Content creation is at an all-time high. At the time of this writing, there are some 2.8 million blog posts being created daily (per Worldometers). Brands, marketers, preachers, self-help gurus and your neighbor down the street are all creating content these days. Blog posts about everything from favorite recipes to travel tips, golf swing lessons to salvation messages and more.
Content distribution is the equivalent of the cable industry’s last-mile efforts to get programming transmissions into the eyes and ears of the cable viewer. Without spreading your content as far and wide as you can, there’s little justification for creating all that content. Your team, your staff, your company – everyone should be on board with distributing great content marketing efforts from your team, whether it’s sharing a new infographic or great video marketing pieces.
But are people seeing all of that content? Google searches only pick up so many indexed pages. The quality of the content and the strength of the website are important factors in how high your content shows up in searches. Without that, you’ve got to put in a little hustle to get your content found. Here’s where you can start to take that blog post and distribute it in various formats around the Internet. Create a short video to explain the blog post and add that to a video sharing site. Ask your friends and followers to help you share that piece of content around their social feeds. Here are three essential ways to distribute your content:
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Social networks: Distributing content through your social feeds is the top way most marketers are sharing their content. Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and other networks are terrific vehicles for sharing your blog content, infographics and video snippets. A 2016 DCN research report shows that when big brands share their content on social networks, they experienced much higher engagement levels. In a nutshell, if you’ve got great content, share it on social networks!
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Earned media: This is one of three key media that marketers use over time for content distribution (along with paid media and owned media, per Content Marketing Institute). Distributing your content through this method takes an effort to engage fans and followers, cultivate a network of industry influencers, and be seen at all the right industry trade events and conferences. Remember, earned media works well because it costs you your time, not budget dollars. But the messaging and spin is out of your hands, so be ready to adjust your strategy if it backfires. By forging new influencer relationships, your content streams will have much higher chances of being shared along earned media pathways.
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Video sites – Infographic directories: As content slowly morphs from text to visual components like video and infographics, you can use a slew of online directories and communities to share your content. Upload your videos to your own site, to YouTube, Dailymotion and others. If you’re a mega-brand working with well-known video directors, consider this list of more artistic/creative video communities to share your branded content, too. Distributing great content is the crucial hit-or-miss part of the content marketing equation. Do it right, and your content numbers will go through the roof.