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Producing great content is only the first step in a successful content marketing strategy. To grow your audience, you’ll also need to get the word out. Beyond sharing your content on social media (which deserves its own post), here are four steps you can take beyond the confines of your blog to increase your reach.
Decentralize your content
As an independent real estate professional working locally, there are limits to how much traffic your website can generate. Your blog may be the hub of your marketing efforts, but you should also syndicate your content to external content portals like SlideShare (for presentations and infographics) and Scribd (for documents). These sites receive millions of monthly visitors, and can help you reach tons of potential readers who would never have found you otherwise. Just be sure to include links back to your main website.
Optimize your SERP image
While showing up early in search results for your target keywords is important, a high ranking isn’t everything: you should also be using Google rich snippets to make your search links more attractive. When added to the HTML code behind your website, rich snippets add additional information about your site to your SERP (search engine results page) listing. The most important snippet for content marketers is the author snippet, which adds your name, Google+ picture and follower count, as well as links to additional content you’ve written. You can also add stars and numerical ratings with the review snippet, as well as video thumbnails with the video snippet.
Guest post and interview on external sites
For the most part, guest posting is an advanced tactic for content marketers who have gained enough traction to convince other bloggers that authoring a post on their site will benefit them. That said, there are opportunities to guest post or trade posts with other new content marketers. Scour your contact list for people with their own active content sites. They may be local business owners trying to promote their establishments, or budding writers looking to launch a blogging career. Offer to write a post or be interviewed about your area of expertise. While their audience may be small, any opportunity to gain exposure to an entirely new group of people can be helpful.
Pay the price
Since they cost money and lack the staying power of organic clicks and shares, ads should be the last resort in your content marketing arsenal. When all else fails, however, ads can give your content much-needed exposure, leading to more authentic interactions. The quick payoff of ads can also offset the long wait associated with more time-consuming growth strategies like link building, keyword research, and analytics. Social media ads are a good place to start. Facebook’s promoted posts and Twitter’s promoted tweets are a la carte options for giving your normal promotional posts additional reach, while LinkedIn’s sponsored updates integrate your ads into users’ newsfeeds.
