why it gets no traffic.

You have to deconstruct each piece of content you create into multiple shareable assets.

If we’re talking video content, you want to take the entire video and cut from it…

One ~5-minute clip
One+ 30-90 second clip
One+ 10-30 second clip
Multiple quotes
Any high engagement still images

And then you want to go and promote those on various platforms. Here’s a graphic from our published YouTube Growth Study .

If you’re looking at written content, then you should be looking at cutting the below from it for promotion…

One long-form share for platforms like Reddit and Facebook Groups
Multiple quotes for Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Bullet point summaries for longer shares
Any custom images you’ve created
A short summary for your email list

You should be able to turn one 1000 word article into 5+ sharable assets without any difficulty.

Once you know how to cut up your content into sharable assets, you’ve got to know where to share them.

Step 3 – Create a list of your best engagement communities and channels

At first, this is going to be a shotgun approach (more on how to get this more targeted later).

I recommend making a list of the areas and communities your potential customers/clients hang out.

Check out each entry on your list and make sure that these communities are…

Engaged
Not full of spam
Agreeable to you sharing links to your own stuff

If it gets a yes on all 3 fronts, start engaging there.

You’ve got to be engaged if you want people to click your traffic generating links.

When you have some potentials, make sure you keep an easy to follow list like the below.

That list is an example list I actually use when sharing content.

You can also get your hands on the template in the image above and several video lessons on how I use this in our Membership here.

If you don’t want the pre-made templates, then…

Step 4 – Craft a Content Promotion HQ

You need to create a single asset for your promotional content.

Something you can navigate to and find all you’d need. I’d recommend using Airtable (used in the template mentioned above from our Membership).

I’d also recommend including – at the very minimum – the below information.

Short-form promo copy for sites like Twitter
Long-form promo copy for sites like Reddit
The primary link you want to direct people to
Custom images that can add a little extra flair to your posts
Links to the communities you want to share to

Add all of that and you have pretty much all you need to craft your own Content Promotion HQ.

Once you’ve got that sorted, you’ll have something that enables this…

However, I’d also recommend going one step further and using Bit.ly for the links.

If you create the links in Bit.ly you can get a quick overview of where you’re driving most traffic from to help you understand where to focus more time.

This is how you remove the shotgun approach to content promo.

You look at what’s working best and start to focus only on that.

Once you’ve got all of this sorted, you start to

Step 5 – Share to your best communities and channels again and again and again

Here’s the thing.

When you start sharing your content across all of these different platforms and channels you might worry about sharing the same thing more than once.

Don’t.

Thanks to the algorithms and open rates, you’re probably only going to reach around 20% of your audience with each share.

If the content is good and genuinely helpful or entertaining, you need to share it multiple times with your audience.

If you don’t, you’re robbing them of the opportunity to find something that could help them.

I’m not saying that you should share the same thing day after day, but yu definitely shouldn’t only use your sharable assets once.

I generally operate on the 2-week rule.

It’s a rule I created based on the idea that in 2 weeks 99% of people will have forgotten who I am and what I did.

That time frame’s probably a lot shorter on social media.

If you don’t believe me, think about a creator or influencer on a platform you enjoy and try to remember the post they did 7 days ago.

Can you?

Of course you can’t.

Would you be annoyed if they reminded you of that post in another 3 weeks?

No. because you like what they do and it’s beneficial for you.

Don’t be afraid of sharing the same content time and time again. Most people won’t see the initial post and will be thankful you tried again.

When you put the above into a sequential approach, you get the below.