Content Promotion Strategies & Ideas That Work

Ever wonder how famous people build up their starstruck fan base?

Sure, you can be like the Beatles and perform a gazillion brilliant live tunes around the world and accumulate fans that way...
 

 
But what about normal humans?

You can also build your massive fan base by promoting your content online.

The better your content promoting skills, the bigger your audiences will be.

And the bigger your audiences, the better your chance at reaching your conversion rate goals.

We’ve partnered with Uberflip to give you five content promotion secrets. These tips can help you build up your crowd volume so you can turn your followers, fans, and likes into conversions.
 

 

Creating or join closed groups on platforms like Slack, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be an effective way to ask for shares. You can also do some sharing yourself.

It’s a way to network with colleagues within themed groups to share ideas on similar topics. You can read, share, give feedback and comment on each other’s content.

In the same way that these coders share tips with each other, you can use closed Slack channels to request from your colleagues' upvotes, favorites, and shares across their networks:
 

 
You can also use Facebook and LinkedIn closed groups to share your content back and forth.

There are more than one billion active Facebook users and 467 million LinkedIn members. With that user base, it’d be silly not to court relevant influencers with large networks.

Try to befriend influencers in your industry who will have wider networks with related audiences. That way you can promote each other’s content, which will be valuable to similar audiences.
 

Get in front of targeted audiences more quickly by publishing to community upvoting sites. Popular sites include Growth Hackers, Hacker News, and Inbound.

They have industry-related members and influencers that you can befriend, follow, interact with, and seek feedback from.

You can get valuable insights from influencers via article comments, by joining discussions, and asking and answering questions. Brainstorming, learning the latest trends and ingesting related content all in one central location, can help you get to the middle of the buzz quickly.

Better yet, once you build up a decent network and following, you can use the power of networking to rack up some significant upvotes. Also, each time you have a piece of content published to these sites you can share the link and ask for upvotes.

The more upvotes your articles get, the more exposure for your content.

Here’s what a top list of most upvoted articles in Growth Hackers looks like:
 

 
If you’re fresh to the game and just starting out, you can ask other members with a larger following to publish your content for you.

When your articles are published to these sites, there’s a direct link that leads to the original blog post. You don’t have to worry about content duplication issues.
 

Gain more exposure among influencers and their followers by establishing a healthy, mutually beneficial partnership in which both parties share each other’s content.

Most people feel rewarded by returning favors, which makes this system effective. The idea behind networking among influencers and communities is to create a sense of reciprocity (psychology concept #27).

By doing all the sharing, commenting, upvoting and complimenting first, your influencers will be more willing to do the same when you ask.

The goal is to create longstanding relationships with strategic partners. You should continue to build both of your audiences while promoting content back and forth to larger and larger audiences over time.

Tip: Make sure every piece of content that you share and that you ask to be shared adds value to your audiences.

Finally, the last thing you want to do is turn off your followers by promoting crappy, unrelated content. That’s the quickest way to shrink your audience.
 

Promoting your content with ads can be an effective way to get in front of very specific audiences depending on the platforms you use.

Facebook, Outbrain, and Quuu are some of the most effective platforms for spending your content promotion dollars.

With Facebook, you can create various ad sets with specific audiences like retargeting lists, demographic-based parameters, interest categories, lookalike audiences, and even imported contact lists.

Measure your engagement levels using the various dashboards of each platform. You should be able to find out which paid promotions are converting at the highest rates.

Here’s what Facebook’s ad reporting dashboard looks like:
 

 
With conversion rate reports, you can beef up your ad spend on the audiences that are converting more and decrease the spend on those that aren’t performing as well.
 

Bookmark communities are another resource for building up your target audience through networking with other influencers.

Sites like Triberr and BizSugar are effective sources for more influencer interaction, upvoting and wider potential audience reach.

Triberr’s tagline: a community of talented bloggers and influencers come together to read and share great content.

Here’s what posting and sharing to Triberr did for online marketing dad John Banks’ blog:
 

 
BizSugar’s tagline: share small business news and tips. The BizSugar community focuses on marketing, finance, management, technology and startups categories.

Similar to the exchanging of ideas and networking concepts behind community upvoting sites, bookmark communities can help you gain momentum among authority figures and gain access to their networks.
 

Each of these content promotion ideas can help you expose your content to not only more people, but the right people.

Test out various promotional strategies and resources for various audiences.

Remember: Your audiences are in varying stages of the conversion cycle, so tailor your content and promotion to that stage.

• Adjust your promotional strategies as you publish different content.
• Adjust your promotional strategies as you promote on different platforms.

You get the idea. Now it’s time to get famous...