Content Distribution: 6 Ways To Share Your Blog

For many businesses, content creation is a top priority. In fact, as of 2017, companies set aside 46% of their budgets to buy blog content. Yet, only 50% of organizations, both large and small, have a documented content marketing strategy. This is despite the fact that data shows that the most successful marketers do.

While there are several elements of a strong content marketing strategy, one of the most important, aside from content creation, is content distribution. Knowing how to share your blog posts is an important skill, and it’s a tricky one.

You can buy great blog content all day long, but it won’t do you any good if your audience doesn’t know it exists. Aside from taking the obvious first step of publishing your content to your blog or website, you need to invite people to come and read it.

But to whom should you “address” those invites, you may wonder. That is the question on many marketers’ minds. We’ll go in detail about content distribution and how exactly to share your blog on the many platforms available.

What Is Content Distribution?

Before we delve into the best ways to promote your blog content, let’s cover the basics: What, exactly, does content distribution mean? In a nutshell, content distribution refers to the process of publishing, sharing and promoting content online. It is how you choose to serve up content to entice your target audience to consume it. Many brands publish to one or two channels and call it a day, but the most successful marketers know that there are dozens of outlets — and many more combinations of outlets — through which they can engage their readership.

6 Ways To Share Your Blog Content

The founder of Audience Bloom, Jayson DeMers, once said that the real value of content marketing lies in content distribution. That was back in 2014. Today, the internet is much more saturated with content, meaning it is much harder to set your brand apart through content alone. To give yourself the best possible chance of standing out from all the noise, you should develop a content distribution strategy before you buy blog content, as this strategy will guide the type of content you create. Here’s why a strategy is so important.

At the time of writing this article, there had been 3,251,128 blogs written and published online today, and that number only increased with each passing second.

On average, the final daily count is somewhere around 4.5 million. As you can see, there is no shortage of supply. Combine the astronomical output with the fact that humans can only consume so much content in any given day and it may be easy to see why DeMers feels the way he does.

If you invest in content without giving any forethought to your end audience, that content risks getting lost in the vast and growing sea of articles. You can reduce the risk of this happening to your blogs by identifying appropriate distribution methods before you commission their creation. Below are six ways on how to share your blog content and best practices for each.

1.     Share Your Blog on Social Media

Social media content distribution is one of the most widely used methods for promoting blogs and other types of content. It’s the process of publishing, sharing and promoting content on social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. These are great places to share blog posts and may make up the majority of traffic. Use the following best practices when using social media to promote your content:

Distribute On Multiple Channels

When asked for his advice on the best promotional strategies, James Clear, an industry influencer, said, “share, re-publish it and pitch it to more places.” His thoughts behind this sentiment are that you went to great lengths to either create or buy blog content of quality, and that quality content deserves to be seen. So, do yourself a favor, he says, and share it to more places.

Of course, each platform is a little different. Here are a few tips for some of the most popular media platforms:

Facebook: This platform is used by millions of people worldwide. The best way to share blog posts on Facebook is to post consistently on your Facebook account. Encourage followers to share and write a little about your post to hook readers. Don’t forget to have a featured image that helps your blog post seem more enticing.

Instagram: Learning how to share blog posts on Instagram is a little tricky, as this platform is much more picture-based than text-based. Tailwind offers a few tips such as sharing your blog post in an Instagram story, putting the link in your bio and using great images to entice readers to click the link and read more.

Pinterest: If you want to drive traffic, Pinterest is a great way to distribute content. The catch is you need to have good quality images that you can use to catch the attention of readers. Learning how to share blog posts on Pinterest is simple, but there are many ways to focus on bringing traffic through building related boards and making your pins easy to find.

Share To Start Discussions

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make on social media is that they share to get links, not to engage with their followers. When using social media as a content distribution method, share a brief overview of what the article is about, invite followers to read it and then encourage responses. Stick around to participate in the discussions readers start.

The best way to share blog posts on social media is to create content that gets people buzzing. Hot topics and useful content can naturally spread on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and more.

