Content Marketing Ideas: 9 Ways to Promote Your Content Like a Pro

Building a successful blog business takes more than consistently publishing excellent content; you need solid content marketing ideas that work.

There is more to managing a blog that builds your business than publishing “great content.”

You need effective content marketing ideas that boost growth and generate leads. Without it, your publishing efforts might not yield the required result.

What are these top blogs doing differently that separates them from the rest?

They’re either doing one of these two things or both better than you:

Publishing useful content regularly, or doing content marketing ideas better than you.

In this post, I will share nine types of content marketing ideas to drive more relevant website traffic. If you want more website traffic, apply these content marketing ideas today.

9 Top Content Marketing Ideas

If you focus your marketing efforts on these nine tactics, you will experience significant business growth sooner.

Top industry outlets use these marketing tactics to drive millions of monthly visitors.

1. Create Multiple Snippets for Social Sharing

Each published post should provide at least ten different snippets to promote that content on social media sites for days, weeks, and months.

Dig deep into your content mix to see how you can develop different variations of snippets. Find ways to use these snippets for social media promotions.

Here is a pointer for different types of snippets you can derive from a single post:

Here is a content marketing example Brian Dean of Backlinko used for one of his blog posts.

If you click on any of the tweets below on Twitter, you’ll end up on the same page despite having different tweet variations.

Then you can schedule these snippets using content marketing tools like Buffer to go out at different times of day over the coming weeks and months.

2. Reach out to Those You mentioned in The Post

This is a time-consuming and tedious job (though it depends on the outreach numbers). But from experience, the result can be extraordinary compared to other blog marketing tactics.

Ensure you reach out to these people whenever you mention a blogger, an influencer marketer, or a link to other relevant resources in your post.

Let them know you link to or write about them in your publication.

Shout-outs to those mentioned in the post are an effective content marketing strategy for getting on other people’s radars and increasing your audience reach.

Here is a content marketing example of a promotional email template I like to use when contacting those mentioned in the post. It is subject to change depending on the situation and the blogger’s status.

The email template below is a draft using the NinjaOutReach prospecting tool.

Always include a naked URL (for example, http://justwebsitetraffic.com/) when contacting an influencer you’ve mentioned in your post, especially via email.

It helps increase the response rate as most people are sceptical of what’s on the other side. With a naked URL, they know where you’re taking them.

3. Use LinkedIn Direct Message

LinkedIn can be an excellent source for powering influencers’ marketing and driving direct attention to your “quality content” through its direct messaging system.

With LinkedIn, you can find influencers/bloggers in your niche and email them directly. Below is a practical example of a post I recently promoted using the LinkedIn direct messaging system.

As you can see from the image below, I used a naked URL for the post. I also tried to keep it as short and straightforward as I could. I sent this exact email message to over 300 recipients.

When this paragraph was written, the promoted content had 248 social shares and 50 comments (Update: Twitter share count has been removed).

That is not bad, considering most people don’t check their social media email notifications (LinkedIn included).

However, this tactic shouldn’t be abused or used too often, or you’ll start annoying people or spamming their email boxes… always do this when you have quality content.

If you’re promoting mediocre content to influencers and other bloggers in your niche, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.

Your recipients must connect with you before sending them a direct email on LinkedIn.

While I read, LinkedIn has a messaging system that lets you send an email to anyone on the network. Whether you’re connected or not, I haven’t tried it and don’t feel it is a good idea for the platform.

Don’t use bulk email sending options, too. It is never a good marketing practice except when using complete email marketing service solutions.

The downside to the bulk email sending option is that you won’t personalize each outgoing email.

After analyzing 260 million emails delivered across 540 campaigns, a study by Retention Science shows that including the recipient’s name in the subject line increases the open rate by 2.6%.

So, instead of trying to save time, do the right thing by writing directly to that influencer. Personalize the email and increase your response rate.

4. Request For an Influencer Quote

Including influencer quotes in your content can increase authority and go a long way toward boosting its viral impact.

Before publishing your excellent content, research experts in your industry. Reach out to each of them with the topic of your content and ask if they’ll be willing to provide experts’ views on the subject.

Image Source — HubSpot Marketing.

You can reach out to top figures in your industry at scale with a single click of the mouse using the NinjaOutReach prospecting tool.

Here is how to do just that — Research Influencers in a particular niche.

Enter your industry keyword, name, or location.

The NinjaOutreach App will return a list of top figures, influencers, bloggers, locations, or companies. Depending on the box checked.

You can discard the influencers you don’t want from the list. Save in a list the ones you want to build a better relationship with. Create a new list you can use later for marketing and relationship-building.

Don’t expect to hear back from everyone you email for quotes. Not all of them will get back to you, but two or three will reply to your email request.

That might be what you need.

Add each influencer’s quote to the body of your content, with a link back to their website and, especially, their Twitter account.

Then, email each influencer to let them know your post is live. Ask if they could spare one minute to share it with their audience.

You can follow an influencer on Twitter from the Ninja outreach app interface. See their Twitter follower count, location, and website address.

5. Find People Who Already Share Similar Content

This one is big, and I mean very BIG.

Many content marketers consider researching people who have already shown interest in a particular topic tedious and time-consuming.

So, they back off from such content marketing tactics.

But in my experience, it is one of the most effective ways to get your content in front of an audience for free. An audience that guarantees relevant, targeted readers for any piece of content.

