When I wrote my first book, back in 2006, I mistakenly believed that the hard part was over once I submitted the 40,000-word manuscript to the publisher.
In fact, the tough part was only just getting started.
Whether you’ve written a book or a blog, published a podcast or created a video, you need a way to share the content with your audience.
After all, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
We don’t need to get too philosophical for this one – any content you publish needs to find its way to your desired audience for it to have a meaningful impact.
In this blog post, I’m sharing some suggestions for getting your blog, podcast or video to your audience once you’ve pressed publish.
1 – Optimise for search engines
Organic traffic is a fantastic result when you public content online.
If someone is searching for a relevant keyword phrase and they find your content, they are already primed to read, listen or watch your creation.
Most modern website content management systems (including our favourite, WordPress) are pretty good at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) right out of the box. You can also add plugins (we like Yoast SEO) to improve the findability of your content.
But it starts with keyword research; identifying phrases that are relevant for your business, in sufficient demand by people searching, and have relatively low competition.
We also favour a strategy that attempts to capture a long-tail of search terms – lots of search results across multiple pieces of content, instead of one star performer. More on this approach another time.
2 – Share it on social media
When you press publish, a quick win is to share your post, podcast or video on your social media channels.
Keep in mind that each social media platform has a different requirement for character count, hashtags and associated graphics.
Don’t simply cross-post content across different platforms. Instead, craft a specific message for each social media channel.
And don’t be scared to share each piece of content on multiple occasions! Twitter, for example, has a relatively short ‘half life’, so your tweet probably won’t be visible for very long, and could be missed by the majority of your followers. Share, and then share again.
3 – Include it in your email newsletter
Your email list is a digital marketing asset you control and you should absolutely be working hard to build that list over time.
Stay in touch with your email subscribers by sharing a newsletter with them at least once a fortnight, but preferably each week.
Feature your best content in each email newsletter and consider curating other valuable content too; your audience will thank you for introducing great content to them, as well as sharing your own great content!
4 – Run paid ads
Getting attention for your content online organically is becoming more challenging over time.
One way to improve the reach of your content, and to put it in front of a new audience, is to pay for ads on different social media platforms.
Here at Bear Content, we’re a fan of running Facebook Ads. Because the mighty Facebook knows so much about its users, it is very effective at placing relevant ads in front of the right people.
Don’t boost posts on Facebook (it’s a bit of a lazy approach to paid ads there, and tends to be a waste of money) but instead set wide parameters and allow Facebook to do the hard work of presenting your content to an audience most likely to take action.
Also, remember to retarget your existing website visitors using a custom audience on Facebook. It’s likely that a prospective customer needs to visit your website on multiple occasions before taking action. Retargeting keeps your brand at the front of their mind, and sharing fresh content with them is a great way to encourage repeated website visits.
5 – Repurpose to create micro-content
Our attention spans are getting shorter!
You might create some fantastic long-form content (a several thousand-word blog post, or 45-minute long podcast conversation, or a 20-minute long video). But who has the time to read, listen or watch that?!
When you go the effort of making longer-form content, make sure you also repurpose it into bite-size chunks, easier for your audience to digest.
Your repurposed content then serves as a compelling introduction to the main content piece and hopefully encourages people to click through to learn more.
6 – Add it to your email signature
If you’re anything like me, you send and receive a LOT of emails each day.
When was the last time you updated your email signature?
It’s a prime piece of digital real estate and including a link to your best fresh content is likely to get that content in front of a new audience, who you don’t necessarily capture via existing social media channels.
7 – Make it easy to share
Include sharing buttons on each website post and add a call to action to your content, asking the reader, listener or viewer to share it.
We like the Better Click to Tweet plugin on WordPress, as a way to encourage people to share your content on Twitter.
Including social sharing buttons is important here too.
You've published some fantastic content. Now what? Here are 8 ways to share your content with a wider audience. Share on X8 – Consider different preferences
I’m pretty unusual (!) in that I equally like to read articles, listen to podcasts and watch videos.
My content consumption style probably leans towards watching videos, on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
But everyone is different!
Make sure that you cater for the different preferences of your audience, but repurposing content as the written word (blogs and articles), spoken word (podcasts) and video.
