The article was originally published on LinkedIn in May 2017 by
Barbara Stawarz-García in Polish.

The simple times for creating online content are behind us. Today, in the times when it’s almost impossible to become a pioneer in your industry, effective promotion, content recycling and distribution are becoming more and more important.

Every day we are flooded with content in different formats. Most of it is created by users themselves, and brands struggle to attract our attention. According to MarketingProfs, every minute we publish:

  • 1 388 blog posts
  • 2,5 million Facebook posts
  • 72 hours of YouTube videos
  • 300 000 Tweets on Twitter
  • 220 000 photos on Instagram

There’s no point in hiding that we’re all tired of all this content. I’ve always said that content marketing is not about creating content factories. it’s not just about creation. Effective content marketing is about giving the consumers what they’re looking for, but also about actually reaching them. It may be in the form of organic or paid campaigns, but most importantly, it has to break through the noise created by everyone else.

Organic means of promotion include:

  • SEO
  • Email marketing
  • Social media
  • Live Promotions
  • Influencers (unpaid)
  • UGC

Paid promotions are:

  • SEM (PPC)
  • Social Media Ads
  • Sponsored articles
  • Paid influencer marketing

Promoting content generates website traffic, increases engagement of the target audience and eventually converts our lead (potential client) towards making the purchase decision.

Key areas of content promotion include building reach, then engaging the audience nurturing leads as means for converting them into sales.

Best practices in content distribution

If you are facing the challenge of planning an efficient campaign to promote and distribute content as an element of your content strategy, don’t forget about:

  • the content promotion calendar (content marketing ecosystem where you can plan the promotion activities for particular forms of content adapted to your desired client persona);
  • segmentation (remember, that not everyone is interested in all kinds of content);
  • adapting the form of content to the particular channel of communication (using the right tone, selling values suitable to the persona for the given channel, e.g. a different tone on LinkedIn and a different one in Snapchat; don’t copy the same content in different channels);
  • analytics and optimisation (measure, analyse, optimise).

Remember that the purpose of your content marketing efforts is to effectively deliver the goals of your strategy.

Don’t be afraid to use clean-cut communication – who you are and what you’re offering – the audience shouldn’t have to figure it out on their own. Adapt the form of content to the level of engagement of your audience (if you’re using marketing automation systems).

Optimising conversion:

  • relevant link to the target action (with CTA)
  • clean-cut and strong CTA

Remember! Your content schedule shouldn’t be longer than 3 months. There’s no place for burning budgets in content marketing, so current analysis allows you to validate the effectiveness of your content and set the direction for your future activities.

How to promote content well?

In order to create less and gain more following, bet on:

  • re-using content (repeated publications in different channels),
  • content recycling (reusing materials in different forms).

From the perspective of Google algorithms redundant content is a sore point, so reusing (in the printed press we would call it reprinting), should be done carefully and in accordance with the good practices which are tolerated by Google.

If you are publishing content again in a different place:

  • you should use a canonical tag (canonical URL),
  • use the “noindex” metatag in the dublicated content,
  • place a link to the original at the beginning of the “reprinted” text (canonical URL will do).

Good practices for re-publishing content

Duplicate content is something that Google really doesn’t like much. So it’s important to be aware of that and follow good practices which will help you instead of causing damage! Remember that:

  • you shouldn’t publish everything many times over – only your best and most engaging content,
  • you should change the heading of your article (different titles for the same text teach us a lot about headings – what works best with our audience),
  • duplicating content should be done no less than 2 weeks from the date of publishing of the original text,
  • duplicating should also include CTA (call-to-action),
  • the duplicated text should be properly adapted visually to the layout of the new outlet (layout, graphics, context),
  • you should not publish great content on poorly done websites with marginal reach; a page with more domain authority gives us more powerful impact (the MozBar plugin can help you check domain authority for the domain you’re looking at).

Well, nothing can replace original content and it makes sense to focus on that. But if you feel stuck and forced to duplicate your existing materials keep the above good practices in mind.

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