You’re certain you’ve created the right content, so why aren’t you seeing the explosion of traffic you expected? The problem usually lies with your distribution strategy. You may stick your content on the usual channels: website, social channels, or an email to your existing customers, but that’s just the start of it. If you really want to increase your traffic, you need to be thinking beyond the basics. Here are seven ways to increase the reach of your content.
#1. Quora
You may, or may not, be familiar with this question and answer website, but getting it to work for your business is all about being proactive. Try to find a topic that’s close to your specialities, or find questions that are relevant to your latest blog. Once you think your content can add value, try to answer a few of the questions with your content. But don’t just publish a link to your content. Offer a synopsis up front, followed by a link to the full article. This gives the reader the confidence that what they’re going to click on is relevant to the problem.
Another tip is to make sure your profile is up to date. Focus on getting the first 50 characters right as this is what Quora shows next to your name.
#2. Community engagement – BuzzSumo
Another proactive way you can engage with your community is through BuzzSumo. This nifty little tool allows you to see what type of content is resonating with your audience, as well as who your biggest influencers are. It not only allows you to see who the big names are but also the smaller ones too.
The tool allows you to search for a topic and presents you with a list of relevant articles. From there, you can click on “view sharers” to see who has shared the article on their social channels. The results are usually organised by number of sharers, so if you play around with it a bit you’ll be able to find the right level of influencer to engage with. All that’s left to do is to reach out to them on their social channels to see if they find your content interesting.
#3. Medium
Medium is generally for people who don’t have a website or web editing knowledge, it allows them to blog to their heart’s content about their latest stories and muses. It allows content creators to re-publish their content on their site without having to re-write it.
Some of you may think that surely this is a quick fire way to get penalised by Google for having the same content in multiple places, but actually Medium offers a WordPress plugin which automatically uploads your content to their site and adds a canonical URL too. This shows Google where the original content lies and protects you from any content duplication penalties. You could alternatively decide to re-write the content for the site without the canonical URL, but that’s up to you.
#4. LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn Pulse is LinkedIn’s own blogging platform. Again, it’s mainly used by people who don’t have their own blogging capability, but because it’s relatively new, LinkedIn is giving it good exposure. This means whenever you write a post, your network is automatically notified about it.
Depending on your content’s objectives, you have the option to either publish the full post on Pulse or provide a short synopsis followed by a link to the article on your website.
In today’s world, social is absolutely key to distributing your content, but unfortunately, the big social brands now want to make money. The reality is that without some paid behind your content you’ll be unlikely to reach even 10% of your audience. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter make it very easy to spend money with them, but you don’t need to spend a fortune to get the results you’re looking for. Just a few pounds here and there can go a long way with the right targeting.
If you’re a small business that depends on the local community for your trade, then make sure you set up geo-targeting. The minimum spend is £1 a day, but that £1 could go a long way. You could promote ten pieces of content organically, and get the same results as one piece promoted via paid. Why work harder when a couple of pounds will do the job?
#6. Content distribution networks
Platforms like Taboola, Outbrain, and AdYouLike are all excellent services that can cast your content far and wide. They’re probably used by more of the larger publishers, but if you can dedicate a reasonable minimum budget you could see CPCs as low as 20p. Their large distribution networks mean your content could be displayed on sites such as the Telegraph.
Also, if you’re a B2B company, then you may want to consider working with these sites to help generate leads. A gated whitepaper is a great way to generate prospects. Although the KPI for this is usually cost per lead, rather than cost per click, so you’ll need to work out if the cost / quality of leads proves to be worth the investment.
When working with these platforms it’s important to test test test. Make sure you have variations of your headline, synopsis and CTA to ensure you’re promoting the optimal advert. You’ll be surprised how much difference just one word could make.
#7. Reddit
Reddit is a pretty well-established platform now, and most people would associate it to crazy memes and internet nerds. In reality, though, Reddit is a hotbed of internet culture. If there’s a trend happening in social, you can bet your last paid-social pound that it’ll be all over Reddit. You need to be careful about how you use Reddit though. It’s a hybrid between a blog and a social network, so if you post the right content you could create a lot of engagement around the topic, but get it wrong and you’d wish you spent a bit more time researching.
Image: Handwriting of Content Marketing word in notebook on the wood table
