Content Marketing: Now What?

You know the feeling of creating the perfect blog post. You've done your research and put all of the pieces together. You've edited, double checked, triple checked and optimized the content. You spent almost as much time coming up with a clever and catchy title as you did in crafting the blog. This post is your best work yet, it’s bound to go viral, right?

Well…maybe.

Chances are, without the right promotion and distribution, your blog isn't going viral (no matter how great it is) on its own. Yes, sometimes it happens without any extra effort, but that strategy of wishing and hoping is not going to work for you in the long run. It doesn't matter if you have incredible content if nobody sees it! Buzzfeed Founder Jonah Peretti has said that when it comes to content marketing, 50% of your time should be spent considering promotion and distribution.

Here are five platforms you can use to promote and distribute your content to help it go viral:

Twitter

Promote your content by tweeting about it, but don’t limit yourself to only one tweet. Send out a link to your blog several times during the day with different copy accompanying the link. You could tweet a quote from the blog, a statistic about the blog topic, how your audience will benefit from reading the content, a catchy headline, one of your thoughts about the blog or a number of other ideas. This makes your Twitter timeline fresh while still promoting one piece of content. By attaching the same link to all of these different tweets, your blog gets more opportunities to be seen by a larger group of people. Space these posts out throughout the span of a week and test out which posts and times work best. Remember, you can’t expect to tweet a link to a blog once have your web traffic go through the roof.

Content Distribution Software

Content discovery offerings such as Outbrain or Taboola can help grow your audience by distributing your content on other sites where people are already in content consumption mode. This audience is targeted, more engaged and likely to stay longer on your content. These content discovery services have networks of publishers to give your content visibility and reach beyond what your social networks can do for you. Outbrain, for instance, appears on over 100,000 online publications and blogs, serving over 100 billion content recommendations every month. While these paid opportunities are not cheap, they send high quality and targeted traffic to your content. If you decide to go this route, remember to keep cost vs. conversion in mind to see if the money you’re spending is worth the results.

Email Marketing

If your company has a weekly newsletter, make sure to add a short teaser about your content with a “read more” link. This teaser should entice the email recipients to head over to your website because they want to know more. You could also send a personal email about your content to a select list of people with a link to share. This is the most direct line of communication for you to your audience: straight to their inbox. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email has an ROI of around 4,300%! Email and content marketing go hand in hand.

Direct Outreach

Do you know who the influencers are in your niche? Create an inventory of the most influential bloggers and tweeters in your industry that are engaging, motivating, well-known, impactful and thought leaders. This list can be anywhere from 50 to 500 people. Now it’s time to engage! If you want influencers to interact with your content, you have to interact with theirs. So start by sharing, commenting on and asking questions about their content. Once you have built up a relationship with your influencers, you can start to share your content with them and hope that they share it with their audience. If you have built a strong relationship, you could even email him/her a link and ask for a share (although I wouldn’t recommend doing this frequently).

Facebook

Facebook advertising is one of the best online marketing options available, mainly for the fact that potential profit is around two to three times better than AdWords and SEM. You can use Facebook advertising to have your content show up in the News Feed of a very targeted audience based on factors such as likes, interests, location, age, gender, education, connections and more. This will expand your reach, drive traffic, increase “likes” on your page and will help improve EdgeRank to help improve your future organic marketing efforts.

Have you found certain tactics that have helped your content go viral? You can also connect with me on Twitter at @rachelrubes or on Google+.