An outstanding content piece that isn’t optimized for social media or created with social-specific goals in mind is going to have a difficult time gaining any traction or generating buzz around it. Luckily, there are many steps you can take to assure the content you create is truly share-worthy:

1. Learn What Interests Your Audience

People use social media networks to express who they are, connect with others and build their personal brand. As such, the content people share on social networks should give you a clue as to what is important to them.

Unfortunately, most people are not going to be extremely passionate about the product you’re selling or the service you are offering. We aren’t all selling “hot” items that get people talking naturally, so you must find a different angle. Followers may be passionate about the results of your product/service or about how your product/service affects or helps them. If you can create content that illustrates what is actually important to your audience, you will find success.

To find these insights, practice social listening on your own or through the variety of tools (both free and paid) available. Monitor keywords on Twitter, hashtags on Facebook, conversations on Google+ and discussions on LinkedIn.

Really dig into what your audience is talking about and discover what type of content they share, where they share and how often they share. With this information you will be able to create a content piece that sincerely speaks to your audience.

2. Create Useful Content around Those Interests

Once you know what kind of content your audience enjoys or is searching for, take that information and create something useful. Achieve this by developing content that educates, interests or entertains the audience. Though educational content is often very successful, sometimes people want to consume content about something that interests them but won’t necessarily teach them something new.

This is where entertaining content can be extremely beneficial. Everyone loves to laugh or smile every once in a while. If you can make someone laugh (or cry), you’re tapping into your audience’s genuine emotions. This type of content is heavily shared throughout social media, and has a great chance of going viral.

Humor is one of the easiest, most instinctive ways to trigger emotion, so creating humorous content is a way to garner a reaction from your audience. If you don’t think your industry can be funny, think again. For example, shaving isn’t an inherently funny activity, but Dollar Shave Club made it funny by producing hilarious videos and imagery that spoke to their audience in a way their competitors were not.

3. Make the Content Easy To Share

Don’t make your audience work to share your content. Make it as easy as possible with functional, easy-to-find social sharing buttons – no matter the device or platform they’re viewing it from.

About four out of every five people in the world now have a mobile phone and it’s projected that the number of active cell phones will reach 7.3 billion by 2015. That’s more phones than there are people on the planet, so it goes without saying that content must be optimized for mobile viewing and sharing.

The content medium matters, too. Users share images on Facebook more than any other content type. Photos on Facebook receive 53 percent more likes, 104 percent more comments, and 84 percent more click-through rates than the average post. Learn what’s popular for each platform and cater to that trend with the right type of content.

4. Set Achievable Goals to Measure Success

Having established goals is critical if you want to effectively measure content success. Of course, we all want our content to be tweeted, liked and shared a bunch of times. We want our content to produce thousands of website visitors, tremendously increase leads and make a sizeable addition to our revenue stream.

However, all these goals stacked together make it hard to create a successful stream of content, let alone a single piece. To create successful social media content, your goals must be reasonable and attainable. Instead of working to achieve all of the above, set explicit goals for each content project.

Here are a few examples:

• Have X number of social media mentions in a week.
• Increase Facebook likes by X.
• Have X number of people fill out our contact form in a month.
• Have X number of people download our content piece each week.
• X% increase in traffic from social media networks over 3 months.

As long as X is reasonable (based on analytics data), these specific and defines goals will allow you to accurately measure the success of your content piece.

There are a variety of aspects to consider when creating content you hope will be popular on social media networks. You can’t make content go viral – it has to be so great that it blows up naturally. To create content that is worthy of viral attention, start by learning what your audience likes, create content that is useful to them, make it easy to share and have specific goals in place to measure its success.

The post 4 Steps to Create Share-Worthy Content for Social Media appeared first on Relevance.

Consider the following types of content that you probably aren’t creating, but should be:

1. Top Lists

Let’s start with one of the most effective forms of content.

How many times have you seen a shared BuzzFeed article on your Facebook or Twitter feed? Popular sites like this have changed the game of Top Lists content.

Attention-grabbing headlines are what make Top Lists work. Any headline that lists a number of details, secrets, categories, or tips will work because it makes it very clear what the reader can expect when clicking on the article.

For an easy example, consider the article you are reading right now.