Make Content Digestible

Along with creating content that gets people talking, it’s important to share content that is easy to read. Many brands create content strictly for social media, but you can also repurpose long-form content so that followers can easily consume it when browsing their feeds. Ways to make long-form articles more digestible for social platforms include turning it into an infographic, creating a video, creating a poll and using SlideShare.

Include a Link To Your Blog On Your Profile

Look at your social profile to see if you have a link back to your blog. If you don’t, add one. This is an extremely easy yet extremely important way to help interested readers and potential customers learn more about you. Without an easy way to connect, most people will move on without a second thought.

Make Your Content Visual

Create engaging visuals to go along with your content that encourage interaction via sharing, liking, commenting or clicking through. An easy way to make your content visual is through the use of awesome (and preferably original) photographs, but it doesn’t hurt to go above and beyond by creating infographics, videos, slide shares and the like.

Share New Posts More Than Once

A CoSchedule study revealed that businesses that share a new article just once are doing themselves a disservice. When you repeatedly share the link to a blog on multiple channels, you can increase your traffic by as much as 3,150%. Those kinds of results are not something to be ignored.

Re-promote Older Content

Do you have blog articles that were particularly successful in the past? Re-promote them. Though the advice comes from Neil Patel, CoSchedule shares the results from when it tried this tactic. What it saw was that, after re-promoting an article, the blog generated even more traffic than the first time it was published.

The results were consistent for articles that were months to years old. However, be careful when using this tactic. Patel found that when he re-shared links to his less successful articles, his social traffic dropped.

We can go on and on about ways you can use social media to promote content you purchase from copywriting services, but there’s only so much time in the day. Instead, we’ll jump into other tried-and-true tactics.

2.     Use Email

Social media is a great way to cast a large net with your content distribution efforts and attract new followers. However, if you want to get the ball rolling, start with people who are already interested in what you have to say: Your email newsletter subscribers. To ensure optimal performance through this channel, do the following:

• Send your emails at peak times. First, we’re going to preface this point by saying that there is no universal “best time” to send branded emails. Peak times vary from industry to industry and brand to brand, and at the end of the day, the best time for you all depends on your specific audience. That said, widely accepted tips include the following:
  • Send your emails during the day.
  • Avoid sending anything you want read on Mondays.
  • Know that weekends, historically, have low open rates.
  • Email campaigns generally perform the best on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
  • Optimal times to send emails are between 9 am and 11 am, and 1 pm to 3 pm.
  • Bear in mind that your competitors are probably following this advice as well, so try going against the grain, too, to see how that works for you.
• Send emails specifically for the launch of a new post. When you buy blog content, ask the copywriting services to generate a quick email detailing your new post to go along with it. The email should tell subscribers why they should read your post and include a clear call to action.
• Send out bi- or tri-weekly email newsletters. If you invest in a lot of content, consider compiling the best from the batch, along with some from other industry leaders, in a single email newsletter. This is a great way to share your blog posts and encourage your subscribers to check out your content, as well as remind them of the value you routinely provide.
• Enable social shares through email. Encourage shares right through your emails and establish your posts’ credibility from the get-go by including social share buttons in the body of the email. Creating a link is easy but can generate quite a few shares within minutes of your posting an article.
• Always include links to articles in the signature or foot of an email: Say you operate a health care practice. You send an email to your patients informing them that open enrollment is around the corner. In the signature or at the foot of your email, include links to articles that may apply to the email’s subject line, such as ways to save on health insurance costs, or what patients need to do to qualify for Medicare.

Email may be your strongest tool for quick content distribution and with minimal effort. However, even if you have a loyal and substantial subscriber list, don’t stop with this tactic. Learning how to share your blog content takes effort. And the more effort you put in, the better the results you will see.

3.     Focus on Link Outreach and Link Building

Link outreach can be a time-consuming and, therefore costly, endeavor. However, Moz sums up the importance of link building in a single, apt metaphor: Links are like votes for your website that tell the search engines to favor your content.

