11 Ways to Amplify & Promote your Content

Content Promotion starts much before you publish a piece of content. There are few things you should consider doing before publishing your content and after publishing your content.

Here is a summary of the points mentioned in the video:

Pre-publishing Phase

Step 1 – Influencer Grooming
Try to attract the attention of potential experts or influencers in the topic that you are writing about.
– Ego Bait
– Asking for Opinion
– Collaboration

Step 2- Keyword Optimization
Do Keyword Research and identify your potential target term

Post – Publishing Phase

Step 3 – Internal Linking
Make sure that you appropriately link to the newly published content piece from other pages within your site

Step 4 – Outreach
Reach out to the influencers you’ve identified in step 1 notifying them about the post. Alternatively, try to build some links back to by offering to guest post on other authoritative blogs.

Step 5 – Newsletter
Leverage your captive audience by sending out a newsletter to them updating them about the newly published piece of content.

Step 6 – Social Channels
Share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social platform that you may be associated with.

Step 7 – Content Curation Communities
There are plenty of sites like Reddit, Inbound.org, etc where you can submit your posts for an additional boost in traffic. Ensure you select the right community and follow their guidelines.

Step 8 – Comment on Other Blogs
Find other blog posts that are relevant to the article you just published and submit relevant comments where you could possibly reference your recent piece within the comment. Don’t make it look spammy.

Step 9 – Q&A sites and Forums
There are many forums and Q&A sites (e.g. Quora) where you can find threads where people are asking for help on topics that you’ve addressed in your recently published article.

Step 10 – Paid Promotion
Sometimes you need a little bit of a boost to get the traffic going. Apart from considering Facebook, which should be the #1 platform of choice, there are other networks like outbrain.com, taboola.com, stumbleupon.com etc,. where you can gain further traction.

Step 11 – Backlink Analysis
Analyze the backlinks of all the articles who are competing for your target term. Analyze their backlinks and see if there are opportunities for building similar links.

Transcript – 

So many of us produce content on a regular basis but so few of us promote it. Our content is always lying in a waste with too few people reading it. So, I’m going to talk about 11 ways that you can amplify your content.

So, now I’m going to break down content marketing into 2 phases – there are 2 phases where you have to think about when you come to promoting your content. The 1st phase is pre-publishing. Now, what do I mean by pre-publishing? The things that you can do in your preparation phase. So, now you have to realize one thing that when you are promoting content, you have to think about who is going to promote it for you and ideally if you want your article to have the widest reach, you want influencers in that topic that you are talking about to spread the word.

So, potentially the first thing that you could do or should do, this might not be possible for every article, but it should be possible for some is influencer grooming. Now, what do I mean by influencer grooming?

Influencer grooming is where you try to attract the attention of potential experts or influencers in the topic that you are writing about and the first thing you could do is ego bait. Ego bait is where you mention them in a positive light or even negative light but hopefully positive light where that you attracting their attention and attention of their in their fans, their followers and you can attract a lot of attention that way. The second thing that you could do is do a roundup. Ask multiple experts for an input or their opinion on the topic that you are writing on.

Once you do that, you can then follow up and tell them that you have written this article mentioning their inputs and they would be glad to mention you or link to you in their blog post or even share you on Twitter or Facebook. And may be the last thing that you could do it to influence your outreach is collaborate. Collaborate with a certain well known expert who has an agenda, may be, that he has, he wants to promote, he has a program, he has a course, he has an event he wants to promote.

May be your article can build up to something where you are helping him promote his event and you are in return getting exposure from his following. So, I think it’s a smart thing to do. It might not be possible for all articles that’s why I mentioned that something you can do sometimes once in a while and that’s a good thing to keep in mind. So, ya keep that in mind – influencer grooming,  influencer outreach and these relationships that you build can help you go a long way in all future articles that you go publishing.

Now, before you publish, again I’m talking about pre-publishing phase – a little bit of SEO. You want to do your keyword research, you want to identify potential target term at least one if not a couple more and then optimize your article for that word because you don’t want to not optimize for any word and hope that Google will discover it for some term.

I think the smart thing to do is try to identify potential even if it’s long tail or however long tail, just think of a search term that people could want to search for something that you are writing about and that is a word no matter how short or how long but try to optimize for at least a few words.

So, once you have got that basics that in this pre-publishing phase, then we move on to what you can do post publishing. Now, post publishing is, there are many things that you could do after you’ve published your article. Now, the first thing, I’m going to go step wise. These are the things that you can do literally step by step.

The first thing that you can do and should do is internal linking. Now, what do I mean by internal linking. You have many other pieces of content, you have many pages on your site and you will invariably find at least one if not many more places where you can internally link with the appropriate anchor text keeping the target keyword that you’ve in mind.

