Great Content Is Not Enough to Sell. Do you Know what’s Missing?

As marketers, we all know that valuable content is the key to our clients’ heart. No marketer of today can afford to pitch the irrelevant content that is either too advertorial or too obsolete to be engaging. So we spend countless hours researching, writing and proofreading our spectacular pieces of content. At the end of the day, we post it to Facebook and Twitter and wait for buyers to cram up our virtual doors. But they fail to. Why does this happen?

The 80/20 Rule

In one of his blog posts, marketer and entrepreneur Derek Halpern introduces the 80/20 rules that states: spend 20% of your time writing content and 80% of your time promoting it. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should get sloppy with your content, just invest more in making it available to your target audience. The reasons why everyone should adhere to this golden rule are simple and quite obvious:

• EVERYBODY is creating content nowadays. Freelancers, entrepreneurs, bloggers and simple individuals – everyone has at least one blog on which they post regularly. So, the competition is fierce and you should do your best to stay ahead of it. And no, killer subjects and clever puns are not enough to keep you ahead if your target audience can’t find them easily.
• You will stop wasting time or creating half-assed pieces of content. Let’s face it: inspiration can’t strike every goddamn day. And if your clients are bored by one of your posts, you might lose them for good. So write only when the muse is indulging you, but make sure to spend the rest of your time reaching as many people as possible. Be generous, don’t allow anyone who might benefit from your article or e-book miss it.

How Do You Promote Great Content?

How do you normally go about promoting your latest blog post? Finish writing, then update your social media profiles and forget about that post, right? Well, let me just say that you’ve just wasted precious content. Here’s what you can do instead:

• Use a social media manager (Sendible, Hootsuite and Buffer are some excellent examples) to schedule the blog post repeatedly. You can even do it for a whole year: just set the message to be repeatedly posted every week for a year. This makes your usual routine 5 minutes longer, but it will increase your traffic by at least 200%. Bonus points: some social media management tools can be integrated with CMSs like WordPress and you can do the scheduling even before the post is published on your blog.
• Link your newest piece of content in your email signature. How many emails do you send each day? Answer this question and you’ll learn how many extra visitors you can receive each day just by implementing this simple trick.
• Send out a newsletter. For bonus points: send individual emails to everyone mentioned in your newest piece of content (yes, that includes organizations).
• Engage users. Simply sharing your content and letting it fend for itself is not enough; make sure you answer every comment on your social media platforms, in your blog’s comment section and anywhere else your material has been featured. User-generated content is the most valuable one, so nurture it carefully.

Over to You

How do you promote your content? Any special tips or tricks you would like to share or discuss here? If you are still unsure of how to leverage it so that it brings more leads or converts existing ones, I (ahem) have an idea to help.