We’ve all read so much about great content being a link magnet which also gets shared organically. But, does it? Does writing good content automatically ensure traffic and links? Afraid, not. If you just write good content and expect magic to happen, it is like the Spaghetti on the wall approach. You’ll throw it and see what sticks. But that isn’t what content marketing is about.
Content marketing is a process that requires a good degree of hard work, research, systematic planning and scheduling. Much of it happens even before you start writing about something. In our blog about tools to promote content, we share ideas on not only how you can promote your content but how you can create promote worthy content in the first place.
A research by OkDork showed that of 1 million posts, 89% posts have less than 100 social shares. How can you be in the remaining 11% and ensure your content gets organically promoted?
a. Choose the right blog topics
A research by marketing expert Brandon Gaille shared the blog topics that are likely to get the most social shares.
The hottest blog topics list is a good beginning point for choosing your blog topic or even adapting it to fit one of the topics. Here are examples of the hottest blog topics and how you can adapt them to the content marketing company.
- Saving Time: 21 tools that’ll save your time when writing long-form content
- Health and Fitness: How being a freelancer can take a toll on your emotional health
- Money: How much money do bloggers around the world really make? Have a look
- Life and Happiness: How you can use the World Happiness Index to craft interesting content
- Travel: Can you sustain your living as a Travel Blogger? Find out from those who’ve been there done that
b. Use the Skyscraper technique
Whenever you research a particular blog topic, you’ll see a string of Google results already written about it. The only way to outrank them is if you write better content on the same topic – more authoritative of a better quality. Become higher than your closest competitors on the same topic to be promoted as the best authority on it.
Now that your content is all set in terms of quality, here are seven tools that you can use to promote it which will make it go from an ordinary blog post to the one that drives traffic and conversions.
1. Boost your post on Facebook
Facebook doesn’t give the same organic reach that it did a few years back. Fans and Likes on your page by themselves aren’t enough to drive virality into a post. But Facebook offers other features that’ll help you reach more of your existing base and even new people. The Boost Post feature on Facebook is one of its most economic options to get results within a short period. It doesn’t require you to create elaborate ads and drilled-down targeting. Instead, if you boost a post to reach more of your existing audience and some new ones, you can see some good results even for as small as $20. Over 2 billion people use Facebook every month, which means you’ll be definite to find your customer base in there. Even a $5 boost can sometimes increase the reach of the post five times making this a very interesting medium to promote your prized posts.
Pro Tip: Pay extra attention to you your social metadata. What is social metadata? It is the text that appears below your social post. If you leave this unedited, the platform will automatically pick up the first few lines from your post. This either gets repeated along with the post content or isn’t very readable including the author, post date and time and other irrelevant data.
2. Find your promoters using Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is an amazing little platform that allows you to discover trending content by typing in keywords. It then shows you the best articles for the particular keyword and its social shares. Now, what you need is pick out the best articles that come close to what you’ve written. After that, identify the people who’ve tweeted and shared the article. If these people have liked and shared the earlier article, they may be likely to look at a (preferably) better one on the topic and share it too. It’ll take a while to create the list and reach out to them but you’ll see the difference in traffic when each of them actually share and promote your content.
Pro tips:
- You can use a tool like hunter.io if you want to trace out official email ids.
- You can use either mail merge for gmail (using Google docs) or a tool like Gmass to send out your outreach emails efficiently.
- For the most important promoters, customize your email mentioning something that could interest them
- If all else fails, you can @tweet to them to catch their attention
3. Use MeetEdgar to schedule and re-post content for better visibility
Meet Edgar is an intelligent social media scheduling tool that automatically re-shares your content at different times. This increases your social reach and the there is an increased chance of each post being visible to more people. The tool automatically re-shares your content to ensure you are never left with an empty queue.
Pro tip: You can also try a scheduling tool like Buffer. The paid account has unlimited scheduling that can allow you to schedule content for a week or more without hassles.
4. Spy on competitor backlinks with Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most comprehensive tools out there that pulls out your competitors best strategies and presents it to you in neatly done reports. It is most popularly used as an SEO competitor checker tool that shares the entire backlink strategy of your competitors.
For content, add the url of a blog with similar content and active social shares to see who is linking back to the article. Once you know that, all you need to do is politely ask if they can link back to you.
Pro Tip: Keep a little something handy to see what you can offer them for linking to you. It could be a shout out or even some handy reports.
5. IFTTT
If This Then That is a free platform that provides ‘applets’ for the most used apps on your smart phone. By making tasks simpler and more intuitive for common apps like messengers, the Applet holds a lot of possibilities on getting mundane tasks related to content simply get done.
Pro tip: With a mix of apps like buffer for Instagram, you can use the phone-only app even from your desktop
6. Zapier
Zapier is another tool similar to IFTTT which connects you app and automates workflow. It is great with saving time and efforts especially when trying to set up something new. For example, you can set up a Zap when you get an email. The email will be automatically scanned for attachments and the attachments if any will be added to your Dropbox. Meanwhile, you also receive a notification on Slack about the new email and its attachments.
7. Sniply
Sniply is a smart tool that adds the much required CTA (Call to Action) to any social content you share. If we were to follow the 80-20 rule of posting on Facebook where you posted 80% content that was generic and 20% directly promoting your brand, it is a bit worrying when social doesn’t actively send traffic your way. To solve this exact problem, sniply allows you to add your call to action to any external page on the web. Which means if you see a good article and want to share it with your customers, you can first create a snip.ly link (just like you create a bit.ly link) and then share it on social. The landing page of the article now has your sniply message of visiting the website or continuing with the process. Now, you get to redirect people back to your website. How interesting!
Have some tools that you’ve used and loved? Do share with us.
Here’s how you create better content and keep your readers hooked. Download the free here. It’s a quick 7-minute read, so get going!