7 Ways to Build Natural Content Promotion Into Your Blog Copy

Lately, among potential clients and elsewhere, there has been a surge in curiosity around how content gets promoted. For example, we get questions like “We only have a few hundred Facebook fans and no email list. How will you promote our blog content?” The answer starts by creating content worth promoting! Most of the content our prospective clients have tried to promote previously wasn’t great, or simply wasn’t there. Once you have great content, there are dozens, if not hundreds of ways to promote it. That being said, there are some ways to “bake-in” promotion of your content as part of the actual content production process. The best part? Most of these tactics don’t cost a dime. Here are 7 ways you can bake-in content promotion into your blog post:

# 1 Enable Easy Twitter Quotes

In any good content marketing recipe, “baked-in” content promotion is a key ingredient. [Tweet this quote]

See what I did there? Providing the ability to “Tweet this quote” makes it much more enticing for any readers you do attract to your post to Tweet about it. For details on how to do this on your own, or using ClickToTweet, check out this awesome piece by Ramsay Taplin.

# 2 Enhance Copy and Paste

Using the Copy and Paste Script from 33Across any time someone copies content from one of your posts, your URL can be automatically copied. This way, when the content is pasted it contains a link to your post. This script can aid the person trying to quote you and help increase traffic and links to your content at the same time.

# 3 Social-lock Special or Bonus Content

Holding back a juicy bit of content in exchange for tweet or follow can be powerful. I first learned about this technique from Matt Landau of VacationRentalMarketingBlog.com. If you have Wordpress installed, you can use any of the six options mentioned in this post on WpSolver.com. You can ask for a share or a follow with most of them. There is more advanced functionality in others. Don’t “over do” this one, but if you want to hide the final item in a list of five go for it!

#4 You Down With OPA (Other People’s Audiences)? … Yeah, You Know Me!

Ok, so far all of the techniques required that you already had some traffic to your content. What if your site is brand new and you haven’t built up your audience yet? If that is the case, then you MUST be down with OPA – Other People’s Audiences. There are several ways to bake-in promotion using OPA:

Quote Someone In Your Content – Then Let Them Know

You don’t actually have to speak with someone to quote them. You can quote a Tweet, a blog post or anything publicly available. Heck, you don’t even need an actual phrase to quote, you can simply mention in your content that “INSERT NAME HERE” inspired you to write the post about in the first place. Whether you quote or mention another individual, make sure you let them know about it. You can Tweet @ them or even shoot off a quick email letting them know they were mentioned in your post. If the content is any good, and certainly if the content is of any benefit to said person’s audience, you have a good chance of getting your content shared with their audience. I reached out to several individuals and companies I mentioned earlier in the post letting them know I was mentioning them in this post.

Interview People For A Post

Whether you conduct an interview with a single individual or a group interview with several receiving the same set of questions, much like quoting, interviewing is a great way to bake-in content promotion. Obviously, there is a little more work than a simple quote or shout-out but hey sometimes more work = better content.

Strategic Joint Ventures

Maybe there is a tool you use in your business that makes your life easier. Perhaps you have a comprehensive process where this tool plays a major role. Put together a webinar showing how you use this tool and get it sponsored by the tool’s brand. Sponsoring could include co-branding rights, promotional pushes to the tool brand’s email list, social following and a blog. Inflow recently took this approach with our webinar on Content Audits co-sponsored by URL Profiler. A more low-key approach to this technique is to supply a testimonial to a company you love and use. Make it easy for them to use your testimonial on their site, in social etc. by including relevant imagery like logos, social handles, etc.

#5 Optimize Your #Hashtags

Another great tactic to bake-in content promotion is to develop an excellent #hashtag strategy. Using optimized hashtags appropriately can really drive more visibility for your content and brand. MarketingLand has an excellent article on this topic, complete with tools and techniques. In addition to using optimized hashtags, and while we are on the topic of social sharing, don’t forget to consider re-promoting your awesome, not-yet-outdated older content on your social media accounts throughout their lifecycle. Check out this fantastic post on CoSchedule.com for more details and advice on creating a long-term social promotion plan for a blog post.

#6 Leverage Snip.ly To Promote Your Content

Snip.ly is an excellent tool for promoting your content on social while sharing someone else’s content. For example, perhaps I want to share the post on QuickSprout.com (where I learned about this tactic) about Content Audits while simultaneously promoting the Content Audit Scenarios resource on the Inflow blog. I would simply create this Snip (click to see what a Snip looks like – bottom left of the page) and share it on our social media channels. Snip.ly could help gain valuable exposure for Inflow while helping to promote other content.

#7 Embed Social Sharing Links in Content Downloads

Much like the tactic in #1, use this technique to embed social sharing links (with or without quoting) even in your downloadable PDFs. Hubspot has a great how-to article explaining how to make shareable links on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It makes sense that someone would want to share a link to or quote from your content while they are enjoying it locally on their device.

Go Bake It In!

While none of the above ideas are “new” in and of themselves, I think it is helpful to include at least one of these strategies in your content production process every time. In addition, a few of the tactics can even be applied to some of your older content right now. So what are you waiting for? Go bake-in some content promotion today!

Do you have any other ideas? Please share in the comments below.