Tag Archives: Content Distribution

What is news content marketing and what are its benefits?

News content marketing

News content marketing is writing, publishing and distributing highly interesting and relevant information and updates about your company/organisation or about related events taking place elsewhere. This is something slightly different from publishing content simply to educate your customers and clients and provide them product or service-specific information. A good example of news content would be

  • Your company or organisation has bagged a very big client
  • You are expanding your operations to other cities, states or countries
  • You are branching out into new services or products or adding new features or attributes to your existing services or products
  • Your business has gotten a new website or a new blog
  • Your organisation has won an award
  • Someone new has joined your organisation
  • Your office premises has acquired something new, like computers, new-age furniture, landscaping material or anything interesting you would like to share with your clients and customers
  • A small fire broke out but it was quickly brought under control (or unfortunately, was not)
  • Something interesting happened near the building
  • Your area is going to experience inclement weather
  • There was a power outage where you have your office
  • A stray cat wandered into your office premises and decided to make it its new home

The list can go on and on once you get into the groove.

Do you know people are obsessed about reading news, especially online? While conventional newspapers are winding up, demand for news is rapidly going up. Most of the links you come across on Facebook, Twitter, and even Tumblr, come from one or another news website. How is this tendency of people to consume and share as much news as possible beneficial to someone wanting to leverage content marketing?

What are the main hurdles you face while trying to implement your content marketing strategy?

  • Lack of an audience
  • Lack of enough fresh content
  • Lack of content writing ideas
  • Very low frequency of content publishing
  • Expense of getting the content written or generated is quite high

All these hurdles can be in one way or another taken care of via news-related content marketing. For smaller daily or weekly news you can have a separate section on your website itself (something like “Latest News”) and for more significant news distribution you can use one of the various press release services available on the Internet. You can also spend your time networking with influential journalists working with major news outlets like the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Tech Crunch, Mashable, etc. so that twice or thrice you can get some major news about your organisation published over there.

How to disseminate your content

Spreading content

After you have figured out what sort of content your business requires and you have started publishing that content the next step is distributing and disseminating that content. Simply publishing content on your website or blog is not going to be very profitable unless people become aware of it and start accessing it. You may already have a steady flow of traffic to your website or blog and this can further gain traction once you produce more and more content but still you have to take measures to make your content accessible to as many people as possible. Listed below are some channels that you can use to disseminate your content

Publishing content on your website or blog

This is the easiest way of making your content available but for this people need to be aware of your website and blog. If you already have an audience, great, but if you are in the process of building an audience than along with publishing content under your website you also need to focus on other sources.

Publishing an electronic newsletter

Publishing an e-zine is one of the oldest and the most effective ways of spreading your content on a regular basis. Have an opt in e-mail list and display a subscription box on your website and on your blog. You can either just publish content in the e-zine or you can first publish it on your website or blog and then mail links to your subscribers. Services like MailChimp and Aweber have great features and they also provide you with ready-made subscription forms that you can straightaway copy/paste onto your website and blog

Making RSS subscription available

RSS feeds are a great way of regularly distributing your new content. If you are using a content management system to manage your website and blog the feature that generates RSS feeds must already be there (you can also use http://feedburner.com for better statistics and enhanced exposure). Once you have generated an RSS feeds link display it prominently on your blog and website and elsewhere so that people can easily subscribe to it.

Using social media channels

Although your blog is very much a part of social media you can use other avenues such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Many businesses publish content keeping such distribution channels in mind. Extensive research has been done on what sort of content goes viral on social media websites: what sort of heading and what sort of format attract the most attention and encourage people to share your content.

Submitting articles to article directories

There are many article directories that accept articles free of cost. It is a much outdated method but it is still being used by those who have just started spreading around their content, and to an extent it does work. The only problem is the quality of most of the articles in these article directories is not up to the mark and consequently they don’t carry much authority.

Writing for other blogs

Writing for other blogs exposes your skills in front of an entirely new audience and it also gives people an opportunity to visit your website or blog and know more about you and your business. There are many successful bloggers who are constantly looking for guest bloggers to provide them the much-needed respite and if you can write well you can approach them. With every blog post a small bio of yours appears carrying your credentials, primary URL and also a link to your RSS feed.

Submitting slides and PDFs

You can create information slides and PDFs and upload them to websites like SlideShare and Scribd. I personally feel compared to full-fledged blog posts and articles it’s much easier to create slides carrying main points.

Publishing white papers

White papers pack lots of useful information without beating around the bush. Writing and publishing white papers might be a difficult task because it requires lots of research work and fine tuning (most white papers are scholarly and detailed) so you may want to spend more than a couple of weeks preparing a single white paper. But once it is prepared and published on your website you will reap great dividends for a long time.

Attending meetups and workshops

If there are meetups and workshops happening in your niche you must try to attend them so that more and more people come to know of your presence. This may not directly help you expose your content in front of them but it will certainly bring you in contact with several influential people in your business and some of them may mention your website or blog through their blog or social media updates.

These are some prominent channels you can use to distribute your content over the Internet.