These types of posts and articles are perfect for building your authority and demonstrating that you are an expert in the field. Top Lists can be great tools for reaching your content marketing goals for a variety of reasons:

• Lists are skim-able: Readers can easily browse the piece and still obtain the exact information they’re looking for.
• Lists are easy to digest: Sorting content for your audience in a list format does a good amount of the work for them. People like to organize information to digest information and visualize different concepts.
• Lists lead to engagement: One of the goals for your content should be to generate interaction and comments from your readers – and lists are great for that.

2. Infographics

By now we should all know about infographics and the marketing benefits they can have for a brand. They are a great way to capture many pieces of information and communicate them in an interesting and condensed format.

Infographics often make use of charts and graphs but, with the right designer, they can turn into informative works of art using beautiful design and typography. They also tend to generate traffic and leads for a long time after being published.

When someone finds an infographic that they think is really cool, they will link to it from their page, embed it on their site, or post it on their blog. When someone grabs the content to post on their website, they credit the page they got it from with a link to the original source. Consequently, infographics are a great way to drive traffic and links to your website, which is one of the biggest benefits they offer.

3. Free Guides

Free guides and whitepapers may require a more of an investment than other content types but are worth the venture in many industries. Free guides and whitepapers work well in marketing situations where one of your key focuses is to drive leads to your website or build your email list.

Create free guides or whitepapers that can aid customers without giving away your proprietary processes. Then, give it away for free – but require a name and email address in exchange for downloading the document. Don’t ask for too much information, as that may deter people from proceeding with the download. Then, use collected email addresses to grow your marketing list and nurture those leads.

Be sure your free guide or whitepaper offers great value, as a useless content piece can discourage downloads as well. The best part about this type of content is that once it’s produced and put online, it keeps working for you for years to come.

4. Comparisons & Reviews

With today’s online shopping platforms, consumers spend a lot of time comparing products. If you are an eCommerce company, it is your job to help visitors become educated about your products by comparing them to similar offerings from competitors. For great examples of product comparison features, check out Amazon.com, Nashbar.com, or even Zappos.com

With product reviews, the goal is not simply to learn whether someone liked or didn’t like something, but rather to educate others about the product and whether or not they should buy it. If you provide such highly-valued information for the user, they will be much more likely to do their analysis and make their buying decision via your website. A product comparison or service review can be a priceless bit of content, and as a result, it can quickly convert browsers into buyers.

5. Interviews and Round Ups

Interviews are a very simple way to provide great content to your audience while simultaneously positioning yourself as an expert in your industry. Interviews can be video or text based; both are easily consumed by consumers.

Network with Influencers & Experts

Round Ups generally gather several industry experts around a single subject and present their unique insight in an easily digestible format (such as a Top List). The topic needs to be original and interesting enough to get experts excited about contributing and be proud to share it with their own audiences.

As Clair Jones points out, “If you’re asking [experts] their opinion for the sole purpose of making them feel invested enough in your content that they will feel obligated to share it, they will smell you out faster than you can say ego bait.” Be genuine, be concise and always have the goal of creating value – both for your audience and for the interviewees.

Create Remarkable Content

Round Ups allow you to collaborate with other leaders and provide the best possible content for users. They establish you as an expert and a curator of incredible content and information. Use this content to introduce your readers to helpful, useful information – no matter what niche your industry is in.

The strategy here is very simple: Present the knowledge of other industry experts and tap into their audience or network. They are often useful content tidbits on their own, but also tend to get shared often by the people that were included.

Start by reaching out to experts in your field to discuss the possibility of an interview. For video interviews, schedule a time that works for both parties and record via Google+ Hangout or Skype. For text-based interviews, consider sending the interviewee 10-12 questions and ask them to answer as many as they are comfortable with.

By interviewing experts in your field, you become an expert as well. Moreover, it populates your website with a wealth of original, expert information.

7. Video

There are many places to post video. Everyone knows YouTube, but there’s also Vimeo, Viddler, and other sites.

It still amazes me how many brands avoid making video content. Believe it or not, creating video content is not as hard as you think, and it’s always getting easier. Between Google+ Hangouts, the ability to record Skype and webinar sessions and almost everyone having access to some sort of video recording device, creating video content can’t get much simpler.

