When Derek Halpern talks about the 80/20 rule in terms of content production and promotion, you could be forgiven for glancing at those figures and presuming the larger number refers to the planning, and writing, of blog posts, articles and the like.
However, Halpern actually advocates spending 80% of your time promoting content, saying: “It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more.” But, why is this? And how can good content promotion shoot you up the Google rankings?
Direct content promotion
First of all, we should outline that the reason you’re creating content is to generate traffic to your site. Therefore, you should disseminate it to as wide a range of people as possible. Neil Patel recommends emailing, tweeting and Facebooking content on the day it goes live, then diversifying your promotion as the week goes on, sharing excerpts on Twitter, posting on LinkedIn groups and responding to user comments on the post.
New, fresh content helps boost your position in the SERPs, and with Google increasingly taking social media into account, you should ensure you promote across all platforms.
Indirect content promotion
As well as promoting your content via your own channels, you should also look to build relationships in your industry – this helps to enhance your brand credibility, and makes you look like a knowledgeable source of information: this, of course, is the image you want to portray on Google, and the search engine is always on the lookout for this, rewarding sites that do appear authoritative.
Ways of indirectly promoting your content include: reaching out to influencers and asking them to share your content; guest blogging for authority sites in your industry or advertising.
Native advertising
Especially in the UK, Native advertising is a big business, with over £200m spent on native ads in the first half of 2014. Native ads are the answer to the modern market’s distaste for invasive advertising; instead, promotional material is ‘hidden’ in the form of content posted on a publisher’s website, in their house style. Here are several particularly effective examples.
Native advertising can help to boost SEO due to the fact it provides useful, quality content and, more often than not, includes inbound links to your site.
Summary
Here’s a heads-up: unless you’re the Guardian, the New York Times or a website with similar authority, people aren’t going to just start reading your content en masse; you need to put a little work into your content promotion.
Content marketing isn’t a precise science, and you can never guarantee a ‘supercharge’ in your SEO, but if you start with the tips above and work from there, you should soon see the benefits, no matter how big or small they are.
