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.
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Iâve been analysing some of the best content promoters in the game to create a system thatâŚ
- Works regardless of industry
- Takes as little time as possible
- Generates compounding gains and never leaves a good piece of content behind
Iâll explain the exact process for this below.
But first, letâs look atâŚ
The mistake most content marketers make with content promotion
Spend any time in the content marketing world and youâll hear âcontent is kingâ bandied around.
This is one of those really dangerous maxims thatâs made its way into the daily use of marketers across the globe.
Itâs dangerous because itâs based on truth, which makes it hard to disprove. While partly true, the idea of content being king doesnât 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.
Thatâs a great way to get burned out.
The idea that content is all you need leads to the below model. YouâŚ
- Create an arbitrary publication schedule
- Stick to that schedule and produce daily/weekly/monthly content
- Promote each new piece after itâs published on a handful of channels
- Head back to step 2
Itâs a hamster wheel of production. And itâs 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 itâs supposed to.
And whatâs 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.
Thatâs 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 wasnât bad enough, the common content marketing approach gets worseâŚ
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 youâve published.
You give yourself a pat on the back. Crack open a cold one to celebrate and thenâŚ
⌠get back to your desk to work on the next piece of content.
Wait. What?
Youâve just had something provide a major win for your business and you⌠ignore it?
You move on to the next piece when youâve got something thatâs 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 thatâs working, donât move on to the next thing.
Go back and make sure youâre wringing every last drop of value out of those pieces.
When weâre talking about content, that means continually going back to your best pieces and resharing them so your ideal audience sees them.
Donât 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.
Youâre not spamming people by promoting valuable information, youâre doing them a favour.
By spreading your promotional material across platforms youâre expanding the number of people youâre able to help.
How to ensure your content promotion strategy continues to bring growth
Hereâs the thing.
Itâs real hard to continually promote the content youâve produced thatâs generating results.
And itâs impossible if youâre on the content hamster wheel.
I know because Iâve spent years as Chief Copywriter and Head of Content for various brands.
The most meaningful growth I ever experienced in these positions wasnât 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 audienceâs attention with minimal effort.
Hereâs how it worksâŚ
Step 1 – Produce less, promote more
Forts up, youâve got to get used to this concept.
Success doesnât come from producing tonnes and tonnes of content, but from producing high-value pieces and ensuring your audience is able to find them.
If youâre producing content right now and getting next to now results, hereâs what youâve 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
Itâs 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 donât 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 weâre talking video content, you want to take the entire video and cut from itâŚ
- 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. Hereâs a graphic from our published YouTube Growth Study in our Membership.
You can check the membership out here.
If youâre looking at written content, then you should be looking at cutting the below from it for promotionâŚ
- 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 youâve 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, youâve 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 areâŚ
- 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.
Youâve 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 donât 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 youâd need. Iâd recommend using Airtable (used in the template mentioned above from our Membership).
Iâd 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, youâll have something that enables thisâŚ
However, Iâd 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 youâre 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 whatâs working best and start to focus only on that.
Once youâve got all of this sorted, you start to
Step 5 – Share to your best communities and channels again and again and again
Hereâs 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.
Donât.
Thanks to the algorithms and open rates, youâre 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 donât, youâre robbing them of the opportunity to find something that could help them.
Iâm not saying that you should share the same thing day after day, but yu definitely shouldnât only use your sharable assets once.
I generally operate on the 2-week rule.
Itâs 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 frameâs probably a lot shorter on social media.
If you donât 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 canât.
Would you be annoyed if they reminded you of that post in another 3 weeks?
No. because you like what they do and itâs beneficial for you.
Donât be afraid of sharing the same content time and time again. Most people wonât see the initial post and will be thankful you tried again.
When you put the above into a sequential approach, you get the below.
The Content Promotion Model
Hereâs what the model looks like.
- Step 1 – Create a high-value piece of content
- Step 2 – Add the contentâs link to your Promo HQ
- Step 3 – Write multiple promotional pieces of copy for different platforms
- Step 4 – Share to those platforms to drive traffic  back to the content
- Step 5 – Repeat that sharing periodically