40 Really Simple Content Promotion Strategies

You’ve written a post designed to take organic traffic by storm. What do you do next? Sit back and wait for the SEO goodness to do its thing? No! You should immediately be thinking about content promotion strategies!

Don’t have any of your own? No problem!

This post details 40 content promotion strategies that you can literally steal and apply to your own content.

These first 11 content promotion techniques I deemed as the quick wins for my client.

You can achieve these with relative ease and they don’t take up much time. If you need immediate traffic, here’s how to promote your content.

A word of advice, you might want to write these down. But, don’t worry, I’ve done that for you. At the end of the post, you can borrow my content promotion matrix to tick off each strategy as you go.

 Action: Craft a compelling post to share on your company’s Twitter account. Include the following:

Of course, you can (and should) vary your format – but this is a great format to get started.

When crafted, schedule in a tool like Buffer or Social Pilot at the suggested best time for posting.

As you post more, social media management and reputation management tools will tell you the best time to reach your audience.

The result? Check out the engagement one hour since tweeting.

 Action: Craft a compelling post to share on your company’s LinkedIn account. Include the following:

Sounds a lot like the first Twitter strategy?

That’s because it is.

What makes Twitter and LinkedIn different?
Your audience.

I’ve always found that I prefer Twitter for engaging with people and content. But, my content gets way more engagement on LinkedIn.

Do use the same template but be aware of the different personas who are passively scrolling through LinkedIn.

 Action: Craft a compelling post to share on your company’s Facebook account. Include the following:

Getting a little repetitive now, isn’t it?

Well, I did say they were quick wins!

Do use the same format and strategy here when sharing on Facebook. But again, be aware of the type of audience you may have on Facebook.

Action: If you don’t have a Medium account, go to Medium, and create one.

Next, copy and paste your latest content into a new post. Literally.

I know it sounds like plagiarism but here’s the best part… Add a canonical link and all traffic gets credited to the site you copied the content from.

When you publish the same article across different sites, search engines use canonical links to determine and prioritise the original source of the content.

Using canonical links tells the search engine that this piece of content isn’t the original and redirects it to find the original source.

Hey presto! A free traffic source with little effort!

How about that for a quick win?

Action: Find (or create) a relevant Reddit community.

Share your content in it.

Simple, right?

You will need to check out the community guidelines of each subreddit (that’s the name for different sections of Reddit). Some don’t appreciate promotional content or a large number of links in posts.

If you violate these guidelines, you could be banned from the subreddit.

Action: Search Reddit for relevant posts already created and comment on them.

Make sure you only comment with something comment-worthy. It’s no good spamming subreddits in hope that you get some clicks.

Quality, targeted comments with a call to view your content for more information serve as a great way to engage with your audience and generate traffic.

Example: Over the last five months, I’ve spent a small amount of time searching for relevant subreddits to share content. For the small effort expended, the results pay back the time spent.

Action: Like Reddit, search Quora for questions that your content answers.

When answering the question, make sure it’s a quality response and follow up with a link to your content that provides more information.

One word of warning is not to leave links in every answer. Quora is quite tight on its community guidelines and polices anything flagged as spam or overpromotion.

Some marketers have found success in simply answering questions without using links to their content. While successful in the long term, it’s not an easy win to generate more quality traffic to your content.

Action: Assemble an email or email newsletter showcasing your latest content.

This could be your latest blog post or a collection of all the content you produced over the course of the last month. How often and how you create this email is up to you.

Ask 10 marketers the best practice and you’ll get 10 different answers. What matters is that you do email your email audience.

These are the people who opted in to receiving your content. They are expecting it and are often your most likely next customers.

Marketers often suggest the email list is the best source of all content marketing because you own the email list. (Unlike SEO, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc which are all owned by other companies).

Think you’re finished here? Not so fast! When your email audience has dwindled, you can use your content (new or existing) for re-engagement purposes.

Action: When you’ve emailed your subscriber list (or before), send a personalised email out to everybody you mentioned in the article.

If you used research from a brand, email its marketing manager. If you’ve quoted an influencer, send an email to notify them. Even if you haven’t interviewed them, they will be appreciative of the coverage.

Action: Assuming you are the author or producer of the content, you’ve probably shared it on your personal LinkedIn profile.

If you haven’t, always do this! LinkedIn loves content from people as well as company pages.