One major obstacle an average content marketer encounters is having access to premium tools that make finding a targeted audience a breeze. Most tools cost money, and in most cases, they charge a monthly subscription fee.

But there is a workaround to make things less expensive, which I will share in this post.

After publishing your excellent content, head to Buzzsumo and enter your content keyword; Buzzsumo will return a list of top content with the highest social shares.

Now, take the URL of the most shared content to the Twitter search box. Twitter will return a list of Twitter users who have shared that post.

Since these Twitter users have shown interest in your content by sharing a similar post with their followers, you can leverage this opportunity to showcase your content and ask them to share it with their followers.

One rule of thumb is to use this tactic only when you’re confident your content is on the same level or even better than what they already share with their audience.

If you produce similar content or higher-quality content, this tactic might win over some loyal blog readers.

One drawback of this tactic for boosting traffic is that you’re unlikely to get a massive list of people who have shared the content.

Compare this to what you can get with other premium tools designed for such tasks, such as the Buzzsumo premium account, NinjaOutReach, and Awario.

But still an alternative for content marketers bootstrapping their marketing tactics.

6. Repurpose Blog Post to SlideShare Presentation

You might have read about the benefits of the content upgrade in the SlideShare presentation. But you don’t have enough time at hand devoted to it.

When you do it right with better slides that tell a beautiful story, SlideShare can be an incredible source of free targeted traffic.

Here is a Slide deck presentation I was playing with some time ago.

Top 20 earning blogs 2016 from Shamsudeen Adeshokan

As you can see, my Slide deck presentation is nowhere near anything good, but despite this, it generated an extra 72 free super-targeted readers for one of my other blogs in a month.

Despite the shallow quality of most of my Slides over there (I must admit that). You can see that most visitors coming from SlideShare find my content engaging and relevant.

Looking at the Google Analytics below, SlideShare visitors spent an average of 12 minutes 51 seconds on the blog. A bounce rate of 31.94% is a reasonable engagement rate.

Suppose you haven’t gotten started with turning your blog posts into SlideShare presentations. Maybe because you feel your Slides will not move a needle, don’t worry; you’ll get better as you go along with it.

The shortcut to publishing a top-notch Slide presentation is to hire professionals. But if you’re trapped in cash, instead of doing nothing at all… start where you are.

You don’t have to use Slide presentations all the time. Converting your post to PDF format can work well on SlideShare.

Most of my blog posts are being converted to PDF and uploaded to SlideShare.

For further reading on how to get hands-on experience using SlideShare for effective traffic generation. Check out this post on Ana Hoffman’s traffic generation cafe blog.

There are other sites where you can submit your PDF file for traffic and a link back to your site.

7. Syndicate Your Content

One of the most effective content marketing ideas to get plenty of eyeballs on your content is taking advantage of content syndication sites. And the good news is that plenty of them are available online now.

Some will allow you to syndicate the entire post, while some of these content syndication sites prefer just a snippet of your newly published content.

However, one major problem with using content syndication sites to increase website traffic is fierce competition for the front page.

But if you published something super helpful. And you always participate in community discussions; many members recognize your contributions as high-quality.

Your content might regularly appear on the front page.

I have had great success with Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, and Kingged.com.

These three content syndication/blogger community sites have played vital roles in driving traffic to my online home, CyberNaira.

There are other content syndication sites you can try, such as:

8. Use Paid Advertising Channels

If all tactics to increase your website traffic seem very difficult to execute. Or not bringing the kind of results you’d hope for. One traffic channel won’t disappoint you. So far, you keep fueling the candle to keep its light on — paid content marketing channels.

With paid content marketing channels, you can send thousands of super-targeted traffic to your web pages in minutes.

Paid traffic increases your chances of getting found by your target audience and makes more sales.

One good thing about paid content marketing platforms, such as Facebook ads and Quora, is that the cost per click is relatively low compared to Google Ads.

I recommend this to new bloggers just starting to use this medium for content marketing.

It helps you reach a potentially more relevant audience while you wait for Google and other search engines to send you traffic.

With Facebook ads, you can get 256 website clicks for under $5.

Here is a screenshot of the ad campaign I was running when writing this post, which has generated 256 website clicks, yet I haven’t spent more than $5.

You can do better than that.

There are other low-cost, effective advertising channels you can use to market your content to the right audience:

9. Build Links back to Your Post

Link building and content marketing can’t be separated from effective website traffic strategies.

Most of the things you’ll do, called content marketing, that drive back traffic to your blog will generate at least a link to your content.

But the SEO value of these links separates a link builder from a content marketer.

Links are not created equal.

While some content marketing ideas will generate viral buzz in website traffic. Social shares, but not enough SEO value to move the page up an inch on the search engine ladder.

Some marketing tactics will generate quality SEO link juice that will shoot the page to Google’s top 10 in record time.

Savvy content marketers know the great value and benefits of organic traffic. So they make sure every content on their blog has the potential to drive search traffic.

You know what?

Links are still the currency for high search ranking placement. Don’t let anyone deceive you — Google loves links. The World Wide Web can’t exist without interconnected links.

If there is just one marketing tactic you should explore daily, it is link-building.

The more links to your web pages, the more love you get from search engines.

What makes the difference in the result you get from your link-building campaign is the quality of the links you manage to build or earn.

Conclusion…

Success won’t come overnight.

It would be best to refine your content marketing ideas to yield results and improve your return on investment.

These nine types of content marketing ideas mentioned in this post are well-guided content marketing secrets most experts won’t tell you.