There are two rules for content marketers. This article is all about the second rule, however before we dive into that let’s quickly touch on rule number 1.
Rule number 1 for content marketers is to create useful content.
But how do you know if your content is useful?
It’s simple.
Ask yourself this question: When my intended audience reads my content, does my content solve their problem or help them accomplish a task?
If the answer is yes, your content is useful, and you nailed rule number 1.
According to Moz, this is called searcher task accomplishment (STA), and it’s essentially what Google is optimizing for with their ranking signals. Therefore, STA is what content marketers, like you and me, should be optimizing for with our content.
The key is to understand your visitors, users, and customers so you can provide them with the content they’re looking for and keep them from bouncing off your site. It’s a good idea to analyze your website from A-Z and make sure you’re using this user-driven approach.
Now that we have that cleared up, let’s discuss the second most important rule of content marketing.
Rule number 2 is to promote your content.
Hate to say it, but if you build it, they will not come. You have to build it and then promote it.
How? You need a plan. And this article can help you accomplish that task (hello, STA!).
Below are more than 12 resources you can use to put together a simple content promotion plan, including the promotional tactics you should use, and the best places to promote your blog content.
So, let’s get started.
Here are a dozen promotional tactics you should use to promote your blog content:
1. Quuu Promote
What is it?
Quuu Promote is a content promotion tool where you can submit your blog content to be shared by a community of over 40,000 micro-influencers.
No bots. Just real people and businesses who are willing to share your content with their followers on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You just submit your content and Quuu’s community provides you with clicks and shares across social media.
What’s the tactic?
You can use Quuu to get your content hundreds of social mentions from influencers and drive relevant traffic to your blog.
So, what’s the catch? Rule number 1, of course.
The content you share must be useful. The Quuu team manually reviews your content before you share it. If it doesn’t meet their quality standards then it’s rejected (as it should be).
How much does it cost?
Pricing starts from just $40/month per promotion. Each promotion runs for 30 days and you can continually promote your evergreen content again and again for free with unlimited re-promotions.
2. GrowthHackers
What is it?
GrowthHackers is the largest online community of growth professionals (mostly content marketers) where members share and promote each other’s content.
You simply submit your article and it gets shared and upvoted within the GrowthHacker community. And, if your content gets lots of upvotes, it gets extra distribution on social media and in GrowthHackers’ weekly email newsletter.
What’s the tactic?
It’s twofold. First, use GrowthHackers to promote your blog content, by posting to the platform and using it to get in front of an engaged audience of industry influencers. Second, use GrowthHackers to learn now content marketing tactics.
GrowthHackers is not just a place to promote content. It’s a learning community, a place where top growth leaders share their inspirational stories for growing companies like Spotify, Airbnb, Facebook, and Pinterest.
They even offer a Growth University where you can learn the proven strategies and tactics from top content marketers.
How much does it cost?
It’s free. GrowthHackers is community-based, meaning all content shared is created and/or posted by community members themselves. It’s free to join and free to post.
However, just like with Quuu, rule number 1 applies. The content you share must be useful to the community or it gets the boot.
3. Zest
What is it?
Zest is a content discovery platform for marketers by marketers. Like GrowthHackers, it is community-based where members can contribute content and submit blog articles.
However, Zest has extreme standards when it comes to enforcing rule number 1. If you submit something that isn’t insanely useful, the team at Zest will flat out reject it.
What’s the tactic?
Like GrowthHackers, the tactic here is to share and learn. You’ll quickly see that Zest is not only a great place to share your best content, but it’s also a great place to discover great content.
Zest uses machine learning to build what they call “knowledge-building paths” that personalize the content you see. So every Zest user gets specific content based on what they are interested in learning about.
The idea is you don’t have to waste time sifting through useless puff pieces that add zero value.
How much does it cost?
With Zest, you can contribute content for free or pay to promote it. In either case, the content must meet their high-quality standards.
4. Hacker News
What is it?
Hacker News is a social news website run by the investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator.
The content you find on Hacker News is generally focused on tech and entrepreneurship but “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity” is acceptable to submit.
What’s the tactic?
Write an insanely useful blog article and submit it to Hacker News. If your article makes it to the top of the Hacker News feed it essentially goes viral.
Hacker News may look like a 1990’s Internet forum but don’t let that fool you. It’s the biggest link aggregator and message board in Silicon Valley and its loyal readers are some of the most influential people in business, marketing, and tech.
Like the sites above, Hacker News has extremely high-quality standards. Your content has to be useful and deeply interesting — ten times more interesting than the post you’re reading right now. (The truth hurts.)
Anyway, the point is if you’re content doesn’t teach people about the world in an inspirational way it’s not going to succeed on Hacker News.
How much does it cost?
It’s completely free to submit content. Whether it’s accepted is another story.
5. Medium
What is it?
Medium is a social blogging platform where everyone with a story to tell can share their ideas and perspectives on any topic. It was created by the same team behind Twitter and in many ways, Medium is sort of like Twitter but for long-form content.
The other big difference is unlike Twitter sequential feed, Medium has an algorithmic timeline that delivers tailored content you’re going to be interested in.
What’s the tactic?
Use Medium as your blog or repost articles on it to take advantage of Medium’s algorithmic timeline providing you with an opportunity to reach a built-in audience of engaged influencers.
You might even be discovered by big publishers like Business Insider and the HuffPost who scout Medium for new contributors.
How much does it cost?
It’s completely free. All you have to do is join Medium.
6. LinkedIn Articles
What is it?
LinkedIn allows members to contribute professional insights using their article publishing platform. It’s different than a post. LinkedIn’s publishing platform allows you to publish or republish full blog articles.