They key with video is to just jump in and start filming. You might leave a lot on the cutting room floor, but you’ll never get there if you don’t start filming. By establishing a standard for the quality of your content and having fun at the same time, you will improve your chances of creating video that will increase your traffic, generate leads, and maybe even skyrocket to viral status.

Start Creating Extraordinary Content

A solid content marketing strategy includes many of these types of content – all of which can set you apart from your competition. Figure out what type of information your audience wants or needs that isn’t already available in the market and be the organization that rises to the occasion. If you provide that content with unparalleled quality – you win!

The post 7 Types of Content You Still Aren’t Creating But Should Be appeared first on Relevance.

Stop Selling and Start Helping

The key to driving content marketing success through blogging is by turning your blog into a learning center instead of using it as a depository for additional information about purchasing your products or services. Much of content marketing is about building trust with your audience and establishing yourself as a leader within the industry. In order to effectively reach your audience and build trust, you must break through the noise and help your audience by publishing high-quality educational and useful content.

Think about this common scenario: When you have a question or problem, what is the first thing you do? For many of us, we go online to a search engine and enter a query. In today’s world filled with instant results, we expect search engines to lead us to the answer in some way, shape or form. When your audience searches for help, you need to be the one to provide it, or else your competitors will.

When you help a potential customer solve a simple problem without asking for anything in return, you give them a reason to think of you the next time they have a similar issue – perhaps one they can’t fix on their own. As a result, turning your blog into a learning center can be more advantageous than publishing posts full of self-promotion.

Creating a Learning Center

To get started with turning your blog into a learning center, you must find out what your audience needs help with.

Identify Pain Points

The first step in providing your audience with helpful information is finding out what it is that they actually want to know. What are the pain points of potential customers? There are many ways to find out:

• Ask your employees: Ask your sales team what problems or frustrations often come up in customer discussions. What questions are asked over and over? What is confusing to customers that you could explain better?

• Analyze your website: Many websites have a search bar, where visitors can manually search for something if they can’t find it on their own. Look at the queries that are being entered. What are the most entered searches? Is there anything that visitors search for that you don’t address on your site at all?

• Ask the audience directly: Come right out and ask your audience. If possible, create a survey, or post something less formal on your social profiles. It couldn’t be any more straightforward; simply ask your audience what their biggest pain point is, or what information they would like to see featured on your blog.

Be Transparent

When you’re researching a purchase decision and are wavering between two companies, what is the most useful piece of information you could have? For many people, that would be a candid comparison between the two companies up for consideration.

Though this type of content is incredibly useful, many businesses shy away from directly equating themselves to their competitors, afraid of drawing attention to what their product or service doesn’t do. But, if it truly is a product or service you don’t offer, that will become apparent to the visitor anyway – be it on other pages of your website or on a call with a salesperson.

With comparison content, you have an opportunity to be helpful and build trust through transparency. Don’t be afraid to compare yourself to your competitors and provide unbiased analysis on your blog; your audience will thank you for it.

Publish Quality Content

With the above in mind, begin crafting quality content for your blog.

Graphic by Vertical Measures

Though you may be thinking about your content and how you present it with a focus on educational material, many traditional blogging best practices still apply, including:

• Format: Consider the type of content you are going to create. What is the most helpful way to display the information?
• Organization: Be sure your blog is organized in a way that makes sense to the user, through categories and tagging.
• Titles: As always, blog post titles are extremely important. Think about how a prospective customer would search.
• Images: When publishing helpful content, images can be very powerful. Skip the stock photos and include charts, graphs, and diagrams that provide color to the post, while still being useful.

Though businesses continue to adopt content marketing through blogging, many utilize blog posts as another place to sell and self-promote. However, as people have embraced online research to fuel purchase decisions, businesses would be better off using their blog as a learning center to help educate and provide unbiased information to their audience.

The post Establishing Your Blog as a Learning Center for Content Marketing Success appeared first on Relevance.

1. Promote Specific Content to a Relevant Audience

While all of the content you create should be useful, informative and interesting, a number of factors should be considered when choosing specific content to promote, such as the overall budget and goals for the content marketing campaign.

