Online Marketing Tasks that Matter Most (Part 3): Content Promotion

October 29th, 2012

By Ryan Kettler

In the first two articles on How Anyone Can Get More Results From a Business Website from Boostsuite, we discussed how to create and optimize new content for your website in order to attract more visitors. Today, we will talk about how you can promote that content for maximum results.

Good content requires good promotion. Just because you wrote the world’s greatest article on barbeque sauce does not mean any grilling fanatics will instantly know about it. You need to spread the word. This will drive traffic to your website, it will extend the lifespan of your article and will generate more interest faster than just relying on your existing visitors and the search engines.

Here’s a quick list of places you should be promoting and sharing your article once it’s ready to go:

Create a new page on your website and add the full text of the article to the page
Write a quick blog post introduction to the article and include a link to the full article
Highlight the article in a section of your email newsletter and add a link to the full version
Save the new article page on your website as a PDF file and email it to your sales team. Give them a one line description of the exact problem that the article solves so that they can easily identify which prospects in their pipeline will benefit from receiving it.
Post a short article introduction to your online support community or customer forum
Post the article in one of your LinkedIn Groups and ask for feedback from the group’s members
Create a poll or ask a question about something mentioned in the article on your company’s Facebook page
Create five different iterations of your article’s main headline and post each version on Twitter over a few hours. Include common hashtags that are relevant to the audience and article content.

It’s imperative to include links back to the full text version of the article on your website from each of these places. The goal here is to use promotional channels that you already have and to tease people with the information that they’ll only find by clicking back to the full article on your website.

You don’t need to do all of these at once, but more is always better. If you have only a website and a Twitter account, it’s just fine to begin there. You can always add more social properties later on.

If you write and share good content the search engines will notice it and social users will distribute it, creating more inbound links to your website.

Quality inbound links important

Inbound links are important for search engine optimization as the more quality links you have coming to your website from known sources, the more authority and trustworthiness you have with the search engines. More authority means a higher likelihood the search engines will show your website higher in their results.

Congratulations, just by starting a website content creation, optimization and promotion process your company now has a distinct marketing advantage over most of your competitors. Although most of our suggestions are very simple, most companies fail to even get started.

A small investment of your time into your business’s website is guaranteed to provide more visitors and customers over time at a very low cost. Stay tuned for the next article in this series as we’ll tell you exactly how to measure the progress your website is making as you execute the steps we’ve described so far.

Boostsuite’s founder and CEO, Aaron Houghton is among the entrepreneurial thought-leaders participating in the two-day Startup Summit in Raleigh, Nov. 6-8, where he’ll discuss how to drastically lower the risk you take when you launch your new startup.

Ryan Kettler is Director of Communications for BoostSuite. Ryan is a sports fanatic, beer connoisseur, Internet marketing zealot and live music enthusiast. When he’s not helping BoostSuite customers he can be found sampling the latest IPAs and cheering on his North Carolina State Wolfpack.

BoostSuite is a web marketing optimization product for small business owners. Unlike current products that bewilder and discourage small business owners, BoostSuite allows novice web marketers to build more website traffic and convert more online visitors into customers and leads for their businesses. BoostSuite is free and takes only one minute to set up, is easy to learn, and can be used by anyone.

Online Marketing Tasks that Matter Most (Part 3): Content Promotion

Quality inbound links important

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