It’s easy for bigger corporations like BuzzFeed, YouTube, Nike, SEO MOZ, Zappos or Amazon to get millions of likes on Facebook and thousands of followers on Twitter. These brands have enough linking domains along with impressive domain authority. They could publish anything like a five-minutes hack and a thousand of people would watch and share it.

But what if you are a small business owner, digital marketing agency or startup with no social media presence and have very limited resources to strengthen your online presence. If that is the case, then most probably your blog posts and other content marketing efforts will be in vain.

You have created an amazing piece of content. Okay great, what’s next?

Now it’s time to create a content distribution plan in order to get the desired results you are expecting from your killer piece of content.

If you want your content to serve its real purpose to get more engagement and website traffic, you need to be proactive with your content promotion and distribution. Here are some effective content distribution tactics you can use to get your content noticed.

1. Send an Email to Your Prospects

Every time you create a blog post, infographic, slide share, or announcement, send a message to your subscribers. Add a small teaser of the content to evoke audience to click through, don’t forget to add a strong CTA asking them to share and like.

Your email list is comprised of people who subscribed to your newsletters or emails, because they are interested in your brand and want to get the latest updates.

A study conducted by Campaign Monitor  suggests that you are 6 times more likely to get a click from an email campaign than a tweet.

So, it’s a great way to promote your content to people who are already engaged and are ready to share your content.

After a few days, check your analytics and check who didn’t open your email. Send the email again, use a different subject line this time. You will be definitely surprised at how many clicks you are missing by simply sending an email once.

If you create content on a regular basis, how often you use this content distribution trick will depend on your audience interest. For instance, if your subscribers are signed up for weekly or monthly updates, then stick to it.

2. Actively Participate in Communities

There are a number of tools and platforms available that will help you give your content a wider reach. All you need to find the right one and stay engaged.

•         Join Social Media Groups

Facebook and LinkedIn groups are indeed a great opportunity for brands to engage and target your niche audience. Join those groups that are relevant to your industry and content type. Don’t sell, suggest your content naturally. Moreover, you can also join Pinterest and contribute to some specific boards on Pinterest.

•         Content Promotions Channels

There is another way to increase your brand reach on social media by joining content promotion networks such as Viral Content Bee, Quuu  and more. These tools help brands to promote your content to those who are likely to share your content.

•         Discussion Boards

There are a myriad of community platforms and discussion boards that allow you to discuss topics related to your niche. You can join Yahoo Answers, Quora, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org and talk about your content as a solution to people’s problems.

Make sure you engage in discussions naturally and give people an impact that you are trying to solve their problems, not promoting your content.

So, join these content curation and promotion communities and take the maximum advantage of them for your brand.

3. Paid Marketing

Advertising and promoting your content is a relatively new concept that can help businesses to get the desired results in terms of leads and conversions. Investing in paid advertising is the effective way to get your content noticed on a number of platforms and engage with a wider audience.

•         Facebook Marketing

Facebook allows brands to create targeted ads based on the demographics, location and interests of your target audience. If you have a clear idea about your target buyers, you can take full advantage of these Facebook Ads for your content promotion.

•         StumbleUpon Ads

It has a paid discovery feature that works on pay-per-click algorithm. StumbleUpon users are mostly millennials so if you have content relevant to this specific demographic, chances are your will brand get more exposure.

•         Reddit

It is another famous social media platform that can help your business to stand out and get more reach in this competitive digital age.

•         Outbrain

Outbrain is a content promotion platform that displays your content on different blogs and news websites that are relevant to your industry.

4. Reaching Out Your Brand on Social Media

There are nearly endless updates post on social media and there is no guarantee interested people will see and share your content. To improve your brand visibility, it is important to target interested people directly.

Tools such as Buzzsumo is helpful to find social media users who share content. Simply choose the keyword that you want to promote and type it into search bar. You will get a list of websites related to that particular keyword. Now choose the most relevant website and click on View Shares, and then target this list with your content.

5. Ask Influencers to Mention Your Content

Targeting thought leaders and industry influencers is important and engage them with your content. Make sure you target people with a high retweet, mention and reply ration. Request influencers to mention your brand or suggest your content to their audience.

An effective way to get your content noticed is influencer marketing: ask bloggers, roundup curators to include your content as a reference to get more reach, build backlinks, get comments and encourage their audience to share your content. You can find industry bloggers and round up blogs and ask them to include your content in their blogs. They will share your link if you do the same.

6. Guest Blogging

Get more and more people from the web to the most important landing pages such as sales page, email opt-in page or sales page by guest blogging. Create a killer piece of content and pitch it to different websites. If they have a “write for us” option, include your links in the content and your author bio to important pages on your website.

Conclusion

Content marketing can do wonders for your small business, web design company, SaaS startup, or branding agency. It can bring traffic to your website and help you reach your business goals, but only if you do it right and promote your content effectively. Follow the above cited content distribution techniques, revise your content marketing strategy and get your content noticed.