For companies with a lower marketing budget, free guides and white papers that are gated behind a lead-capture form make for a great marketing content. It should be valuable enough to get visitors to provide their contact information in exchange for the content. It’s vital to make sure your messaging and content are targeted to potential customers, or you may just be filling your email and lead lists with low-value contacts.

Video content and infographics can also make for great content to promote to a specific audience. If you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on something that you believe has the potential to really resonate with a subset of your audience, but just can’t seem to get any traction with them, paid promotion might make sense as a viable promotional option. Often, video or graphic content just needs a bit of a publicity boost to gain the traction and visibility you seek. Platforms with great segmentation tools, such as Facebook, really let you hone in on your target market.

Regardless of your company’s goals or budget – your content must be relevant, valuable and engaging. Irrelevant or uninteresting content will drive low click-through rates, lower your brand’s authoritative voice within the industry, and stall conversions.

2. Select the Right Networks to Promote your Content

Choosing the right network to publish your content is a critical factor in effective promotion. Utilizing popular channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube to promote content is a great way to reach the biggest audience possible. Here you have two options: You can create great content specifically for a network, or you can choose a network to publish existing content.

Remember, certain content will resonate better with certain social media networks. There is an active community and etiquette that comes with each social channel, so try to put yourself in the shoes of the user and think about what content would interest you based on the network’s style.

For example, a highly technical white paper related to your industry may be a great content piece, but that doesn’t mean that it should be promoted to all your fans or followers on Facebook. A better network to test may be LinkedIn, where you can target users by profession and job title, increasing your odds of getting in front of a highly technical audience that is already in a more professional frame of mind.

3. Closely Track your Campaigns Successes and Failures

With any marketing strategy, accurately measuring and tracking efforts against targets and goals is essential in proving ROI. Content marketing is no different; when specific goals are set in place, the measurement of different metrics will be easier to track – making your content marketing strategy more effective. Taking advantage of free resources like Google Analytics and using them to their full capacity will take your content efforts to a level you’ve never known was possible.

In order to start tracking the success of content promotion (and guide future efforts), you need a content marketing strategy with specific promotional objectives. By implementing these specific objectives or goals, you’ll be able to determine what makes content works best on various promotional channels. Your team can then make the necessary adjustments along the way to improve an effective formula.

Through this measurement, you can focus on the kinds of content that have generally worked for you and your competitors. Adapt your content marketing strategy toward success and stop wasting time promoting content to an irrelevant audience.

The post 3 Tips for Effective Content Promotion appeared first on Relevance.

Some might join content promotion and distribution together, but they are actually two completely different marketing angles that should be balanced evenly. Put simply, the difference between promotion and distribution is that promotion is all about generating a buzz around your content and distribution is a matter of finding a lot of different ways to get your content to appear in search results.

Even if you create the absolute best content out there, how do you reach the people that want it? Publishing articles or content on your blog is only part of the process. Brands must also effectively promote it to attract their target audience to a product or service. There are various tools and platforms that can help promote content and reach the biggest audience possible. Following are seven essential content promotion tools and platforms.

Hootsuite

HootSuite was originally designed for optimizing and managing Twitter accounts, but it also allows you to post from personal Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Unfortunately, HootSuite will not connect to personal Google+ profiles, but it does allow you to manage your Google+ pages that hosts the content. This tool enables a brand to create a new post and send to any combination of the connected social media accounts.

The ability to schedule posts is HootSuite’s most efficient tool, allowing a company to plan ahead and keep their accounts actively engaged with their audience using just a few easy steps. Select the date and time and let Hootsuite post your content for you to reach the broadest audience possible.

Another cool feature of HootSuite is a link shortener built into the compose box. If a content piece is on a page with a long URL, place the link in the box and click “Shrink”. HootSuite will place the shorter URL (in the form of ow.ly) at the end of the text in the compose field.

HootSuite’s link shortener will also track important social metrics found in the analytics section. You can create full reports on engagement, clicks and collective data for each specific social account. This is a vital promotional tool that can greatly save time for any marketer.

Followerwonk

For Twitter users, Followerwonk stands out as one of the most robust tracking tools available to help generate the most engagement through Twitter. Followerwonk allows any user to identify, analyze and improve metrics from Twitter in order to maximize social media promotion.

The “Search Twitter Bios” function is among the most useful features on Followerwonk’s platform. Use it to find the most popular Twitter accounts in your particular field or industry. For example, if you are an internet marketing specialist, you could type “SEO” or “Linkbuilding” into the search bar and Followerwonk will suggest all of the Twitter accounts that feature the word “SEO” or “Linkbuilding” (or closely related keywords) in their Twitter profile text.

Consider the vast possibilities for content promotion when you can sort followers by such stats as tweet count, account age, social authority, following or followers. This is crucial information about your audience and provides an even larger outlet for promoting content.

Taboola

Taboola reaches 400 million unique visitors and serving over 150 billion recommendations every month. Recently, Taboola acquired Perfect Market, a company which also worked to improve engagement and drive traffic and conversions. With this acquisition, Taboola has evolved from a content discovery engine to a content and product discovery engine giant.

With Taboola’s content recommendation platform, any brand can successfully drive traffic, improve social sharing metrics and increase the amount of links pointing back to the content. Taboola focuses strongly on videos because videos are one of the highest demanded forms of content; in fact, a recent study found that consumers are 27 times more likely to click through online video ads than standard banners. Additionally, native online video ads can generate 82 percent brand lift among users exposed to the ads. Taboola serves up to 1.5 billion recommendations to Internet users each day (45 billion every month) and drives 24 million unique visits for marketers using the platform – numbers that should make any marketer’s ears perk up.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a popular tool that helps create buzz around content, build links and increase website traffic by helping you “be found” by utilizing various marketing channels. The user-friendly dashboard provides an easily digestible overview of an account’s history and tasks, filterable by:

• Complete history (emails, tweets, logged calls, blog comments or engagement)
• All projects or a specific task
• All items for/from a user or for/from a specific user

BuzzSumo is another tool in the BuzzStream family that helps marketers find highly shared content, as well as influencers with specific expertise in certain fields. While there are other tools to find influencers on Twitter (such as Followerwonk, discussed above), BuzzSumo provides unique features that enable you to find not just an audience, but also content promotion and placement opportunities.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a wonderful content discovery engine greatly enhancing the way that people find and bookmark content. StumbleUpon begins by understanding their user’s personal interests. Initially, this comes from a short survey when the user creates a profile, but it grows in complexity as the user engages content through the service.

Users click the “stumble” button on the toolbar, which gives them a new web page to interact with. If they like what they’ve been offered, or “stumbled,” they can give it a “thumbs up.” If they don’t, they can give it a “thumbs down” vote. Content that is voted up by the people in the user’s network will be more likely to appear in the next “stumble” for that user. From this data, you can view a number of different trending data:

• “Recently Hot” tags: These are the current trends that people are tagging. Drill down for more content under the tag.
• “Most Popular All Time” tags: These tags change less frequently but will change. To see what is gaining the most attention, look through these tags. Again, drill down for more content.
• Stumbles by topic: You can see what activity is happening by topic.
• Top Rated websites: These are the pages that are getting the most stumbles.

Additionally, StumbleUpon offers a great paid discovery service that is great for any content marketing strategy. By consistently promoting content through this platform, you can quickly establish your brand as a thought-leader within the industry, driving more traffic, leads and sales for your business.

Facebook (Ads)

What would a content promotion article be without the mention of Facebook, right? It’s the largest social network – and boasts endless promotional opportunities for your content. There are three main locations on the site that you can choose to display your advertised content:

• Newsfeed: The most popular of the Facebook advertising placements, these ads show up seamlessly in a user’s feed along with the content that they see from their friends and the people that they follow.

• Mobile: Earlier this year, Facebook stated that there were 1.01 billion mobile monthly active users on the social network – that is a crazy amount of people. If your content is optimized for mobile, this is an avenue that can greatly enhance your content’s visibility.

• Right-Hand Column: This placement can be seen below the “Trending” topics section. The benefit of this placement is that the ad will move down with the user as they scroll through their feed.

Advertising on Facebook allows you to reach one of the largest audiences in the world; never before have we been able to reach such a massive following with such accuracy and relevance.

