Over 91% of B2B markets and 86% of B2C marketers have hopped onto the biggest trend in digital marketing – content marketing.

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Although Content marketing isn’t just a trend, it’s evolved to be much more than that and the psychology behind why it works is clear. Creating your own original content allows you to be an authority with your offerings and a thought leader in your industry. Sounds great right?

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So why isn't everyone doing this?

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With the exponentially increasing influx of content, it is getting harder and harder to reach your audience organically. The fact is most marketers are not accomplishing their content marketing goals because many of them don’t know how to stand out or distribute their content. 

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We’ve written a couple of blogs before detailing how to write excellent content so, this time we’re focusing on the best ways to distribute and promote your content. So how can you make it so your information stands out amongst the infinite pieces of information on the web?

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Click here to download our case study on how we used our own product to drive 20,000 page-views starting from absolute zero.

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1. Share information, don’t promote it.

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The last thing you want to be is that annoying guy who constantly self-promotes. You know the type. You’re watching a nice music video on Youtube and happen to scroll down to the comments. He’s the one telling you to “Check out his covers”. How often do you think this works?

Your information is valuable. It answers a specific question, and if it doesn’t then why are you writing it? Seek out opportunities to provide these answers to those who are directly and indirectly looking at it.

For starters - forums, groups, LinkedIn, or even Reddit are great places to start. Browse the comment section of popular websites or discussion blogs that you follow and use your involvement as a catapult to sharing your information. Make sure that you are actually providing something valuable rather than just self-promoting. No need to say you wrote it if you don’t want to. The right audience will come back to your website if the content is good.

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2. Repurpose your content (aka the Waterfall Content Strategy)

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So now you have a few avid readers visiting your site. Let’s be real though, most of the people who find themselves on your site most likely come from somewhere else that click through to one specific piece of content (see above). Unless they’ve seen your name, site or blog multiple times, chances are would be interested readers are going to miss your latest posts. So how do we prevent this?

Gary Vaynerchuck, an American entrepreneur best known for his digital marketing and social media work as well as leading two New York-based companies VaynerMedia and VaynerX uses what is now coined the “Waterfall Content Strategy”.  He is able to produce huge amounts of content by leveraging strategic channels of content.

The first sentence in his article, Content on Content on Content, says it perfectly:

‘I’m about to get real meta on you: the article you’re about to read was made from a video, that was made from the making of an article, that was originally based off a video.’

He goes on to say, ‘When you have something at the top, use it as a source to create other content.’

Gary claims that this is the infrastructure for a true content strategy.”

If that isn’t motivating enough, the rising company Sweet Fish Media has said they used the “Waterfall Content Strategy” to gain 300% in revenue growth.

Gary claims that this is the infrastructure for a true content strategy.

About a month or two ago, Ghostit pushed out a new type of content – Podcasts. The audience for our podcast is small, but growing steadily over the last couple of months. Though the number of listeners is not high, we’re not discouraged. In fact, our podcast has become an amazing channel of content that we’ve been leveraging to create multiple pieces of content we can share across the web. This also creates backlinks to the podcast too.

Let’s take a look at our steps:

a. Record the podcast.

b. Get an Audio Engineer to edit the audio

c. Have a copywriting team to make written content e.g. blogs.

d. Cut memorable snippets from the blogs to create stand out social posts. You can even Share quotes from your blog posts as images on Instagram.

e. Use key points of the blog to create visual content e.g. infographics, posters, memes etc.

QuickSprout blogger Neil Patel attributes 2,512,596 visitors, 41,142 backlinks and 3,741 referring domains to the 47 infographics he’s produced and published.

f. Space out your content on an editorial calendar so the same piece of information doesn’t get repeated on the same distribution channel.

g. Publish a slide deck to Slideshare. This site isn’t super well known, but it boasts over 60 million monthly users. Break up your blog posts or infographics, add them to a set of slides and you’ve got ready-made consumable content – without the hassle of creating something new.

h. Send out e-mail newsletters with your latest posts. 73% of marketers count email marketing as core to their businesses.

i. Produce a video based on your article. Or have a 2-3 minute animated video based on your podcast and share that to YouTube.

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3. “The Main Event Strategy”

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“The main event strategy” is a weekly strategy (or whatever length of time you desire) that uses the technique of building up hype over multiple platforms about a specific event before sharing the actual event across the same platforms.

Let’s take Ghostit for example. We will be rolling out our Campaign Packs, and we’ve been building hype slowly over several channels including but not limited to Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Facebook. When we fully roll it out, we will be featuring it across many if not all of these channels. This will create multiple “Social Backlinks” that will help us rank on Google. Not to mention using the spillover effect grow all our social media simultaneously.

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4. Get Influencers to Market for You

A “cheat” tip that a lot of marketers overlook. If you’re just starting out, it’s going to be difficult to get your content out if you have a limited fan base, and even harder if your business is new and your brand is unknown. An easy fix is to get influencers in your industry or influencers who are popular with your target audience to promote it. Take a good long look through your blog post and see if you’ve mentioned any influencers in it. If you haven’t, then you really should.

They don’t even have to be killer names, even having a couple of people just above your ranking is good enough. Take a second to reach out to them and let them know you’ve mentioned their name and backlinked them. Encourage them to share the name-dropped piece of content with their followers.