Sharing Content With Inbound Marketing

06 August 2017 | Elena Chulanova

How? How do they do it? That’s what a newbie manager screams after looking at thousands of likes and hundreds of reposts under a competitor’s article. But their article is not at all remarkable, and its design is quite average. The newbie manager’s article is surely not worse, but he has to content himself with a dozen likes from sympathetic colleagues.

What’s going on? Why is one article left behind, and another brings its author glory, prosperity, a million dollars and a private plane?

I’ll tell you what’s going on. Some people forget that simply creating content doesn’t do the trick. You should promote it as well. And this part deserves as much attention as the actual writing of cool posts.

In this article, I'll talk about the basic methods of promoting content. If you don’t want to tear your hair out trying to get ahead of competitors, follow this advice to ~~save yourself from premature hair loss~~ get your content promoted.

Ask an influencer for a comment

Before publishing your new piece of content, reach out to opinion leaders in your industry, tell them about the topic of your article, and ask them to provide their thoughts on it. Put the expert commentary in your article and don’t forget to add links to the influencer’s website and social media accounts. This kills two birds with one stone: the expert gets more exposure, and your work becomes more reputable because you name now stands side by side with that of an influencer.

You can reach experts using BuzzStream. This service is helpful if you need to quickly find an expert in a certain field. I recommend writing to several influencers at once. Not everyone will reply, that’s for sure, but you will manage to secure some quotes anyway.

Here's a handy template you can use. Just replace the underlined parts with relevant info.

Topic: Looking for an expert’s opinion on the cultivation of lettuce in permafrost conditions

Hello Prof. Sprout,

My name is Augustus Pye from Proud Gardener.

I am writing an article about cultivating lettuce in permafrost conditions, and I was wondering if you could provide a commentary.

My article will reach a large audience, and your opinion will provide even more value to people in our industry.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would share your ideas on cultivating lettuce in permafrost conditions. I will add your quote to the article and show you the final variant of the article before it’s published.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Augustus Pye

When you get to sharing the article on social networks, tag the experts who provided their comments. At least one of them will definitely share your post.

When your article is published, email it to the influencers to let them know and ask them to share the post on their own social media or even include it into their newsletter (Why not? Some of them might!).

Here is an email template you can use:

Topic: New article that mentions you

Hello Juliet,

My name is Romeo from Media Management in the Middle Ages.

I have just published a new post where I feature a quote from your article ‘How solar activity affects font choice for your website’.

If you have time, I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Thanks!

Romeo

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sharing content

Go heavy on social media

Create multiple snippets to share your content on social media. Go through the article and think up at least 20 snippets. They can include:

variations of the title,
abstracts or short quotes from the article,
some stats,
your opinion, or a brief summary of the post,
jokes about Jews

Remember to use keywords in the snippets. Then share the snippets on social media over the next several weeks or even months.

There are lots of WordPress plugins that help share old content. I like СoSchedule. It’s a helpful tool to schedule blog and social media posts where you can customize snippets, images, date and time.

Contact people who are interested in your topic

While researching info for your article, you probably process huge amounts of useful content. Find people who have shared this content. This is your target audience, contact them and suggest sharing your article.

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sharing content

They are easy to find. Take the article’s URL, paste it in the search box of a social media site, and get users who shared it. The same works for those who post links on their websites instead of social media. To find these people use the service called Open Site Explorer by Moz.

Repackage your content

Take your content and turn it into a video in order to attract a totally different audience. If you have a blog post or a review, make a Youtube or Vimeo video out of it. Optimize it to gain greater reach.

The key here is not to be the first on the page of search results. It’s much more important if Google shows the thumbnail of your video. This way you receive more clicks, even if you don’t rank high on the page.

You can also repackage your content as a PDF, a slide deck, or a podcast, and then publish it on suitable platforms. For example, we have turned a series of articles about residence permits, real estate abroad and second citizenship into a comprehensive guide.

Add a link to your new content into your older posts

Consult your analytics tool to find the most popular pages on your website. Don’t search over a large period of time, the last several months will be perfectly enough. Add links to your new content to the most trafficked and shared posts on your site.

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sharing content

You can add links right into the text, if it fits there. If it doesn’t, add an advertisement sidebar or a related content section at the bottom of the page.

To add such sidebars and sections use Relap. Highly recommended.

Find thematic or interest communities

There are a number of sites that allow you to submit your content so that their audience could see it. The competition is strong on these sites, but if you have unique content (which you should always strive for), you are likely to attract attention and good traffic.

For example, Smart Course, the company that works with teenagers (parents of teens, attention!), was featured as an expert by Mel, Russia’s main educational website…

And then by other educational platforms.

Thematic communities on social media also suit this purpose. Some of them publish suggested content for free as long as it is interesting and useful for their readers. Some groups don’t even have pre-moderation, if the posts are published by community members. Other groups charge some fee for featuring your content, and sometimes it’s really low.

Get familiar with advertising

This method is for the rich and the lazy.

If you don’t have time or don’t want to do all of the above, or you want to enhance the effect of the other methods, set up advertising and support your posts financially. That’s what Smart Course does (and not just them). Notice that the organic reach is higher than the paid one.

Our Uchebka offers lots of articles on what settings to choose and what buttons to push. For example this one: Cheap and Easy. How to Properly Set Up a Facebook Click To Website Ad. You are welcome.

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sharing content

Send newsletters

And finally, the most obvious way to distribute your content. Write a letter about it and send it to the base of your subscribers. Just don’t forget about this method and actually use it.

Let’s sum up

Writing a useful, interesting, unique and simply wonderful post for your blog is half the battle. The second half is to promote it. To do so use all the methods you know: