Have you ever heard the saying, “content is king”?
If you’ve been anywhere near a computer in recent years it’s been pretty much impossible to avoid.
…and it’s WRONG.
How many of you have spent hours piecing together what you thought was an epic piece of content only to hit publish, wake up in the morning, and….crickets?
Zero social engagement. Zero backlinks. Zero traffic. Zero conversions.
Writing quality content is no longer enough. In fact, it’s less than half the battle. The magic lies in content promotion.
Allow me to break down three content promotion tools that propelled my blog from zero to over 30,000 pageviews in 11 weeks.
I did it with zero marketing budget. Zero connections. A tiny social following. All while working a full time job. And, you can too.
The three tools you’ll soon be mastering have the capabilities to drive thousands of people to your pages — and I’m going to show you step-by-step how to do it.
(I have a new post on the Digital Marketer blog! Check out my template for creating a search and social media powerhouse blog post here.)
Let’s get started.
#1 Snip.ly
Their tagline sums it up perfectly: “Attach a call-to-action to every link you share.”
You can piggyback on a proven piece of content, written by a well-known influencer/ brand in your industry, and use it to drive traffic to your site.
Here’s how to do it.
Log in to Snip.ly and find a popular piece of content that is related to your new blog post.
I wanted to leverage Snip.ly to promote my guide to identifying and recovering from Google penalties.
First, head over to Google and enter a search keyword similar to the title of your post. I start with the content that is ranking #1.
This content most likely has a large number of quality links pointing to it, plus some solid social engagement.
As expected, the post received a lot of social engagement.
This is the type of content you want to curate with Snip.ly.
Before you start snipping, I would recommend checking out Buzzsumo.
Buzzsumo is a great free tool you can use to uncover trending content on social media.
Head over to Buzzsumo, click the “top content” tab, filter by “article” and enter a keyword related to your content.
Make sure you have it set to return results for the past month.
You’ll see a list of posts along with the number of social shares broken down by individual channels.
Pay close attention to the specific channels that are generating the most social engagement. This will highlight which social channels to direct your focus towards.
Copy the URL of the content and paste it into Snip.ly.
Snip it!
Here comes the power play…
Customize the way you want your snip to appear.
Select the “Button” action type, this will place a CTA button on the curated content that will direct people back to your site.
The key is to write an attention-grabbing message that communicates added value to the reader.
Customize the button text and enter your destination URL.
Copy your Snip.ly link.
Use the social networks you’re engaging on and share the URL:
- Google Plus
Bonus Tip: When you’re sharing snipped content, be sure to mention the source of your curated content and include a relevant hashtag.
Notify influencers that you have shared their content and tap into their large social audiences.
A great thing about Snip.ly is its clean and simple analytics reporting. For each snip you have created it shows the number of clicks and the conversions.
45 people clicked the Snip.ly link I shared on Twitter, and 26 of those people clicked through to my website.
Not bad for a minute of my time.
For a 60-day test, only sharing my Snip.ly URLs on Twitter, I received 543 visits to my site.
To make the whole snipping process even more efficient, the team over at Snip.ly have created a slick chrome extension so you can snip content on the fly.
#2 Buzzbundle
I have two “secret” weapons when it comes to content promotion, and Buzzbundle is one of them.
This tool is great for both content promotion and link building. It allows you to monitor and track conversations related to specific keywords and brand mentions across a number of channels:
- Blogs
- Social networks
- Forums
- Q&A sites
It allows you to find and engage in conversations as they are happening. Many of which you would never have been able to uncover using many of the well-known tools everyone else is using.
This is a competitive edge you can’t afford to not take advantage of.
Here’s how to do it.
Once you’ve installed the free BuzzBundle desktop application, open it up and click “create new project”.
Next, hit “create new stream” and enter the keywords and URLs you want to track.
At the time of this post, Venchito Tampon, a blogger at DigitalPhilippines, had released a content promotion post that was generating a ton of social engagement.
It makes sense to monitor this URL for any opportunities to engage in the conversation, and potentially promote my new content promotion case study.
Click ‘OK’.
You’ll see four streams begin to populate with online conversations surrounding the keywords and URLs you entered in the previous step. From left to right, Forums and Blogs, Q&A sites, Social Networks and Video Sharing Sites.
You can delete and change the order of these streams.
The free version of the tool will give you access to 30% of the conversations. The others will be grayed out, as seen below.
I tested the free version for two months and it still gave me the firepower to engage and promote.
Create a Persona
After you create your keyword list, you’ll need to create a persona.
You can create multiple personas and connect any number of social profiles to each one, as well as forum profiles, blogs and Yahoo! Answers.
This is a powerful feature that solves a big problem for anyone managing a social media strategy.
