Publishing Сontent is Half the Battle: Here is The Other Half

Many factors influence the success of your content: a shareable and clickable headline, the quality of your content and the visual assets to support it. But more often than not, people overlook one of the most important part: distribution. Getting that content in front of your target audience. Publishing content is just the beginning...

Start with your team

The first step to effectively distribute your content is to share it with your coworkers and friends. If they don’t support your writing, who else will? If you have an internal chat or email group at work, share away.

Pro tip: your team is also super helpful at pointing out typos, broken links, etc.

Share on all the networks

The question is not whether you should post your content on all the social networks (yes you should), but how to optimize your updates for better distribution.

For example, on LinkedIn you probably want to write a few lines about the context of your post. It will encourage people to comment (even if they didn’t read the post) and thus share it with their own connections at the same time.

On a visual network like Pinterest, you want to pick the best images of your post and use keywords as well as hashtags in the description. Pinterest works pretty much like a search engine, especially with the roll-out of their new Guided Search feature.

On Twitter, you may mention a person or a company that’s included in the post to increase your odds of getting a few retweets. You should also share more than once to reach different time zones and different usage patterns, as your tweet’s half life is about 3 hours on average.

There are many other examples but the key here is to systematically post everywhere and adapt your updates to the best practices of each network. The team at Buffer knows a lot about social sharing so I highly recommend you to check out their blog on the matter.

Share with communities

If you actively participate in a web community (i.e.: a link sharing community like inbound.org) by curating great content and adding to the discussion, there is no shame in sharing your own articles once in a while. If people care about your opinion in the form of comments, they will probably be interested to read your blog post as well.

But you have to pick the right community for the right post. In the long term, it will only hurt your reputation if you share irrelevant content.

Build a mailing list

Think about it: if you’re not building a mailing list, you have to rebuild your audience from scratch every single day. Sure you do have Twitter, Facebook and Google+ followers, but will they always catch your post? Will Facebook even show it to them?

By building a mailing list, you make sure that your posts are always delivered to your readers. You can then spend more time growing your audience instead of trying to reach the same people over and over again.

To sum it all up

While these tips won’t turn every piece of content into a viral phenomenon, a good distribution strategy is the only way you’ll truly connect with your audience. By leveraging each channel’s strengths and understanding its weaknesses, you can set yourself up for content marketing success.

What is your most effective distribution channel? Please share in the comments section!