The Tactical Guide To Promoting Your Content

Promoting your post is the last thing you want to do after what can potentially be hours of writing.

But it's exactly what you have to do to get the coverage you deserve.

And since so few bloggers invest the time into content promotion, it's a real opportunity to stand out.

Therefore, we're going to give you a tactical guide on how to promote your post so you have a clear game plan after every publish.

Start With The Lowest Hanging Fruit

My first tip is to start with the easiest things to get some quick wins. These are things like:

1. Send it out to your newsletter

2. Promote it on your social media

3. Link to it internally in other posts on your blog

This can all be done in 30-60 minutes and is going to provide you with the initial exposure you'll need to give you the social proof for the outreach that's about the come.

Now, we move onto outreach.

Email Everyone You Featured

A lot of people are scared about doing outreach. Look at this email I just received the other day:

But as this person soon found out it's really nothing to be worried about.

Still, few people get beyond the lowest hanging fruit, so you can really differentiate yourself with some effort.

However, to make it even easier, we're going to start by outreaching to people who were directly featured in the article.

This is always the easiest approach because people are generally happy to be informed when they've been featured, linked to and/or quoted, so there shouldn't be any mental barriers.

Now, finding email addresses of bloggers is not hard - I can name 30 different ways. It's traditionally a very simple choice between:

• Looking yourself, which takes time, but costs nothing.
• Hiring someone to look for you, which is relatively cheap, but also takes time. Traditionally I hire someone off of UpWork for this role.
• Paying for a software, which is very quick and generally affordable, if this is something you think you'll do more than once.

Let's assume you'd like to go it alone. In most cases, bloggers have contact information on their website, because, unlike business personnel - they want to be contacted.

Traditional places to find a blogger's email address are:

• Contact Form or About Us Pages
• Their Footer (often as a mailto)
• Their Newsletter welcome email
• On Google by searching their name and website

Here's a basic email template to send out once you're ready:

Hey {Their Name}!

Just wanted to pop in and say that we've included you in {Your Article Title}.

Check it out!

{Your Article Link}

Thanks for providing a valuable service, and if you feel inclined to share the post with your audience, we appreciate the exposure.

{A Click To Tweet} 🙂

Cheers!

Dave

Notice the key features are:

• Address them personally and thank them for providing a valuable resource
• Direct them to the article
• Give them an easy way to share in the email itself (click to tweet). A typical click to tweet to include in the email is something like:

"wow, 200+ content marketing tools @ninjaoutreach http://ninjaoutreach.com/best-content-marketing-tools/"

Notice it's very short but there's no reason to make it any longer.

Tag Everyone On Twitter & Google+

If a lot of people have been included in a post, it's good to go the extra mile and tag them all on Twitter and G+.

This way, people can easily see who they've been featured with. It's also very non intrusive, and gives people a built in mechanism to share the post across different social media channels.

There's a lot of ways to find people on Twitter, but usually people showcase their social profiles on their website, so while you're digging for email addresses gather their profiles too.

Tip: Put all of your contacts into a spreadsheet if you don't use a software so that you have it for later.

Once you have everyone's handles and G+ profiles, I recommend sending out a group tweet and including a few people in it at once. People like being associated with other influencers, and as one person shares it, it tags everyone else again, giving it extra exposure.

Due to Twitter length restrictions, you can typically only include around 3 - 6 influencers per tweet, which could require you to send out 1 - 2 dozen similar looking tweets from your account.

Link Building & Outreach To "Strangers"

The final step is what some people refer to as The Skyscraper Technique.

It refers to identifying people who are likely to be interested in your article, and then reaching out to them to share it with them.

Brian's article is already the complete guide on how to execute this strategy, and comes with scripts, but the gist of it is:

1. Identify people who have shown interest in similar articles, either by linking to them or sharing them. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, BuzzSumo, or NinjaOutreach for this.

2. Reach out to them asking if they would be interested seeing your content, which should be top-notch.

And that's it!

As simple as it sounds, it's devilishly effective. We've been using this strategy with our own content and generate around 50 links a month.

Conclusion

Case study after case study has shown that promoting your content is no longer optional.

And while it may come across as "more work", it's really a huge opportunity as it is still not the norm in blogging.

Personally, implementing the above content promotion strategies has generated dozens of links a month for us and led to a significant increase in traffic in just the last few months (>100% increase).

Do you have any other ideas on how to promote your content?