Pinterest

As we know, Pinterest is one of the pioneers of photo album-style content that has blown up over the past five-to-ten years. By using “Boards” to tag and organize photo content, images of all types become extremely shareable. Content marketers quickly discovered the advantages of this photo-distribution channel when promoting content – not only to drastically raise the visibility of the content but also to encourage it to be shared to an even bigger audience.

By adding “Pin It!” buttons that appear when hovering over an image with the cursor (beware these don’t function on mobile browsers) on your website, you will encourage visitors to pin your content for you. This is a great additional source for spreading your content on the Pinterest platform. It will also encourage visitors on your website to start following you on Pinterest for more content.

Here’s a quick tip for brand recognition: add a small branded logo to the corner of all your pins (or content). This is a small and subtle addition to your pins that can amplify your brand name tremendously.

Promotion is all about creating excitement and engagement around content, and these platforms have simplified that process to greatly improve promotion and advertising of said content. These tools provide great opportunities to put your content in the hands of potential customers, but also to build a trusting relationship with your current audience and, ultimately, to increase your chances of landing new business and building on new leads.

The post 7 Essential Content Promotion Tools and Platforms appeared first on Relevance.

To maximize your ability to distribute content, diversify or repurpose it so that you can reach a variety of new channels. If you have a diverse distribution strategy, you could potentially fill multiple slots on the search results page with your content. Here are my favorite ways to both distribute and repurpose existing content for easy content marketing success.

1. Slideshare

If you conduct case studies or other research, Slideshare is an excellent distribution channel for informative, credible content that will provide great value to readers. Slideshare helps establish your industry knowledge and authority by hosting top-quality content and presentations.

The bulk of content shared on SlideShare and other presentation sharing sites is the traditional PowerPoint presentation. However, I’ve seen some very creative uses for slideshows that go beyond presentations. For example, travelogues are finding their way into the slideshow format; they work well because the traveler can post pictures from a trip and add text descriptions of the experience. Some people have repurposed entire eBooks, white papers and even product comparisons as slideshows.

2. Pinterest

Have you taken or designed some really cool, original photos? Start sharing them! Photo-sharing is a great way to keep people engaged with what’s happening in and around your industry. Pinterest centers on the concept of the photo album by using Pinterest “Boards”. Photos and images are extremely shareable. When you take advantage of photo distribution channels, you not only raise the visibility of your content but also encourage it to be shared.

One of the biggest rules on Pinterest that will help you gain followers and keep them coming back for more is to distribute your content evenly. Be sure that your Pinterest profile is filled with not only brand related boards but industry related boards from other contributors. You might have a lot of company photos that you can repurpose and share, but distributing your company’s infographics, logos, or products related to your industry can really boost engagement.

3. Flickr

Although Flickr hasn’t grown in popularity like Pinterest, it’s a vital marketing tool for brands across all industries. Flickr is perfect for content distribution; its entire design is about creating unique visual content and sharing it. And in my opinion, Flickr does a better job of displaying images when compared to Pinterest. Their well-designed, user-friendly interface makes uploading and editing photos very easy. And the one terabyte of online storage is enough room to make most people’s head spin.

Flickr has many active users that take their community seriously. It’s important to note that selling your products on Flickr is strictly forbidden. However, their community guidelines are designed to help businesses stay within the Flickr terms of service and utilize Flickr for content distribution.

These community guidelines are very clear: “Flickr accounts are intended for members to share original photos and video that they themselves have created.” As long as you are publishing relevant, valuable, visual content, the Flickr audience is one to tap into. As seen with Reddit and other sites with strong communities, content is more likely to find viral success within these highly-engaged networks.

 4. YouTube

YouTube offers the ability for users to create branded channels where they can upload endless video content. YouTube is one of the most popular distribution channels for content marketers because so many types of content can be reused or repurposed and still provide value. For example, if you frequently host webinars or interviews, you can record and post that awesome content on YouTube to reach a larger audience. How about a slideshow video of your latest presentation?

If you haven’t done so already, set up a branded profile. You can set up background images to show your brand logo and coordinate the color theme to match your brand style. When posting video on YouTube, make sure to link back to your website in the description, engage with the commenters, and encourage them to follow your brand’s channel.

