Trending
Today we're talking about the distribution side of marketing. In my opinion, this is the most important part of your marketing strategy.
If you know how to promote your content and turn one piece of content into a thousand different pieces, it makes it seem like you are super prolific and you always have something different to talk about.
So, today, we're going to talk about five ideas on how to maximize your content distribution. Let's go.
Specifically, I'm going to be talking about blogs because those are the most common type of recurring content for advisors, but you can apply these learnings to whatever your primary pillar piece of content is, whether that's your podcast, videos on YouTube, etc.
The idea of distribution is finding new ways to cut up, slice, and dice your original pillared piece of content and distribute it all over the place. Here we go.
1. Publish your blog to other sites.
LinkedIn and Medium are two great places to republish your content.
I know what you're saying. “If I publish my blog from my website to LinkedIn or to Medium, won't I get hit by Google for duplicate content?”
Google does not like to see duplicate content on all these different websites. That's why we always preach so hard against canned content and not customizing things and just grabbing stuff from a content library.
You can do it a couple of different ways.
We look at this a lot and read what other marketers have done with experiments. And what you really want to know is that if you're publishing to another site, you want to link back to the original post so that the original post is the canonical search result.
This will allow Google to identify this is being republished from this other site where it appeared first.
So, in search results, your site continues to be prioritized, even though you're able to now leverage whether you post the whole article or whether you just post pieces and link back to the original piece.
That's an important key that you want to remember if you're republishing to those other sites.
2. Share it on social media.
Let's talk about how to use social media.
What you want to think about here on social is not just publishing links back to that blog all the time. It's boring. It makes your social media feed appear really self-serving, and it’s just honestly weird.
If every single post you have is just “read our last blog,” check out our new blog,” or “here's the blog headline for a little twist,” it's not exciting.
What you want to do is take out that scalpel and cut out little pieces to post to social media.
It might be a quote, a sentence, or two sentences that were really good, really impactful from that blog. Maybe it's pulling those out and putting them into an image. Maybe it’s pulling out some statistics that you found and just using those.
It can be things like creating a Twitter thread that goes through the major parts of your blog, you know, in 5-10 different tweets, and, at the very end, you drop the link to the full post so people can read more.
You can use the strategy across LinkedIn, across Twitter, across Instagram, or wherever you've got a following and you want to grow your brand. Focus there.
You don't have to use every single social media channel. But if you do use them all, this is a great way to diversify that content and make it appear that you've got a lot more production coming out of that one piece than just one piece.
If you're not a designer, go to canva.com, and use that to create some more of those image-heavy posts because social media loves images. And, importantly, if you use Canva, don't just grab a stock template and use it as is.
Try to do more than just swap out the colors. At least use brand colors, change out the image if there's a photo, and use your real fonts. That's the minimum that you can do.
If you want to do a little bit more, reposition a few things, delete a couple elements, add in a few new ones, and just go for it. Canva is a great design tool for the non-designer.
3. Repurpose that content into a different medium.
This can be things like video, podcast, an infographic, a downloadable like an ebook, again, a Twitter thread, or even a webinar if your blog has enough meat to it and you want to continue to expand on it.
After you've written that blog, go record a video about it. You can record that straight to social. You can record it for your YouTube.
Like we said, if you use some interesting stats, go find an infographic template on Canva, drop those stats into it, and repurpose that content.
4. Bundle themed content and turn it into an ebook or special tab on your website.
This is something that we especially love to do with client content because we use topic clusters to guide our blog strategy. This allows. us to have themes that we're hitting on and encourages us to talk about interconnected topics on the blog over a length of time.
So, after you published some related posts, group those together into an ebook or another type of downloadable to give yourself a new type of content to offer and reach people in new ways.
You just did five blog posts on your approach to tax planning with clients? Great. Copy the text out of those, put them into an e-book design, write a new intro, write a little conclusion, and you've got an e-book to offer to new visitors to your site.
You make it convenient. You packaged up your little guide to tax playing into one resource instead of five blog posts. It's better for them. It's better for you. So, repurpose!
5. Revisit the content and update it.
The last thing about distribution is you should return to your old content from time to time to audit it and see if you can freshen it up and continue to share it.
One of my favorite marketers, Ross Simmons, says, “create once, distribute forever.”
Now, “distribute forever” is great if you're not just sharing a blog post that hasn't been updated since 2015, so look for ways to freshen it up.
Are there some more relevant updated stats you can swap in? Great. Can you elaborate or freshen up? Maybe it can be something as simple as updating a new image, updating the headline and trying again later.
But if you're creating what's known as evergreen content, which isn't tied to a specific time, it's advice or thoughts that are going to be relevant six months from now, as they were six months previous, that's content that you should keep in the chamber and continue sharing.
Don't let it fall by the wayside and go away. Just because you published it a while ago, if your thoughts are still relevant, continue to share.
So there we go. Five ideas for how to create a content distribution framework that really works well for you and continues to promote your content long after the original published date is passed.
See you next week, everybody.
Related: What Does It Mean To Be ‘Google Screened’ and Should Advisors Do It?