When you’ve posted on LinkedIn and gained some likes and comments, set your successful LinkedIn posts as “featured” on your profile.

To do this, click into the post, hit the …, and choose *Feature on top of profile*.

Action: Find forums specific to your industry.

If you’re new to your industry, this may take some time to figure out where your readers hang out. But, it’s likely the places you also look for research and help.

You should already be in these forums looking for questions you can answer (and use them for your own content ideas).

Example: In the communication and collaboration industry, Microsoft Teams is a big deal. Most of the Mio customers will also be Microsoft Teams customers. So, a gold mine for both content ideas and content promotion is the Microsoft Teams Community Forum.

Action: There’s always been a stigma in the B2B marketing world about using Instagram for content promotion. I bring to attention a quote from a former manager, “People like Dave (not really called Dave but represented a persona) aren’t scrolling through Facebook and Instagram for work purposes.” Well, no they aren’t. But, Dave doesn’t watch TV to buy a new washing machine or Playstation either.

Instagram ads and Facebook ads, even during the coronavirus pandemic have seen spends rise and rise.

We (even Dave) use social media more than ever before.

Don’t forget the consumer platforms when it comes to content promotion.

You can even use Instagram Reels for business now.

The next batch takes some crafting before executing. As you read through the content promotion techniques, it should become clear why. These aren’t month-long projects but you do need to spend some time to get the theory right before you execute.

Action: Just because you’re the author of a blog post doesn’t mean you’re the only person that should share it. But, convincing other members of your team/organisation is often harder than getting a random stranger to share your content.

Example: Gail Axelrod, Director of Content Marketing at Drift shares insight from Drift’s marketing playbook, This Won’t Scale. Play #14 is to Make Marketing Everyone’s Job.

How many times have you posted your latest content in a Slack channel and nobody has shared it?

What you need to start doing here, as the Drift playbook suggests, is to explain why it’s important to share the content. Explain what the content is about, the purpose, and why it’s important for them to share. Even better, convince them to read it and they’ll be more inclined to share it.

Drift calls this internal marketing. It might take place in your weekly sales meeting, over a Slack channel, or a video call. Whatever your medium, make sure you spend time on internal marketing to leverage employee’s Twitter accounts.

Action: Replicate the same action you took for your team’s personal Twitter accounts and make it work for LinkedIn. Here, the strategy and internal marketing is more important than the execution.

Yes, it would be lovely to have both. But, what you ask your non-marketing coworkers to do for you should be limited.

What you can do is write the post for them.

Once you’ve conveyed the importance of what marketing does and why they should promote this content, try writing a post and asking everyone to share the same thing. You might get pushback because people want to be authentic – this is even better. It means they’ve bought into your internal marketing.

Action: Replicate the same action you took for your team’s personal Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and make it work for Facebook.

Again, the strategy and internal marketing is more important than the execution. As you’ve already asked for your coworkers to share on Twitter and LinkedIn at this point, focus on making your content easy to share on Facebook.

Make sure you have share buttons that are easy to find and use within your content.

Depending on the topics of your content, consider using plugins to enable sharing to non-obvious platforms. In this case, the post is about Microsoft Teams so I included a button to share straight to Microsoft Teams.

Action: We’re still not done with LinkedIn at this point. When you’ve exhausted your company page, personal profile, and employee’s LinkedIn pages, there are two more ways you can use LinkedIn in your content promotion strategy. The next is LinkedIn groups.

LinkedIn groups are communities dedicate to one specific topic. According to Smartbug, there are over two million LinkedIn groups active today. So, it would be remiss to overlook the power of these.

Example: First, you need to find and join a relevant LinkedIn group.

In the LinkedIn search bar, type your content topic(s).

Once you’re in the group, watch the page for a few days to learn how users behave. Some groups are great for content promotion and encourage it every day. Others are more strict and you should use them for small amounts of promotion when you produce something really big.

Action: Like LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups can prove a gold mine for incoming traffic. But, these are often more strict when it comes to any form of promotion. Depending on the moderator(s) of Facebook groups, it might take you some time to get the point where you feel safe to post. Finding the right group is critical here.

You do need to find a group where your audience hangs out. You don’t want to appear a pushy, sales-y imposter with a promotion agenda.

Example: My local village has a Facebook group for the latest news and events. Once an established member, Nicky Phillips – who we can assume works at or is an advocate for Screech Owl Sanctuary – posted this semi-promotional post in our village group which has 3,600 members.

