You may be creating the best content in your industry but if nobody finds them, they will be of no value to anyone. If you expect your content to be found by your audience, you have to hand deliver your valuable content to your audience. You may be focusing too much on content creation if you are seeing little or no traction for your content.
If you invest resources into creating blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, eBooks, videos, podcasts and they don’t receive the kind of attention you expect, you will definitely be disappointed. Distribution is one of the most important steps you should be taking once you publish your content. Creating epic content isn’t enough, you have to put in some effort to get your information to the right people.
These are a few lessons for distributing your content for the best results:
1. Understand who your audience is
2. Discover where they’re finding and sharing content
3. Learn what type of content they’re finding valuable (and sharing)
4. Execute creative topic discovery; capture eyes with interesting content
5. Build and maintain relationships
6. Community is key — get involved and join the conversations
7. Remember to write like a human, for humans
There are lots of distribution options and your best bet are the once that can help you reach your target audience in the best way possible. These are some of the strategies and tools we use to get our content to the people who will benefit most from them.
1. Your owned distribution channels
This is probably the best way to get your content to those who actually want to read them. Your own controlled media can definitely get your content to a wider audience. This can be your blog, email newsletter, and most importantly your social channels. Building your own community or audience takes a lot of time but it’s also invaluable.
These people are your community, they’ve opted in to your communications and are likely to be your biggest brand advocates. Spend more time and resources growing your audience and they will help spread your message. Your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn followers, RSS Subscribers, Email subscribers or Google+ followers are your most valuable ways to distribute your content. The greater the number of owned followers, the higher the number of shares your content attracts.
2. Social Tools
One of the simplest ways to share your content to your social media channels on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. You can schedule your posts to publish at ideal times (or let Buffer decide when is best).
ManageFlitter is a web-based application that assists Twitter users gain insight into their Twitter account. ManageFlitter provides a set of tools that allows Twitter users to effectively curate, prune and grow their Twitter account.
Tweriod is a free twitter tool that helps you make the most of Twitter by letting you know the best time to tweet. It can help you determine the best time to tweet your content for your business.
This WordPress plugin allows you to lock a portion of your content behind a social share button so that the content can only be accessed once a user shares to Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. This is especially useful for content giveaways to attract likes and shares.
–Daily by Buffer (mobile app)
If your content makes it onto Daily, you’ll initially see a huge wave of tweets, then eventually an increase in traffic a few days later. Check out when our content was featured on Daily.
3. Forums/Communities
Inbound.org is a community for Inbound Professionals to share and discuss the latest ideas and best practices with the inbound community. it helps you find great content from the world of inbound marketing from other marketers, curated by the community. You can also contribute marketing resources as a member.
Slideshare is still a useful medium to get some of your content to a target audience. It offers users the ability to upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios. You may have forgotten about Slideshare but find out the best way to use it again.
Hacker News is a social news website that caters to programmers and entrepreneurs, delivering content related to computer science and entrepreneurship. It’s an important part of the startup community and it’s one of the best source of news and discussion about technology and startups. You can share your related content with the community.
GrowthHackers.com is a community to learn and share about ethical online marketing techniques that drive effective, scalable and sustainable growth. Discussions are often prompted through popular marketing articles curated by the community and through questions or content posted by the community.
Quibb lets you share what you’re reading for work. Use Quibb to share news about your industry, discuss what matters, and see what colleagues are reading. It connects professionals over business news and informed commentary — targeting every industry, profession, and geography.
RebelMouse leverages technology, analytics and social network connections to build loyal and lasting communities around affinities, causes and brands. It’s the springboard for a brand’s content, sending it further and faster than it has gone before, driving audience participation and building brand loyalists.
Reddit is a social networking service and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links. It helps you discover what’s trending worldwide on Reddit for content inspiration on a variety of topics from across the web. You can also share related links and content with subgroups.
Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. Identify trends from consistently asked questions to inform your content creation efforts. Answer related questions in your industry or share your valuable content via its publishing platform.
4. Other Channels/Tools
Medium is a blog-publishing platform. Once an entry is posted, it can be recommended and shared by other people, in a similar manner to Twitter. Posts can be upvoted in a similar manner to Reddit, and content can be assigned a specific theme, in the same way as Tumblr.
–The Contently platform helps connect content producers with those in need of content, and the service acts as a great way to distribute your own writing in one consistent place.
— List.ly
Build a list about anything—resources for your niche, articles you love, helpful tools, recommended books, etc. Grab links from around the web (including yours), and publish and share—and even embed—your list so that others can see.
Yoast is a great optimization plugin for WordPress that helps bolster your website and its content to its full potential with all the major search engines.
Speaking of email newsletters, MailChimp is one of the biggest and best (and free) ways to send email to your list of contacts. You can set up automated campaigns that deliver each new post that you write, or you can create campaigns from scratch.
Share your great product here. Make sure you only post a real product, or you won’t even be considered.