You’ve written your best blog post yet. You share insightful knowledge and you think your clients and prospects will value the information. Unfortunately, in the overcrowded digital space that is the Internet, you’ll need to do more than hit “publish” on your post for people to find and read it. This is where content distribution comes into play.
Here are four easy ways you can maximize your content distribution so you can get more eyes on your content.
1. Post More Than Once on Social Media
Some of the top thought leaders and content gurus swear by posting the same blog post upwards of six times on social media over the course of several months. Because new news is old news less than a day after its initial posting, there’s a good chance a large portion of your audience never saw the post.
After sharing your blog post on social media, use a social media manager to schedule the post several more times over the course of the next three or four months. At FMG Suite, our Social Foundation tool will soon offer custom posting and scheduling capabilities, but you can also use a tool like Buffer or Edgar to automatically re-share past content.
2. Reach Out to Strategic Partners
If you work with estate planning attorneys, CPAs, property and casualty insurance agents, or any other professionals, send your post to them and encourage them to share with their networks. This works best if your article is related to their field of expertise. For example, if you write a post called “5 Steps for Getting Started with Estate Planning,” you may share it with any estate planning attorneys. They’ll be more inclined to share it with their network and link back to your website.
Beyond strategic partners, consider reaching out to industry influencers. If you specialize in serving Millennials, search for popular budgeting and finance blogs that also cater to this market. Email them and see if they’d be willing to share your post on their social media, or if they would consider reposting on their blog. Bloggers are usually more than happy to share relevant content on their social media.
3. Make it Easy for Readers to Share Your Post
Have you ever read an article and stumbled upon a quote, stat, or sentence that wanted to share with your friends or family? Click to Tweet makes it easy for your readers to share snippets of your post and drive traffic to your website. Click to Tweet is easy to use and free. You can track how many people share pieces of your content to see which elements perform best and are most engaging to your readers.
Beyond Twitter promotion, AddThis is a tool you can add to your blog so readers can share the post on any network of their choice, from Facebook and LinkedIn to email. You can install this plugin on your website in a few simple steps. If you use FMG Suite, our blog platform automatically includes this feature, saving you a step!
4. Notify Your Email Contacts
One of the first things you should do every time you publish a new post is email it to your contacts. Hopefully you feature newsletter sign-ups or similar forms on your website so you can build your email list. The larger the list, the greater your impact. There are several tools, such as MailChimp, you can use to automatically share a blog post when you publish. If you use FMG Suite, we make it easy to share your blog via email and social media. Once you publish a post, you’ll have the option to share on both platforms.
Within your email and blog post, encourage your readers to share the post with their friends. Sometimes a few words of encouragement are all it takes to inspire someone to forward the email to a friend.
Blogging offers endless opportunities for more website traffic and social media interactions. Think of writing your post as just one step within your overall content strategy and factor in time to maximize each post’s distribution.