Action: Flipping back to Twitter, you’ve scheduled as many tweets as you can think of and asked your coworkers to share on theirs.

Next, create a Twitter thread telling the story of your content. In some cases, you might even but using your content as the Twitter thread.

Action: When you’ve exhausted your social media posts for a specific piece of content, create a promotional video explaining what your content is about.

Like the Instagram strategy, this isn’t a content promotion strategy I regularly use. But, that’s on me. I’ve seen it done really well time and time again.

Example: Andy Crestodina uses his social media to showcase videos telling his audience what his latest content is about. When promoting Orbit Media’s latest blogging statistics, he created the video below. Medium effort to shoot the video, edit, compress, then share. But, when done well, it’s an obvious content promotion strategy.

Action: Are you using your content marketing materials internally?

Think back to the last time someone in your sales team asked you to create a one-pager on a certain topic.

Or if you had the latest version of XYZ?

If your engaged prospects or clients are asking you for these materials, these should be topics and assets covered in your content marketing anyway.

If you’re creating content that your audience is asking for, you’ve made this content promotion strategy incredibly easy.

Example: Next time your sales team asks for you a document or presentation covering a topic, find the most relevant blog post or infographic. If it needs updating, update it! Then use this content as part of your sales enablement process. Rather than creating something new each time, leverage your existing content marketing assets.

Action: The most old-fashioned content promotion strategy is literally asking someone to read your content.

The modern way of asking someone to read or promote your content is to tag them on social media. The action itself is the shortest content promotion strategy in this post but it lives in the “medium effort” section because you need to research who you’ll be tagging.

Example: If you’ve used someone’s research or quote, you should always tag them to let them know.

A more tactical approach is to target influencers in your niche. If you have a relationship with these people already, you’re a step ahead and can take a warmer approach.

The colder approach, but worthwhile pursuing, is to search relevant hashtags and find the top profiles on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can see that John Singelman is the only person on Twitter with #contentpromotion in his profile. So, this is a bad example for finding people who could be “content promotion influencers.” But, clicking on Top will provide you with the highest-engaged posts with #contentpromotion included.

These are the sort of people you can reach out to with your targeted sharing. A simple reply to the tweet or a new tweet mentioned their previous article could form a new relationship or leverage their audience.

Action: When someone shares your content on Twitter, thank them on LinkedIn to increase your reach.

How do you find out who shared your content on Twitter?

Type in your blog or site URL into the search bar on Twitter.

You can search by top or latest to find out who got the best engagement and who the latest person to share your content is. You can either search your whole domain or the full URL of your latest piece of content.

Example: After creating an influencer infographic, almost everybody mentioned shared it on Twitter. I took screenshots of everybody who shared it and created a LinkedIn post thanking everybody for sharing it.

Action: Find a Twitter chat relevant to your niche and become a regular.

Once you’ve established your presence in the Twitter chat, drop in a link to some content you’ve produced. There’s the caveat here that it needs to be relevant to the Twitter chat you’re participating in.

Action: If you have a large content marketing team, you might already have an Outreach Manager who looks after building links to your content. If you don’t, and don’t have time to build a formal link building strategy, there are some easy steps to identify who to reach out to.

Without any strategy for link building, you could spend hours crafting emails to publications who don’t reply.

The easiest link building tactic is to reach out to publications who have mentioned you in their post. Maybe you’ve been included in an expert round-up or a “Top 100” list of whatever it is you do.

Rather than just being included in the post, reach out to the author or editor and ask for a link to a specific piece of content you’ve created on the topic.

This final grouping of content promotion techniques may put you off due to the length of time to execute. If your content is already high-performing, you could be forgiven for skipping this step completely. But, if you’re still not seeing organic traffic on a regular basis, and you know your content will be useful to even more people, these content promotion techniques are worth having in the back (or front) of your mind.

Action: Here we come to the section on repurposing content. Content repurposing is the process of taking an existing piece of content and making something else from it. You could repurpose all the content or choose to use specific elements in a new medium.

For example, you might have a successful blog post that you could turn into a podcast episode. Or vice versa. There is no limit to repurposing content. One thing that is certain is you should be doing it.

Action: If graphics are a main source of content, you’re probably using Pinterest in your content promotion strategy already. If you’re not, remember what we said about repurposing content?