Remember the previous step, I told you about keyword optimization. Now, when I mention keyword optimization, I am hoping that you’ve figured out at least a few terms. Keep those few terms in mind and then internally link from any other blog post, any other article, any other page on your site to this topic. So, internal linking is super super important.

Now once you have got that right, then outreach. Now, outreach is essentially reaching out to the influencers who you have mentioned. Remember my point 1 telling them that you have mentioned them. If you haven’t mentioned any influencers, there is also another way to outreach is reach out to potential people who you think would be interested in mentioning your article. There are many related bloggers in the industry, there are many people who would be interested in knowing if you written a fabulous case study.

Manually actually reach out to them, tell them I have written this fabulous piece, would you mind sharing it or would you mind reviewing it? You never know such thing works it has worked for me, it can work for you as well. So, it’s something that you want to keep in mind.

Now after you have done outreach, you want to tap into your captive audience. I am assuming that you are always figuring out ways to capture email addresses, capture the people who are reading your blog post and converting them in to email leads. Once you have done that, you do not want to ever ignore them. You want to communicate to them as often as possible. So every couple of posts if not every post depends on how frequently you post, you want to send down newsletters.

I have seen so many blogs and I will admit we have been guilty ourselves for not sending out enough newsletters to our audience. We hope that they will come and check our blog but that doesn’t happen very often. You’ve got to reach out to them, tell them that ok we have this post ready or couple of posts ready why don’t you check them out?

Now, once you have promoted it internally to your captive audience, the next set of captive audience you have is on your social channels. I am assuming you have a Facebook and a Twitter profile, those are the basic channels. Some of you are active on LinkedIn. So depends whatever social channels you have within your control, Facebook and Twitter are given, so whatever communities that you are part of, it’s almost necessary that you should promote it on those social channels.

Now, what next? This is something people don’t do often enough. There are many content curation communities, Take reddit alone. Reddit alone has many many sub reddits. You will definitely definitely find atleast one sub reddit under which you can possibly promote this article. You don’t want to be out and out spammy, but you can promote it out there.

Apart from that like in the SEO industry, there is inbound.org, there is growth hackers and there are many others. So, you will find content curation communities within your industry which you can submit your article to and hopefully it gets enough upvotes, gets enough traction and then you can get enough visibility as well.

Now, what next can you do? This is something very few people do. You will find opportunities where your article is competing with many articles but not necessarily in the same way.  You have expressed your opinion in your own unique manner, so go to the other articles and possibly do this in the least spammy way possible. Comment on their blog post saying that you’ve also published a relevant article and this is in possibly you can include a link so that link could link back to your article and you could gain some traffic. I have personally benefited from this tactic and I will admit not all my comments have been approved but for the effort put in and the traffic I got, I think it was worth it.

So then after that something that you should definitely consider doing is participate in Q&A sites and forums. Now, what do I mean by Q&A sites is Quora is one example which I have personally used very often so whenever I have seen a question on Quora that I find an article of ours is relevant, I will give it a snippet of my blog post and then also include a link to the article. Similarly in forums, if there is an opportunity. Again you don’t want to be unnecessarily just saying this ok I have written this great article, this should be in response to possibly a question that someone has. So be smart, don’t go about spamming you will may be even get your profile banned.

Then, if your article you think has possibility of gaining wide traction, you do want to consider paid promotion. Now, what do I mean by paid promotion? I mean you can advertise on Facebook, you can advertise on platforms like, if depends on your industry, Stumbleupon, there is Outbrain, there is Taboola. We’ll list some more in the blog post or in the show notes out here but essentially consider that sometimes you do need to promote, if you don’t have enough of a captive audience, if you don’t have enough people coming to your blog anyway, you do want to consider extending your reach beyond your captive audience by actually paying.

There is no harm paying for promotion. Content promotion can build brand loyalty and go a long way in building your newsletter base. So, I think that’s something that you definitely want to consider and the last thing is a bit advanced, it’s very tough so that’s why I have kept it as last thing that you should do and that’s what is backlink analysis.

Backlink analysis is basically where you analyze the backlinks of all articles who are competing with for the target term that you are ranking for. Now, if you writing for negotiate a lease agreement, you want to analyse the backlinks of all the articles who ranking for that term and then see that who is linking to those articles, if they are linking to them there must be a reason they are linking to them so may be reach out to those people and tell them that you also have written an article.

This is a shot in the dark. You might not find opportunities directly but it’s worth a try if nothing else is working for you. This might be the last resort that something you want to look at. So there you go, 11 things that you could do to promote and amplify your content.