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You’ve written a truly 10x article. The last time you published a great article, it generated a couple dozen social shares, a backlink, a dozen views. After a few days, your little “traffic bump” disappeared entirely. The sum of your last few blog posts amounts to some long-tail Organic traffic, and not much else. What went wrong?<\/p>\n
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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n There are two reasons your articles flop:<\/strong><\/p>\n If your content isn’t truly great, making it great should be your first priority. But if you’ve noticed worsening results from great content, or that you’re simply unable to get traction off of your hard work, you have a content promotion problem<\/i>.<\/strong> In a world where 50% of content gets 8 shares or less<\/a>, it’s getting harder and harder to get your content seen by the right people. You need a promotion process.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hopefully, your next blog post has been carefully selected based on criteria that will benefit your business. Be sure that your post has promotion tactics built into it. “Great'” doesn’t necessarily mean promotable. Where appropriate, try to mention influencers or partners, link out to resource pages, integrate relevant topics and long-tail keywords and put yourself into the shoes of those who you plan to ask to distribute your content.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There’s no one process<\/i> that works best for promoting articles. Each business needs to find the right channels and platforms for their content. Ultimately, within your content strategy you need to determines where your blog posts will go and roughly how they’ll be amplified. If you’re lacking that strategy, follow along as I dive into the two publishing options and ideal promotion tactics.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before any article is completed, you need to prepare for promotion. Your first crucial decision is whether your blog post is better suited to go on your own website, or on another website as a byline or guest column. Here are a few quick determining factors to influence your decision:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of course, these aren’t hard-and-fast rules, and they are by no means the only criteria for choosing where you’ll publish your next post. Ultimately, your great article is perfect for an audience, and either that’s your audience or another publication’s audience. How can you provide the most value for the greatest amount of potential customers? Think in those terms when choosing a publishing route. Results will follow.<\/p>\n “How can you provide the most value for the greatest amount of potential customers?”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n If your blog post is going on your website, make sure you have well-developed outreach lists, email templates, and custom emails and social messages pre-written. Manual outreach via email and social media is your highest leverage blog post promotion activity.<\/p>\n Via Buzzstream <\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n If your blog post is going off-site on a third-party publication, try to make a contact via social media or email with your target publication. If your relationship has already been seeded through past work or conversations, you can skip this step and move onto pitching. Get your pitch right, follow-up frequently, and don’t waste editors’ time!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Publish the post on your site, or wait until it’s published elsewhere. Be diligent with follow-up if you’re chasing an editor. Regardless of where the post gets published, make sure you’re able to monitor the post and respond to comments as they come in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If the article was published on a third-party website like an industrial magazine or a niche blog you’ll want to promote it to help generate awareness to your authorship. Ultimately, if it’s an exclusive, you don’t “own” the content. Choose from amongst the following three activities for promoting your “contributed” works:<\/p>\n Share it on Social Media:<\/b><\/p>\n Make sure you have your social sharing schedule dialed in. That might mean sharing your post across Twitter six times using fresh copy and appropriate hashtags, and sharing twice on both Facebook and LinkedIn with unique copy and cover images. Find your ideal mix of social channels and frequency by executing this process over and over. Fill your social queue using a tool like Buffer<\/a> or MeetEdgar<\/a> to share into future weeks.<\/p>\n\n
Write With Promotion In Mind<\/b><\/h3>\n
A Framework and Timeline For Promotion<\/b><\/h3>\n
Two Publishing Routes<\/b><\/h3>\n
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Your Publishing and Promotion Schedule<\/h2>\n
Two Weeks Prior to Publishing<\/b><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nWeek Zero: Publish Or Get Published<\/b><\/h3>\n
Week One: Hustle<\/b><\/h3>\n
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