Find a blog post that really drills into a topic or one that could benefit from adding visuals to explain a process. I’m not going to pretend that I even know where to start when it comes to graphic design but you can find great freelancers on Twitter and LinkedIn with a simple search.

If your budget is lower than a freelancer for a few hundred pounds per day, try outsourcing or using platforms like Fiverr.

If you are graphics first, don’t forget you can repurpose the other way too. Every infographic you create could have a comprehensive blog post to go with it.

Action: Before you publish your next piece of content, take the time to sign up to Google News. Google now suggests that you don’t need to sign up to appear, but there’s no harm in making sure. Once you’re signed up, try out Apple News too. It’s quick to sign up but hard to get featured.

Action: For every piece of content you create for your site, create a guest post on another site. This sounds simple enough in principle but can become a tiresome process if you start writing guest posts and they don’t get accepted by your desired publication. Follow these steps to make your guest posting process easier:

The timing element is important here so you don’t wait weeks for a response. If you don’t get a response within your timescale, go and pitch your next priority site.

When someone says yes, ask for their guidelines. Lots of writers make the error of writing a post only to have to rewrite it with the publication’s specific tone, keywords, or format.

Finally, make sure you spend as much time (or more) on the guest post. Again, lots of writers make the mistake of rushing a guest post because they don’t view it as important because it won’t be on their site.

They could not be more wrong!

There are lots of reasons for this: building relationships, SEO rankings, referral traffic, but one less obvious is that it could turn out to be your best conversion source.

For example, I posted on the Microsoft Teams Community Blog and it’s the featured post. At the end of the first hour, it had over 1,000 views thanks to Microsoft’s own promotion strategy.

Andy Crestodina even recommends an “evil twin” guest post. If you write about the Best Marketing Podcasts then write a guest post somewhere else about the Worst Marketing Podcasts! Okay, maybe not that evil but you get the point.

Talking of podcasts, let’s explore how you can repurpose your content as a podcast. Sometimes repurposing can act as a content promotion strategy of its own.

Action: Take your high-volume search posts and create podcast episodes discussing the topics at length. You might not have the first idea where to start when it comes to creating a podcast. Don’t worry; neither did I.

But, I now have two podcasts, one on its second series, two sponsors, and have been a guest on many other podcasts. If you’re unsure of how to get started, there’s a wealth of starting a podcast content out there. Some of the basic items you’ll need include:

You can even start a podcast from home!

Action: Add variety by creating video podcasts as well as audio podcasts.

You might already know whether your audience prefers to consume their podcasts via audio or video. If you don’t, it’s worth the experiment to find out which gains the most traction.

As well as writing a guest post about his comparison sheet, he created this video where he ran through how he made the sheet and ran down each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses.

This next content promotion technique is included in larger effort projects because it involves a lot of trial and error.

The process of answering a HARO (Help A Reporter Out) question is quick and easy.

But, you might need to answer 10 before you get your first bite.

Action: Sign up to HARO and choose your niche interests. Then, wait for the three-times-a-day email to arrive in your inbox.

When the email arrives, browse the questions that reports and marketers are asking. If one is relevant to you, answer it!

In your answer, include any links to content you’ve produced (on your site or as guest content). General practice is to include your author bio with a link to the company you work for. You can be strategic here and include a blog post in your company name if it’s relevant to the question.

Example: Belynda Cianci created a round-up blog post for Databox using answers to a question she asked on HARO. She asked for tips on How to Create a Marketing Report. You can see in the screenshot above that my response includes my job title and company. The company includes a backlink to one of our landing pages.

Action: Add a pop-up to high-traffic blog posts advertising your latest content. We typically use pop-ups for driving sign-ups to our email lists or requesting demos. But these often glean low conversion rates.

Why not offer the reader some relevant content to what they are reading?

Like when you add an internal link to your blog post, the goal here is to keep the reader on your site.

Example: Use an exit intent pop-up if your reader hasn’t clicked your desired call to action.

So, instead of asking the reader to sign up for a free trial: Ask them to keep on reading: And if you’re brave, don’t bother asking for an email address at this point.

Lots of marketers get stuck (or scared) when it comes to un-gating content. If your goal is to keep the reader on the page, make it a simple experience.

Drop the email gate in this case and save it for driving attendance to virtual events and email sign-up forms.

