Writing excellent content is a good way of making sure that your brand gets noticed by people and makes an impression. Unfortunately even the best piece of content won’t sell itself. Rather than putting the final word on your blog, hitting publish and starting the next one, there is a great deal more that you could be doing to support your content and help it get the platform it deserves.
Once you have written the content the work doesn’t, and shouldn’t, end there.
Content amplification is the process of promoting your content and getting it before as many people as possible. Unfortunately as much as we would sometimes like to believe, most of us don’t have an audience ready to lap up our every word, and read everything we write. Modern day consumers are given a great deal more choice when it comes to spending time online and because of this, you need to go little bit further to get people’s attention.
Create the right content
One of the main factors when it comes to content amplification, is how good it is and how shareable it is. You may have written the best piece of work on venereal diseases ever made, but that doesn’t mean that people will be desperate to spread it around. Before you even start to put pen to paper (or hand to keyboard), consider the purpose of your content. Is it a purely functional piece, or are you deliberately trying to create attention grabbing piece to bring an audience. If it is the later then research is key. Find out what your customers want and spend time planning your content out before you begin to write it. Though it may be more time consuming, finding that special place of top quality shareable content can pay back in spades and you can share it again and again.
Social advertising
One of the first things to do once you have completed your post is to share it on your social networks. If you are fortunate to have a social following then you should absolutely use this to share your content. Targeting groups or people specifically is even better as long as the way you go about it isn’t spammy. If you tailor a social share to a specific person or product then they are more likely to engage with it, whether that means a share, like, or views.
There are a huge number of social networks that people use, so target the ones that you think you will get the most engagement from and get sharing. Linkedin is another way of sharing your content which is still an underrated platform for sharing content. If your piece is particularly themed towards a specific audience then this is a good way of promoting it to people who will care.
Link acquisition
This follows on from the previous point about targeting people specifically, but if you can send your content to your audience specifically then this is an obviously beneficial way of increasing your reader numbers. If you have a mailing list or database of emails, consider sending them content that you think they would be interested in. If they are they may even spread it further for you.
Paid advertising
Another way of promoting your content is by enlisting the help a paid advertising scheme. There are a huge number of these available and a lot of choice. You could use PPC to bump a particularly impressive piece of content to people’s attention or enlist the help of advertising on Twitter or Facebook to promote your content to a wider audience. There are some great blogs around with countless methods of paying to get your content out there, so if this is the avenue you wish to go up then you should do your research.
These are just some of the ways to get your content out there. By operating elements of social, outreach and link building into your content sharing process, you can generate much more engagement with your content and help get the audience you need to grow your business and increase awareness.