5. Republish articles on a related blog

One of the easiest ways to repurpose and distribute great content is updating and refreshing articles from your blog. Now I know what you’re thinking – “Isn’t that considered duplicate content?” Publishing updated and revitalized content is very different than copying and pasting old content onto a new site. If you have blog posts that were successful on your blog, why not post it on other sites to get more exposure?

For example: LinkedIn, the popular social network for business professionals, allows you to post new content on your profile. Share your great content among industry leaders and tap into their audience for maximum exposure.

When repurposing blog posts or outdated articles, make sure that the URL’s included in the post are still working and up to date. Any referenced statistics or images should be updated in order to provide the most value to the readers. And most importantly, ensure that the talking points or industry insights are still relevant for the readers in your field.

The core message for distribution is, “Find ways to get it out there!” The more your company can capitalize on the many distribution channels online, the more you will put great content in the hands of potential clients. Distribution is where you get to establish your brand’s industry knowledge and trustworthy insight.

The more you create content for distribution, or repurpose content for distribution on multiple channels, the more your brand will show up in search, and the more opportunities you’ll create for sharing.

The post My 5 Favorite Ways to Reuse and Distribute Content appeared first on Relevance.

By the time I finish, everyone is usually really pumped and leave with endless ideas on how they can utilize content marketing to generate more traffic, more leads, and more sales for their business. That is, until they get back to the office and need to convince their boss on the concept. Most of these employees are running into the number one issue with getting their boss to commit – it takes courage. Jay Baer, author of Youtility and President of Convince & Convert, recently discussed why courage is the most needed ingredient for any content marketing strategy. Let me take his points and expand on them:

“It takes courage to give away something of value without expectation of immediate return.”

To me, content marketing is about providing awesome, valuable content that offers solutions for your audience’s questions or issues. Great content is usually posted for free on a blog or website that works to help potential customers first. This is to build a trusting relationship with readers and establishes your brand as an expert in the industry. The fear is that people will not need you if you give all your information away.

But I say, people that are going to do it themselves will find the information somewhere and do it themselves. Your target market is those that do not want to do it themselves. Through the goodwill of your helpful content, you build a relationship with those people. With this strengthened relationship, when it comes time to use a related service or product, there will be only one brand the audience will trust – yours.

“It takes courage to trust that your customers and prospective customers will reward you with attention and sales and loyalty at some point in the future.”

Trust works both ways with content marketing. On one hand, you are working to build trust with expert content; on the other, you are trusting that the potential customers will come back to you when it’s time to do business.

Every brand must understand that loyal customers are generated after establishing a relationship first, and a great way to solidify your business as an authoritative, trusted source is through providing useful, educational content.

“It takes courage to play the long game, not the short game.”

As I have always said, content marketing should be treated as an ongoing philosophy and not a campaign with a finish line. It can sometimes be difficult to get decision-makers in your company to sign onto a content marketing strategy with little proof of ROI at first – but it does work.

Companies must have the courage to invest in content marketing, even if it is just a pilot program. Moreover, they must measure their successes and failures after a minimum of six months in order to adjust and improve their strategy for the best results.

“It takes courage to interact with and assist people on a one-to-one basis.”

One of the biggest parts of an effective content marketing strategy is to promote, distribute, and engage with every piece of content you publish. Engagement can take many forms; such as responding comments on your blog, providing feedback or answering questions from your FAQ section, responding to tweets and more.

Social media channels and blog posts allow the audience to interact with your brand in real time, and it takes courage to dedicate the time and stand by your brand’s views, opinions, or expert advice in order to build on a positive relationship with prospective customers.

“It takes courage to be a farmer instead of a hunter.”

Farming is a risky business. Just like content marketing, it can be very rewarding. But also just like content marketing, it takes planning, hard work, and patience. I am no farmer, but I understand the concept of preparing the field, planting the crops, nurturing them as they begin to grow, and harvesting the rewards many months later, assuming no natural or man-made disasters have ravaged your hard work.

I’m not a hunter either, but that approach requires less strategic planning than it does tactical design. The results are immediate, but also short-lived – much like the “spray and pray” approach to content marketing.

Content marketing takes courage, trust, and dedication. But doesn’t every worthwhile endeavor?

The post Content Marketing Takes Courage, and Here’s Why appeared first on Relevance.