How To Develop An Effective Content Marketing Strategy - #infographic

"Content marketing is one of the fastest growing marketing strategies. Fueled by an increasingly media-rich and capable web technology, your customers are craving compelling and engaging content. Are you prepared? Will your capture their attention? Or simply be left behind."

Take a look this infographic, created by kaleidico, that illustrates why you need a content marketing strategy.

Developing An Effective Content Promotion Strategy

So, you’ve just written a beautiful article.

And now you’re left with the daunting task of promoting it.

In fact, it is often the case that we should spend even more time promoting an article than it took to write it.

After all, we do want people to read it, and not just those who are already familiar with our website.

But to get new people involved.

This brings to mind two questions.

1. Who can we tell about what we wrote? 
2. Where can we submit what we wrote? 

Let’s brainstorm!

Who can we tell about what we wrote?

By identifying relevant influencers who would enjoy the article, we can reach out to them in a direct email campaign.

Here is the process:

1. Identify potential influencers.

• People who wrote content related to your article.
• People who commented on that content.
• People who linked to that content.
• People who shared that content.
• People who you linked to in your article.

2. Collect their websites and contact information (email/contact URL).

3. Reach out to them with a personalized email.

How?

1. Finding similar content can be accomplished through Google. 
2. Finding the linkers to an article or competitor can be done through Moz’s tool OpenSiteExplorer. 
3. Finding the contact information is mostly a manual process (though nowadays you could use Outreach tools to get that). 

Some options to send to them might be:

Direct Email:

Here is an email I received recently from Dennis at LeapFroggr, who linked to me in one of his articles.

It was very short and to the point. Here is another:

As you can see, there is not much to it. It is a slight poke.

Twitter:

Twitter is also a very nice way to go about it, as it is not as intrusive as email, and out of necessity is even shorter.

Also, since they are in social media mode when they receive it, they may be more likely to promote it!

You can even use Twitter as a way to mine for other related articles and influencers through their Twitter Search.

Where can we submit what we wrote?

Now that we’ve identified dozens of people to contact through email and Twitter, we should consider possible places we can submit the article.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Triberr and ViralContentBuzz

Triberr is a community for content creators to share what they write.

It connects with your RSS feed to promote your posts to the groups you are a member of.

I'm a big fan of Triberr, although it does take some time to build up your profile.

ViralContentBuzz works very similarly.

Submission Websites

Some websites are built purely for people to submit content to them.

I’ve aggregated a few of them - each niche has their own.

Here are a few aggregator sites in the blogging niche.

Inbound
Growth Hackers
BizSugar
Digg
DoSplash

See what you can find in your niche!

Additionally, there are quite a few directories for specific types of content such as infographics and podcasts.

Conclusion

Content promotion is not something that needs to be started from scratch each and every time.

Develop a consistent strategy and process, and simply execute on it as new articles are published.

While the people you are reaching out to might change, and at times so will the submission websites, the process should more or less hold steady.

David Schneider is the cofounder of Lesschurn. He writes about business and entrepreneurship at Daveschneider and enjoys travel.