In the race to creating as much content as possible people often forget that distributing and marketing content is as important as creating and publishing content. Of course if you have little content you must spend lots of time creating as much quality content as possible, but eventually you will need to invest some time and money in making that content available to people who are supposed to be influenced and affected.
It’s a misconception that create great content and people will find it on their own. This is an ideal situation, but we don’t live in an ideal world. There are many people who can manipulate their search engine rankings despite this update or that update happening at the good old Google. So you need to find channels, you need to CREATE your own channels, and sometimes you need to shell out some money to market your content, and in fact this is what they mean by content marketing – creating high-quality content and then distributing it, broadcasting it.
How do you distribute your content?
Good question. To the uninitiated this might seem quite daunting, especially the world “distribution”, or even “marketing”. I mean, sitting in your dark den, creating content and then publishing it on your website or blog is all well and good, and to be frank, is the easiest part. You can keep doing it for years and wait for the crawlers to bless you with a good crawling and afterwards, hopefully, with a good ranking. This way, although you’re working quite hard, you’re leaving it up to the search engines whether you get traffic or not. Believe me, I have done it myself.
Of course there is nothing wrong in that, and if you want to do that, you are welcome. It is your own business after all and it is up to you how you want to “market” it.
If you want to be proactive, then you need to take the bull by its horns. Instead of waiting for people to reach you, you need to reach the people. This can be done by relentlessly improving your search engine rankings; this is again akin to creating lots of content and then leaving it up to the search engines. This strategy sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t work.
Or you can create your own channels or make use of existing channels (by either spending some money or doing some free work). Here are a few ways you can create your own content marketing and distribution channels:
- Open a Facebook account: Although not every business can be promoted on Facebook, the platform enjoys quite a diverse audience. Right from CEOs to janitors, from saints to psychopaths and from housewives to ladies of the Marissa Mayer’s category, are using Facebook to share useful and useless information with the world at large. Create a vibrant presence on Facebook by regularly interacting with your contacts and contributing meaningfully to the ongoing discussions and debates. Learn its nuances and etiquette. You can also use its services like “Post Promotion” to highlight your particular pieces of content. The basic idea is becoming so influential that people start paying heed to all that you are saying, including clicking your links and coming to your website or blog to access your content.
- Open a Twitter account: The audience for Twitter is a bit different from Facebook, and many say that it is noisier and a bit overwhelming. If you haven’t used Twitter much, you may find it overwhelming, but otherwise it makes more sense than Facebook and business-wise, it can be much more profitable because people are more focused. People normally use Twitter to post links from not just all over the web, but also from their own websites and blogs and once you have built up an audience, it is a great way to distribute and market your content
- Open a Google+ account: Google+ is a fast-growing social networking platform but its audience is slightly different from Twitter and Facebook, in the sense that, as many claim (I haven’t used the service as regularly as the above-mentioned social networking platforms, yet), more business-minded and technology-oriented people use this platform.
- Invest in PPC programs: By spending money on PPC programs such as the ones offered by Google, Bing and Facebook, you don’t have to solely depend on search engines and you can start getting traffic as fast as 15-20 minutes. Of course you may have to spend some money (in many cases a lot – depending on the competition your keywords face) but if you have a marketing budget, then why not?
- Publish a regular newsletter: The email marketing experts claim that you can increase traffic to your website or blog by almost 30% by building a list of subscribers and then mailing them the links to your content on a regular basis. This, I have actually seen working. My traffic spikes when I send out my newsletter. Building your own mailing list can be a big pain in the ass but it’s worth it and actually there is no escaping from it. Even if you haven’t got anything planned yet, at least sign up for an email broadcasting service like Mailchimp and put up a form on your website and start collecting email ids. Later on it may save you hell of a time.
- Write for other publications: In blogging parlance it is called “guest blogging” and everybody from a novice to an A-list blogger does that. When your article or blog post appears on another, reputed website or blog, you gain new audience, you get more clicks, and your search engine rankings are also known to improve.
All these activities take time. These are not one-week or two-week projects. For instance, building an effective broadcasting channel using social networking websites may take you almost a year and that too if you are persistent and perpetually quality conscious. So don’t worry about doing things fast – you may end up spoiling things. Slow and steady actually wins the race here, unless you have loads of dollars to spend. You can simply assign 20-odd minutes to working on your social networking and social media profiles everyday and this should be sufficient. But this is another topic.
It is very important that you take care of the marketing and distribution of your content as you build up more and more of it. Chuck the thought that you need to create and publish content solely for search engines. Many people have had to wound up their businesses due to this. Build your own network of influence. Be known. Create a name for yourself so that people seek you rather than you waiting for them to come to your website. THIS, actually is the entire essence of content marketing.