Whether you’re posting as a CEO, marketing manager or customer service representative, Buzzbundle makes switching between social accounts seamless.
Once you’ve created your persona and connected all your profiles, it’s time to get your buzz on!
Generating Buzz
Like that? You’ll love this…
Hit the “buzz” button and filter the types of websites and social media channels you want to monitor.
BuzzBundle will go out and collect all the content listed on social media sites, forums, blogs and Q&A sites related to your keywords.
It’s as simple as looking through the streams to identify any opportunities for you to engage and share your content.
Remember, you have the ability to create multiple keyword groups. I recommend that you create one for every piece of content you have written.
Then, spend time switching between the keyword groups continually promoting your content. The streams will continually populate fresh conversations surrounding the keywords/URLs you entered.
This is a great way to keep your old content in front of a new audience, continually earning social engagement and backlinks, while boosting your site’s domain authority.
But wait, there’s more…
I’m only scratching the surface when it comes to the capabilities of this tool.
That said, if there was one feature I would recommend to cut through the noise to find the right people to promote content to, it would be the filtered content functionality.
Here’s how it works.
Find a piece of content to similar to yours that is receiving a lot of social engagement.
Enter the post’s URL into the search filter and look through all the people that have already engaged with that post. These are the people that have an expressed interest in the topic you have written about, and are more likely to engage with your content.
The tool will also allow you to schedule social content from mutiple personas with the click of a dropdown and monitor your competitor mentions.
Before you share a link using Buzzbundle, tag it using the free Google URL Builder.
For example, if I was going to promote my content promotion post with Buzzbundle I would set the campaign parameters as follows:
Source = Social
Medium = Twitter
Campaign = Buzzbundle
Then, I would share the custom URL provided.
You can still schedule your content using tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite. These tools will not strip the custom parameters from the URL.
Now, when I look in Google Analytics I will be able to see exactly how much traffic came to my site from the links I shared using Buzzbundle, and from which specific channels.
To see this campaign data, open Google Analytics and navigate to the “Acquisition” tab and click the “Campaigns” link. You will then be able to drill into the data using the secondary dimensions (parameters) you specified in the URL builder.
#3 Scoop.It
Scoop.It is a content curation platform, and is one the best ways to promote content and build quality backlinks.
People collect their favorite content from across the web and publish it in a magazine format similar to Paper.li and Flipboard.
The coolest feature is one you can’t pass up, though…
Many of these pages have high pagerank with tens of thousands of active readers looking for the types of content you’re writing about.
Here is a Scoop.It page with almost 134,000 views.
So, how do you get your content featured on these pages?
Head over to Scoop.It and create a free account.
Enter a keyword related to your content.
or….
Hit the grid button and see if there is a a high level category related to your niche.
Search for Scoop.It pages that curate content similar to what you have written.
Make sure the pages you target have a large number of page views.
Ideally, you will want to target curators that have a large Twitter following as well.
Why?
Because most “Scoopers” (creative, right?) are also active on Twitter, which opens a whole new opportunity for content amplification.
In fact, readers have the option to share your content to several social channels directly from within the Scoop.It interface.
Follow all the people with popular Scoop.It pages and large Twitter followings.
The next step is to “suggest” your content.
Navigate back over to one of the Scoop.It pages meeting the criteria and hit “suggest”.
Enter your URL and select the appropriate Scoop.It page from the dropdown.
Hit “Suggest”.
This will notify the owner that you have suggested content for their Scoop.It page. If they like your content, they’ll post it to their page and you’ll have a link referring targeted traffic back to your site.
As an added bonus, many readers of the Scoop.It page will “re-scoop” the content to their pages, and share it on social media.
More social signals. More links. More traffic. Jackpot!
Bonus Tip:
Returning to my earlier point about targeting high-level topical categories, here’s another way to find additional prospects you may not uncover by simply entering a keyword into the seach bar.
Click the dropdown next to the search bar.
Scroll through the categories and find a topic most related to your content/ niche.
Next, click the “Recommended Topics” tab.
This is a great opportunity to suggest your content to any related pages.
Check out this page with 11,600 views. Cover post looks familiar :).
Check if the curator is active on Twitter.
Well, yes she is.
Curate their content, share it on Twitter, engage in conversation and build a relationship. Then, you’ll have a powerful ready-made distribution channel every time you publish a new piece of content.
Repeat this process with the “Recommended Users” tab.
Scroll through and see what topics each user is curating.
If the topics are related to your content, click through and see what type of traffic they get.
Scoop.It is a great tool to earn links and generate targeted traffic. My recent case study got scooped on one high-traffic page which sent 79 visits to my site.
…and sparked a nice stream of social engagement.
That’s A Wrap
The best part, you can implement each of these tactics with zero budget, zero connections, in any industry.
