If you’ve taken the time to write a well-researched blog post that can educate your reader or inspire them to take action, there’s no reason you can’t get more eyeballs on your content by taking a few simple steps. Defining content success Before we can talk about how to make blogging work for your business, we have to understand the roles blogging, and content marketing in general, play in your business. If we understand that one of the most important roles content plays is to aid the customer journey by moving the reader from one stage of awareness to the next, then we can see how important it is to reach those people. With this in mind, it’s easy to see that a successful blog post is one that moves a subset of the audience from one stage to the next. What successful content marketers do differently Successful content marketers don’t subscribe to the belief that “if you build it, they will come.” They often spend as much time promoting their content as they do creating it, if not more. #2: Share (almost) every post on social media If a post isn’t worthy of sharing across every social media channel your audience frequents, it’s probably not worth writing in the first place. That being said, don’t just start posting the link to your latest “hot-off-the-press” blog post to Facebook and Twitter without a plan. Many online publications are looking for good content — just make sure it’s your strongest work. Suggested articles We’ve all seen the widgets at the bottom of an article that suggest other articles you may be interested in reading. You could also create a help center or knowledge base that links audience questions to articles you’ve published, using a tool like Intercom Articles.
There’s a lot of content created every day — and most of it gains almost no attention.
In 2015, Moz and BuzzSumo looked at more than one million articles published on the web. They found that 75 percent of blog posts had no inbound links, and more than half had two or fewer Facebook interactions.
“It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.” – Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing One Million Articles
And the web publishing environment has only gotten more cluttered. Most content simply never reaches its target audience. It’s no wonder so many people believe that content marketing doesn’t work, even when we have significant evidence to the contrary.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If you’ve taken the time to write a well-researched blog post that can educate your reader or inspire them to take action, there’s no reason you can’t get more eyeballs on your content by taking a few simple steps.
Defining content success
Before we can talk about how to make blogging work for your business, we have to understand the roles blogging, and content marketing in general, play in your business.
It’s useful to think of the customer journey in stages.
Eugene Schwartz did a great job of outlining these stages in the brilliant book Breakthrough Advertising:
- Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.”
- Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for them.
- Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result she wants, but not that your product provides it.
- Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution.
- Completely Unaware: The person has no knowledge of anything except, perhaps, their own identity or opinion.
If we understand that one of the most important roles content plays is to aid the customer journey by moving the reader from one stage of awareness to the next, then we can see how important it is to reach those people.
With this in mind, it’s easy to see that a successful blog post is one that moves a subset of the audience from one stage to the next. In order for that to happen, we need to be sure that we’re driving the right traffic to our content very deliberately.
If you’re interested in learning more about the stages of awareness and how this applies to the content you create, I highly recommend Brian Clark’s Copyblogger article The 5 Types of Prospects You Meet Online, and How to Sell to Each of Them.
What successful content marketers do differently
Successful content marketers don’t subscribe to the belief that “if you build it, they will come.”
They often spend as much time promoting their content as they do creating it, if not more.
Large businesses often have separate roles on their marketing teams for content creation and promotion, or they supplement their in-house team with an agency to ensure each gets the proper attention.
So, what does a practical content promotion strategy look like?
#1: Begin with promotion in mind
Before you even start writing, consider these questions to tailor your content and prepare your promotion:
- Do I have a realistic shot at ranking for search terms related to this content, given the authority of the domain it’s being published on and my ability to generate links?
- What audiences would be interested in this sort of content?
- Where is my target audience already spending time? What are they already reading?
- What’s the most likely stage of awareness for someone interested in this content?
- Is there a specific action we should ask readers to take next?
Answer those questions while you plan,…
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