Ever since I started LeadJoint, the online service for SEO consultants to identify new leads for their business by tracking down websites that have dropped on Google search, I have taken up to content marketing in a big way. This is by far the most effective way to get inbound leads and customers to any online business.
But marketers often confuse content marketing with blogging and guest posting. Publishing an article is not everything. Content marketing is what you do AFTER you publish that wonderful blog post.
The whole objective of content marketing is to make use of your content (either on your in-house blog or as a guest post on a different website) to bring new visitors and leads to your website. Of course, you do not have all the freedom to modify and redistribute content you have published on another website. But depending on where you publish your content and what rights the website owner provides you, here are four things you must do after your blog post gets published.
Share With Community
The first thing you do after publishing a blog post is to share it with your social network. This typically implies Facebook, Twitter, Email, LinkedIn, reddit, etc.
Studies have found that Facebook users engage quite actively during Thursdays and Fridays. On Twitter, the engagement rates are seen to be higher during the weekends. The time of the day your post reaches the community matters too. News and magazine updates (including blog posts) are more likely to be opened during the lunch hours.
Here is how a typical social media plan should be:
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Schedule your posts to be published on Facebook and Twitter 3-4 times over a three day period
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Include hashtags wherever possible
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If a user tweets your link with an opinion, engage in a conversation with them
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Identify LinkedIn groups that cater to your audience and publish your post
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Identify subreddits that cater to your audience or industry and submit your links
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Do not send the article to your newsletter group more than once.
As a best practice, always remember to engage with your audience over these communities non-commercially throughout the week. A rule of thumb is to engage in a helpful manner at least 9 times for every single commercial post or tweet.
Syndicate
One thing that a lot of content marketers fail to do is syndicating their posts. There are multiple reasons for this. For one, a lot of them are simply unaware of the benefits of article syndication. Secondly, there is concern about syndication potentially impacting your website SEO. As Neil Patel points out in this article, syndication, if done incorrectly, can lead to penalties.
There are two ways to get your articles syndicated across the web. The first method is to make use of content syndication networks. This includes services like Outbrain and Taboola where links from the various publishers in the network are cross-promoted over other blogs and websites in the network.
The second method to do it is through actual syndication. Depending on the industry you cater to, there are online magazines and websites that are open to syndicating interesting and useful content from different publishers in the industry. For instance, the articles I write on the LeadJoint blog are related to SEO and business development, and these are often published verbatim on websites like Business2Community and SocialMediaToday.
So how does one identify a list of such websites to syndicate to. Many times, a simple Google search for keywords like "this article originally appeared on" should give you a list of websites that accept article syndication. Once you prepare a list, follow these steps:
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Identify the contact email of the editor
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Write to them about a recent article you have published which you feel is a good fit for syndication
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With their approval, rewrite parts of your article in order to not be seen as duplicate by Google
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Ask the editor if they would allow a rel=canonical in the article body
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If possible, automate this process (some websites allow this) so that each of your new articles can be automatically syndicated. Of course, in this case, you may be able to submit a rewritten piece.
Publishing On Other Platforms
Once you have invested your time and resources into writing a lengthy blog post, one thing that you must definitely follow upon is to repackage this content to suit the various other sources of traffic. This could be all of these different ways:
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Uploading a PDF of the article on Slideshare
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Creating a video of the presentation on YouTube
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Publishing images and infographics to Pinterest
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Submitting a copy of the article as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and SmashWords.
Taken separately, they may appear to not contribute any meaningful amount of traffic. However, a sustained level of contribution through these various can help you build a following over each of these various platforms. The result is that the virality of your articles improve with every new publication. But having said that, there are a few tricks to finding greater success through this strategy.
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Try alternate headlines so that your article content can potentially rank for more than one keyword on Google
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End your presentations and videos with a call to action back to your website. This helps channel these visitors to your website and thus help you possibly convert them as leads
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Amazon does not allow users to submit free ebooks. Since the objective here is to enhance reach, the trick to making ebooks free on Amazon is to make it available for free on Smashwords and allow Amazon to 'price match'.
Sharing Links On Forums & Message Boards
Most business blog articles are intended to answer specific questions or concerns that your customers or subscribers face. For instance, the objective of this very article is to tell business bloggers about the things they must do in order to reach out to more people with their blog posts. To this end, search for forums and communities where questions related to your blog topic has been asked and share helpful information along with a source link back to the blog. In the case of Quora, you also have the option to ask and answer your own question. The objective of this is to trigger a discussion on the topic even if it had not been done before. Additionally, Q&A boards like Yahoo Answers have very good visibility on Google. So answering related questions here might help you be seen by Google users who search on related topics.
All said and done, this is not the be all and end all of content marketing. New strategies to create higher virality are always being developed. For example, one of my customers at LeadJoint once told me how they would often trigger virality of an article by spending a dollar or two on Facebook advertising. Such strategies may not apply to everyone and are yet to be proven winners. I have hence not included them as part of my list. However, newer forms of content marketing are always being tested and executed. Do you have any successful technique outside of what has been posted above? Please feel free to share them in the comments below.
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