Action: For long-form content, take your existing work and either self-publish or hire a publisher to make your work available on Amazon.

By making your blog, infographics, handbook, available on Amazon, you create the potential for a much wider audience.

Self-publishing isn’t the most daunting task on Amazon as they make it step by step.

But, if you’re short on resources or time, you can find loads of publishing experts who exist to do that element for you. As long as your content exists, you can turn it into an eBook.

Action: If you create user-generated content, like surveying customers or running Twitter competitions, you can use the prize-giving or the “acceptance of contribution” communication as a content promotion strategy.

Example: When we surveyed 200 IT Managers for the 2019 Workplace Messaging Report, we made a landing page instead of presenting the data in graphs. Once happy with the design, I emailed every respondent thanking them and included a link to the content we’d created with their responses.

This was a quick way to get 200 views on our content. It was also a passive way of gaining potential social media shares.

If something is shareable – like beautifully shareable – at least one of those 200 is going to share with their audience.

Expert or influencer round-ups are a sure-fire way to get other people to share your content. Assuming you’ve created the content already, or hired a copywriter to do so, the promotion strategy is simple.

Action(s): Email everyone who contributed a quote or paragraph to your round-up post. Inform them that the post is live, provide the link, and ask them if they wouldn’t mind sharing it on their social media.

Told you it was simple, didn’t I? Sure, not everyone will oblige but we can get around that.

Next up, share your post on Twitter as you would for run-rate blog posts. Only this time, thank each contributor for helping and tag them in the tweet.

If you want to be inconspicuous, share an image, and tag them in the image. They’ll still get a notification and it won’t look so obvious to onlookers.

If it’s a personal blog post or one written by a specific author, a thank you tweet also works.

Action: Identify websites that rank for your niche and ask them to link to your content.

Sounds easy, right? Well, like guest posting, this involves a lot of trial and error.

Be prepared to be ignored by 95% of the people you reach out to.

Some sites exist without SEO in mind so the editor you email will have no idea what you’re talking about or why you want a link on their site. Others may have a no link policy because of the unproven rule that linking away from your site is bad for SEO.

While link building is a common practice for building page authority, you can tailor your approach to be a content promotion strategy.

Example: When you find a page that writes about your topic, reach out to the writer and ask them if they are happy to link back to the content you created.

To go a step further, and only when your content is super useful to their reader, ask them if they will embed your content in theirs.

Here’s what I mean: If you create video content, upload it to YouTube and ask the writer to embed your YouTube link. You can do the same with blog posts.

Action: Make something that shows your audience how and why you made your latest piece of content.

It could be an explainer video walking through how you assembled your latest blog post. You might want to delve into the research process for your latest benchmarking report.

This doesn’t have to be war and peace either.

Twitter threads or even a single tweet work as great vehicles for behind-the-scenes content.

Not the most interesting read for the layperson but the right audience can geek out if they’re interested in your brand or industry.

A better example is that of Kevan Lee, VP of Marketing at Buffer. Kevan has 20k+ followers on Twitter. We’re safe to assume most of these are marketers. So behind-the-scenes content like this is as valuable, if not more, than the “content” Buffer produces.

Action: Find a “network” in your niche and share content when relevant.

This becomes a quick win once you’re in the network. But finding the right network where people read your content is another matter.

Example: I know that during #ContentClubUK, something I’ve written may be useful. If it is, I share it to back up my answer to the question. At the same time, I also know lots of my marketing and freelancer peers have created great content on regular topics that come up.

The most important thing here is to share what is relevant and become a regular in the network. Don’t treat this relationship as a one-off Twitter chat.

If you’re a face that appears once and dumps a link to your latest blog post, you won’t get any clicks. But, by becoming a trusted member of the community, you stand a much better chance of getting the click.

And it’s not just social media where you can apply this content promotion strategy. Try forums, virtual meet-ups, or even face-to-face meet-ups.

What’s to stop you from showing someone a blog post in real life? Or sending them the link to read on the train home?

Content promotion strategies are everywhere. There’s almost no excuse to get your content seen these days.

If you are struggling with content promotion or even content creation, I must shout out PR Fire, who has been kind enough to give me carte blanche for this enormous blog post. You can get your press release distributed for just £50. That wasn’t even one of the content promotion strategies we discussed! So make that #41.

Thanks for sticking with me. It’s been a whirl. 👍 Dominic Kent.