Content Distribution: It’s Not Just About Creating

So you’re making content for your business – maybe you watched our video on content creation, maybe you saw the article on avoiding creative blocks, however you decided to start posting content, it’s awesome that you’re doing it. Now we come to another problem people face when starting out making content: getting other people to look at their content. How do you tell other people about this awesome thing you just made? How are going to let them know about your business? Distribution can be one of the hardest things about content creation, because it’s nearly impossible to know what will go viral, what will be huge and what will flop. Just ask the Wachowskis.

So how do you distribute well? There are a lot of different things you can do to ensure your content gets out to the right people, but nothing is a guarantee since you don’t know what someone will decide to share or like or tell all of their followers to watch. The way to mitigate that is to make sure you’re posting a lot of content, and you’re doing it regularly. If you build a following of people who care about your content and know to expect it at regular intervals, you’ll start seeing growth and an upswing of attention to your posts, because you have a group that is interested in your stuff.

We’ve gathered some of the best tips we have on content distribution here, so you can see what we do to maximize our distribution. If you’ve got any other tips you think we should include, please let us know with a comment!

1. Distribute Your Content (Well!) on Social Media

This might seem like a no brainer, but there are so many people who forget to distribute content. If you don’t do any distribution, you end up with sad websites and YouTube pages with no likes, views, or shares. That doesn’t mean you’re producing bad content, it just means it isn’t getting in front of the right people. You should be active on social media, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or any other sites that let you share things with your followers.

If you want to learn how to get more connections on LinkedIn, check out our video on how to start building up your LinkedIn connections here. LinkedIn is a great distribution platform from a business perspective, as it allows you to drill down and get the best connections, the people who are the most relevant to what you’re posting.

Build up your business on social, including having all of your employees liking and sharing posts (this is more applicable on LinkedIn, not so much for Facebook or other sites) and growing their networks as well. Don’t be afraid to post content before you have a solid consumer base, people are more likely  to follow you if you’re posting content relevant to their industries.

2. Email Marketing is Your Friend

Email marketing is sometimes seen as a bad thing, but it shouldn’t be. Yes, we all get those annoying spam emails multiple times a day and never let you unsubscribe, but there are better ways to be. If you’re sending email content out, you should do it infrequently (every two weeks or once a month are our top two suggestions) and you should focus on providing value.

When you send emails to people, you want them to open them. Focus on making your emails relevant to people’s interests, and don’t go too heavily on the branding. Email marketing gives a lot of flexibility and lets you drill down to specific categories, so you can section out groups and send targeted emails, focused on ‘sales’ or ‘manufacturing’, things that focus on the things people do and are interested in.

By giving people a resource with valuable content, you’re not bothering them but instead helping them out by giving them good content. Changing the way you think about email is important when planning campaigns, since you have to make sure you’re doing something you would want to see.

3. Don’t Just Post Your Own Content

If you’re only posting your own content on social media, you won’t see as much engagement as if you were posting a mix of your content and other industry-relevant content. Pull in outside sources and post regularly on your social media with articles that are relevant to your industry, and the industries of your potential clients. People respond to that more than just shameless self-promotion. They’ll see that you’re not just advertising yourself, and are instead an invested member of the community and will want to follow you.

Additionally, if you’re only posting your own content, your feed looks empty unless your’re creating new content every day. You should post once a day at least, to keep your feed relevant and in front of people. It’s incredibly difficult to create enough content to post daily, especially if you weren’t creating content at all previously.

If you’re just starting out with content creation, set a goal to create a graphic, article, or video for the company page once a week, once every two weeks, or whatever you think you’ll be able to stick to. Once you get a good rhythm, you can up the amount of content you post, so you have a good ratio of branded content to outside content.

4. Always Link Back to Your Brand When Posting on Social Media

Content creation is great, but keep your overarching goal in mind while you’re creating and scheduling content. You don’t want to be in people’s faces with branding, but make sure you’re posting your content on your site, linking back to it, and making sure you put your company name on everything.

When you post a video you don’t have to host the video natively on your own website – YouTube is fine. BUT you do want to have a landing page on your website for the video, even if it’s just the YouTube video on a separate page with a description. Add your content to every platform you use, but always link it back to your website, and your brand. Someone reading an article on your site might see your video about the same topic, and click onto it, and keep clicking and consuming content until they’re convinced they need to hire you. By not dedicating separate pages to every piece of content you have, you making it harder for people to find your content.

Put your logo on all of your graphics, and think about adding an unobtrusive watermark to any videos you post. It’s very easy to steal content, so try to keep your branding where you can. It’ll always happen, but making it so people are always redirected back you to helps to curb that somewhat.

5. Be Consistent – Post Regularly and Keep Up with Trends

We mentioned this earlier, but it’s so important that we’re reiterating it. If you’re creating content, you should be aiming for a regular posting schedule. Having a regular posting schedule is more important than posting a lot of your content all at once and then dropping off while you make more.

Scheduling apps like Hootsuite and Sprout Social keep track of your social posting, and let you schedule posts in advance, which is good for making sure you’re on track. Set a goal, make a set number of posts you want to make a week, and try to stick to it the best you can. If you’re scheduling things out in advance and pulling in outside content as well as your own content, it should be easy to keep up with a regular posting schedule.

Once you’re posting content regularly and expanding your connections and audience online, you should see an uptick in traffic to your content and to your brand more generally. Not every person that sees a post of yours will become a lifetime customer, but every person that becomes aware of your brand is one more potential customer.

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