You’ve created the holy grail piece of content, but in reality most of the work begins after creation.
Promotion one of the biggest battles you have to win in this content war, as it is the factor that determines if your voice is reaching your audience or not. There is the 80/20 rule about headlines and your content, and then there’s the 80/20 rule with your content and promotion. 20% creating the content and the remaining 80% that goes into promoting your content. In order to reach your audience and then your potential audience, your content has to be amplified through promotion.
Sending out a tweet and posting on Facebook doesn’t cut it. There are channels that work with some content that won’t work for others, yet there are consistent outlets to target that are the right distribution channels to amplify your content.
Finding the Distribution Channels
Who Do You Curate Content From?
Creating content is like the right arm and curating content is the left arm in this content machine. Without one, especially the curation side, the other arms gets lope-sided and too bulky to even function. Content curation is no longer a nice-to have, rather its a need to have just like you need your left arm.
Look at who you are curating content from and then see where they are distributing content. Connect the dots and try to distribute through those channels as well.
Where Does Your Audience Hangout?
Your target audience and customers should always be your focus when creating content or practicing any marketing activity. The easiest way to expand on your distribution is through your audience and there is almost a sure guarantee that they’ll see your content if you promote it in the places that your audience is hanging out in.
Who are Your Influencers?
Unless you are launching a new company in a completely new space, there will always be some influencers who you can look to for advice or call upon to promote your content. Distributing your content to influencers should be practiced lightly as they probably won’t want to share every piece of content you have; however, they do have a larger pool of fans who could be your target audience or very similar to your audience.
5 Examples of Content Distribution Channels
1. Social Media
One tweet doesn’t even begin to cover the promotion of your content, but maybe a few dozen tweets, Facebook posts, pins, updates, Instagram photos can start the ball rolling. The rapid fire pace of social media and it’s amplification powers represent one of the best distribution channels for your content.
Find the right times your audience is on, the channels they use, and then how to best optimize that social media post.
2. Your Team
Sometimes, I feel like I’m pulling teeth to get my fellow Mavens to share a piece of content. I know it isn’t a matter of them not wanting to share it, many times, it’s just that many don’t have enough time or they forget to do that task.
However, getting your teammates to share out content is the easiest way to amplify your content even more, even with smaller teams. Think about it this way, your brand has it’s own built in fan base ready for you to use. Let’s say you have over 100 people on your team and then on average they have about 100 followers on Twitter…that’s reaching potentially 10,000 more people than you could have reached with your original base.
I’ve started a simple roundup of TrackMaven’s content for the week and then I linked the share link for all of the social channels to push the post out on. Now, all Team TrackMaven has to do is to click on those link to immediately share out the post. Another idea to gather up the motivation is to share the results of when everyone shares a post. Show them the data behind their amplification efforts. You know not to make it difficult for users to share your content, so don’t make it difficult for your team to share it either.
3. Syndication
There are both upsides and downsides to syndication, but the major upside is there is a potential high boost in traffic and a good inbound link (if syndicated on a reputable site).
There are various types of syndication between paid and non-paid sources; yet, syndication is a way to distribute your content rapidly through to multiple audiences.
4. SEO
It was only appropriate to include SEO after syndication depending on the implications of your content syndication and the duplicates. Moz has a great guide to duplicate content for a further breakdown.
Optimizing your content with important keywords won’t show immediate results of promotion like the social media, but it will help length the life of your content and ensure that when people are searching for the type of content you are producing they will find it.
5. Your Biggest Fans
My mom is probably my biggest fan (Oh hey, Mom!) and she often commits some social media faux pas like endorsing my skills on LinkedIn, but she distributes my content without fail.
I’m not advising you to start relying on your parents or other loved ones for distribution this just puts things into perspective that you should ask your brand’s biggest fans to promote your content. You have a pool of people who love your brand, otherwise your brand wouldn’t exist.
You want people to see the content that you’ve created as it’s a basic principle of marketing. Content can’t become king without promotion and the right distribution.
Understanding and identifying the right distribution channels is a victory. But wondering how far you need to amplify your pieces to make them viral? Here’s our take on the manual grind it takes to make something go viral.