Content Promotion – A Beginner’s Guide

The Basis for Successful Content Promotion

In general, the goal of content promotion is to make your own content accessible to as wide a target group as possible. There are various methods for this, which can be explained by the PESO model:

• P - Paid Media:

Paid traffic - ads such as Facebook Ads, Plista, or Google Adwords.

• E - Earned Media:

Earned promotions; the content is taken up by bloggers, the press, and the like and reported on without you yourself having to undertake it.

• S - Social/Shared Media:

Your content is distributed, liked, commented on, and favorited in social media.

• O - Owned Media:

You publicize your content on your own channels – for example, through your newsletter, on your blog, etc.

Figure 1: The PESO model stands for Paid, Earned, Social (Shared), and Owned Media

Create Qualitatively High-Quality Content

Qualitatively good content should offer the user a high added value and deliver a solution for his or her problem. But this alone is not sufficient - your content should be stimulating and make the user want to read it. In this way, you will keep your visitors on your website longer.

The following elements can increase the quality of your content:

Readability

A text with a size of 7.5 and Comic Sans will discourage the reader just by its appearance. Therefore, use clear and easily readable script types such as Roboto and a font size of at least 16 (the larger the better) to make the text easily readable.

Structure and Paragraphs

A "wasteland of text" will scare a user away. No one wants to rummage through endless rows of text. Therefore, use sufficient bullet points for lists and information points to make the text easier to read.

References

Many topics can be reinforced with references. If you have published additional articles/subpages on a similar topic on your site, link these internally. This will keep your reader motivated and will emphasize your credibility. External links are also suitable as references.

Visualization of Your Contents

You have thousands of possibilities to make your content more attractive for the user by using graphics, images, and videos. Use this opportunity! If you're not a graphic artist or designer, there are numerous platforms as well as freelancers who would be happy to take on your order.

Positive Additional Effects

With the use of positive additional effects, you won't only make those reading your content happy, but also search engines, because search engines always want to deliver the best contents possible on the respective search inquiry.

2 Useful Checklists

Always check whether your content:

Always keep in the back of your mind that visitors will more easily share your content when they:

As you see, there can be many different factors that cause people to share your content, for example, on their blog, their website, or on their social platforms. What many people don't know is: with successful content promotion, you can make your website fit for search engines at the same time.

Side-Effects of Successful Content Promotion

In addition to generating traffic, content promotion can also have a positive effect on optimization for search engines. So that search engines can assign your content still better ratings, observe the user intention: what claims and desires are prominent for each keyword?

The WDF*IDF analysis from Ryte will help you to find additional terms and topics that are used in the top 15 search results from Google on the appropriate keyword in the text. See exactly which terms and which topics are treated.

Figure 2: TF*IDF analysis by Ryte

Content promotion will also help you to generate more traffic and attention. If your promotion machine is running at full speed and you are receiving traffic – in general, the following developments should emerge:

• You will be recognized more easily by the public or in your niche.

• You will receive links from other websites. Other webmasters will have an opinion on your contribution or will share their followers with you. Backlinks are always an important ranking factor and above all, relevant links are important for search engine optimization.

• Your content is mentioned and linked in social media: you generate traffic via social channels – of course, social channels such as Twitter and Facebook are a black box for Google, but the existence of high traffic via these channels is not hidden from Google.

• Your trust will increase and therefore so will Google's trust in your website – your domain can thus be seen as more than just a brand, which can likewise have positive results.

• In addition to these positive effects, user signals can also be improved in the same way, such as the Time on Page (How long were visitors on each subpage on average?), Bounce Rate (How high were the jump rates of users without using your content?), and the scrolling behavior (How far did users read your content?).

Through content promotion, your content and your website are in focus. Google sees this, and therefore evaluates your website positively.

Practical Example

Enough of dry theories. In a blog article from Farbentour.de, in which I present over 250 useful and free tools for your own online business, you will see an example of how you can operate successful search engine optimization with content promotion.

Thanks to more content-promotion strategies, I have received not only comments and links over various Facebook groups, but also a fair amount of traffic. The increased flow of visitors has had a positive effect on the search engine optimization of the website, because clearly better user signals have arisen and the item is mentioned and linked on various channels.

Promotion of the Item

Because the target group for the item consists of freelancers and the self-employed, upon distribution, two active Facebook groups were chosen: the group "WordPress&SEO", which at this time has nearly 10,000 members, as well as the group "Successful Blogging", with approximately 3,000 members. Theoretically, through the posting, I could achieve 13,000 people – naturally, on the Facebook timeline, many users were not shown every post from the group. You will find the exact traffic numbers in the "Result" section.

With the address to the group members, I also asked for the help of members to see if they knew of any additional tools. I thereby created an additional trigger that would elicit more clicks.

Caution: Before you integrate Facebook groups, you should first always ask for permission from the admins. Also, search for just a few groups through which you can make your contact known, for example on Facebook. In this case, less is more - otherwise you will earn the stamp of a spammer.

The Result

From Figure 3, the increased visitor numbers via social media channels after publication are clear.

Figure 3: Increased traffic numbers through content promotion on Facebook and other social networks for the blog article.

Over 1,000 sessions and 900 users came upon the article through social media channels alone within eight days (03/22/2015 to 03/29/2015). The article is in the top ten of the highest number of visitors through an organic search of the entire blog.

According to sharedcount.com, the article about the 250 online tools received 288 social signals and one link from six referring domains.

But why did this article work so well on promotion?

1. List-Post Heading

Let's start with the heading. "250 free online tools ..." initiates a decided curiosity, because it is specific and makes a promise. Articles with such headers are designated as "List posts". List posts, that is, numeric mentions in blog articles, have been around forever, and they still work. This doesn't mean that every blog article needs a list post; you should use this technique only when it is appropriate.

2. Promise

In the header there is the promise to find "free" tools. An additional lever to animate those interested to click, because each free offering favors fee-based offerings.

The large number of over 250 tools listed in one article likewise draws great interest to itself.

3. Added Value

The interest in the tools; small and large aids for everyday use, is still unchanging (today in 2017 as in 2015). These make work life easier and are, in part, indispensable: imagine that you have to carry out an OnPage analysis of a large website completely without tools such as Ryte ... it would be a disaster!

Therefore, here there is an additional lure of communicating the exact uses. Free TOOLS for YOUR online business, compactly published in an informative article that the user would otherwise have to search for in a labor-intensive process.

Conclusion

Successful content promotion will not only increase visitor numbers, but it can also be helpful for search engine optimization. In addition to mentions and a natural link structure, content promotion can be optimally employed also to increase the user signals of your website greatly (number of unique page views and scrolling behavior).

Most internet users are in a hurry and have a very short attention span: thus, never forget to make your content visually appealing and animate your readers to read.