What’s the strategy?
Take advantage of the following benefits according to LinkedIn:
- Your content becomes part of your professional profile, displayed on the Articles section of your LinkedIn profile.
- Published articles are shared with your connections and followers in their news feeds, and sometimes through notifications.
- Members that aren’t in your network can follow you from your article so that your next article will be surfaced in their feeds.
- Your article may be searchable both on and off LinkedIn, depending on your profile settings. Having your public profile visibility set to everyone will distribute your articles publicly.
How much does it cost?
It’s completely free and available to all LinkedIn members.
7. Social Jukebox
What is it?
Social Jukebox allows you to easily schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once you turn on Jukebox, it starts to automatically post for you. When it’s done sharing all of your posts, it starts all over again.
This allows you to build up a library of high-quality, evergreen content, that keeps being shared into the foreseeable future. That way, your social media queue never runs empty.
What’s the strategy?
Use Social Jukebox to continually schedule your posts across social media. You just load it with your content, figure out how often you’d like it to share it, and then turn it on.
Scheduling is not only automated, but it’s also flexible. You can set different schedules for each day of the week. When it runs out of tweets, your Jukebox turns over like an hourglass and keeps sharing.
How much does it cost?
You can get started with a 14-day free trial which allows you access to the Advanced Plan with up to ten jukeboxes and up to 5,000 stored jukebox tweets as well as 50 stored Targeted Posts. All for free.
If you like Social Jukebox, at the end of your trial you can keep your account for $19/month or upgrade to a larger plan.
8. Sniply
What is it?
Sniply is a link shortener that’s designed to drive conversions. How? Sniply embeds a little call-to-action snippet into every page you share.
For example, you could share an article from Forbes, TechCrunch, Mashable, Fast Company, BuzzFeed, etc. and each piece would have a custom CTA that appears as a little popup at the bottom of the screen. When readers click the CTA it takes them back to your site or wherever you want to drive traffic.
What’s the strategy?
Use content curation to send traffic back to your own blog or website.
Sniply is more than just a link shortener with analytics. It helps marketers get more return on the links they share. And when you promote someone else’s content, you can actually drive readers to your site.
How much does it cost?
Sniply starts at just $29 per month. All plans include unlimited links. Try any plan for 14 days free.
9. Product Hunt
What is it?
Product Hunt is a website that lets users share and discover new products. Since it launched in 2012 it’s become a platform for tech enthusiasts to share and geek out about the new products.
The platform uses a forum-like format combined with peer referrals (upvotes) to surface intriguing and relevant products.
Product Hunt’s has a large and active following, including company founders, tech influencers, venture capitalists, reporters, and even celebrities.
What’s the strategy?
Create remarkably useful content and promote it like a product. In fact, you should think of your content as a product.
Like a product, your content should solve a problem. And there’s no better place to promote a useful product than Product Hunt.
In this way, Product Hunt is great for content marketing because you can use it to promote content products like ebooks, tech stacks, interactive content, and other types of content.
How much does it cost?
Totaly free.
10. Content Marketing Groups
What is it?
Content marketing groups are private forums on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp.
They’re a place where you can connect with like-minded people, build valuable professional relationships, and chat with industry experts and influencers.
And of course, groups are another great place to stay on top of industry trends and breaking news.
What is the strategy?
This is another twofold strategy which is to shamelessly promote and thoughtfully network.
Use groups to promote your content but be careful because every group has different self-promotion rules. Slack groups usually have a dedicated content promotion channel that allows you to share content.
What makes content marketing groups great for promoting content isn’t the ability to blast out your content — it’s the opportunities you get to connect with influencers and build mutually beneficial relationships.
Relationships you can use to co-promote content.
How much does it cost?
It depends on the group. Most are free. Some are a one-time fee while others use a subscription model. Almost all of them require an invite from the admin.
11. Pinterest
What is it?
Pinterest is a social network that allows users to share, and discover new interests by pinning images or videos to their own or others’ boards (a collection of pins) usually with a common theme.
Using visuals, the social network is very lifestyle-focused, allowing users to share their tastes and interests with others and discover likeminded people.
What’s the strategy?
Think of Pinterest as a search engine, then pin content and search engine optimize it.
Pinterest is great for content promotion because people use Pinterest as a search engine to discover new ideas, create mood boards, and to be inspired.
Just like with Google (or any other search engine), if you optimize your pins for keywords it will make your content more discoverable and drive traffic back to your blog.
How much does it cost?
Like all other major social networks, Pinterest is free to use but also allows businesses to run paid ads.
12. Canva
What is it?
Canva is a remarkably simple graphic design platform. It’s managed completely online, and it allows anyone to easily edit images and create custom graphics.
Canva is perfect for making visuals on social media, blog images, presentations, posters, banners, and infographics.
What’s the strategy?
Use Canva to enhance your blog content by creating stunning search engine optimized infographics that can be shared across social media and listed on infographic directories.
Canva empowers you to make stunning visual content without having to hire a designer or learn and pay for photoshop.
How much does it cost?
When it comes to price, you can’t go wrong with Canva because it starts free with 8,000+ free templates, 100+ design types (social media posts, presentations, letters, and more), and hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics.
Need more? Upgrade to the Pro plan for just $9.95 /month for more customization tools.
Editor’s Note: The article is part of the blog series Grow Your Business, brought to you by the marketing team at UniTel Voice, the virtual phone system priced and designed for startups and small business owners.
The post 12 Content Promotion Tactics And The Best Places To Promote Your Blog Posts appeared first on Startup Stockpile.