Before you share your blog content, set aside 10 to 15 minutes of your day to research individuals who might be particularly interested in the topic at hand. Send them a link to your newly published post. If they read it and like it, there’s the very real chance they’ll share it with their audience and followers.

However, be sure not to reach out to the same people over and over again. If they really value what you have to say, they will subscribe to your blog and share without you having to ask — which hopefully they do after receiving one or two of your requests.

It’s possible to garner links without asking for them, too. In fact, garnering links organically should be a top priority when investing in copywriting services, as the number one way to earn links is by publishing valuable content that inspires viral sharing and natural linking.

Also, don’t be afraid to link to your own blogs. Internal linking serves a few different purposes, yet it should be included in your content distribution strategy. One, it keeps visitors on your site longer. Two, it enables you to send visitors from your new posts to your top performers. Finally, it helps with your SEO. Longer page times and more internal links tell Google that your blog is relevant to other pages on your site and, above all, that it is helpful.

4.     Look Into Niche Forums

Knowing how to share your blog content is really just being smart about it. There are niche forums for just about everyone, from mommy bloggers to pet owners to bird watchers to gamers. As the internet in general becomes more generic, these sites prove to be gold mines for marketers who are looking to target very specific audiences in their content distribution strategies.

While you may not have a hard time finding a community (or a few) on which to promote your newly purchased content, you could struggle to find success on these forums if you fail to abide by the following best practices:

• Check the audience. It may not be worth your while to post to a niche forum whose audience is disengaged or minuscule. If a forum doesn’t have a lot of members, or if the most recent post was from months or even years back, you may be better off focusing your efforts on more “generalized” forums. Also, make sure the audience is who they say they are. A forum may have started out as a well-intentioned mommy group but, over the years, evolved into a group of jaded mothers who crave nothing more than a quiet night binge-watching Dead to Me on Netflix.
• Open the discussion. Don’t just drop a link and hope that everyone on the forum will reciprocate with a click and share. Summarize your article and wrap up with how the content can help community members.
• Engage with the community outside of your content. If you join an active community for the sole purpose of promoting your content, you won’t be a member for long. Reddit readers are notorious for sniffing out marketers and either downvoting their content or banning them. While not every niche forum is as brutal as Reddit, you still don’t want to be “that guy.” Engage with others’ content, participate in discussions and become a valued member of the community.
• Abide by the rules. If the rules of a forum specifically state that product promotion is not allowed, only share content of the helpful variety. Save your most recent product review for Amazon.

5.     Submit Your Content to Google

Despite popular belief, Google will find your fresh content eventually and serve it up to searchers. However, the keyword here is “eventually.” To speed things up, Neil Patel advises you to invite the search engines to your page by submitting each new page for indexing. While it typically takes Google between four days and four weeks to index a new page organically, this method can garner your new blog indexed-status within six hours. This is a great content distribution strategy, especially after you optimize older content.

6.     Repurpose Your Blog Into a Vlog

YouTube has over one billion active users, which account for approximately one-third of all internet users. Podcasting, though still relatively new, is growing in popularity at a rapid rate. As of 2019, more than half of all Americans had listened to at least one podcast in their lifetimes, while one-third claim to be active podcast listeners. Of the one-third of active listeners, 82.4% claim to listen to more than seven hours of vlogs on a weekly basis. 59% say they spend more time listening to podcasts each week than they do on social media. Yet, less than 20% of marketers currently use or plan to use podcasts in their marketing strategies.

If you want to reach larger audiences, YouTube is the way to go. However, if you want to reach larger audiences and gain an edge on the competition, create a podcast. You already have the material, now you just need to turn it into a vlog. Learn how to share your blog content via video, and you’ll have new opportunities opened up to you and your business.

Tell Us About Your Content Distribution Ideas

There are dozens of other methods on how to share your blog content that we didn’t touch on in this post, including optimizing your content for search, placing social share buttons in your content, reaching out to your inner circle for some help, investing in paid advertising, combining old content with new and countless others. That said, if you’ve had success with one or several tactics we didn’t touch on in this post, please share. We’re always open to fresh ideas!