The best ways to share and promote new content for your business

So you’ve created a new piece of content, whether that’s a video, an article or a new podcast. Now, it’s time for the exciting part: getting people to see it!

Contrary to popular belief, the old saying “build it and they will come” is not completely true when it comes to creating content. You need to build it and then get your content out there!

Fortunately, there are many effective ways to share your content online.

You don’t have to do everything in the following list, but it will definitely give you enough to get started.

Share your content on social media

Difficulty: Medium

Cost: Free

Effectiveness: 8/10 (high)

This is one of the easiest and most popular ways to get your content in front of people. Every new piece of content you create can be shared across all your social media channels.

How does it work?

There are two ways to share your content on social media.

1. When you publish a new video or article, use tools such as Sendible or Buffer, to share it right now.

2. Then use the same tool to schedule it again at some point in the future.

How often should you share your content?

As long as it’s not time-sensitive content, then you can definitely share it multiple times.

For our clients, we call content from your business/website “promotional content” and content from other sources “non promotional content”.

We recommend, to start with, you post at least one new non-promotional piece of content every day (so you always have something going out) and then one piece one new promotional content every day (as long as you have enough content to post).

If you don’t yet have enough promotional content to post something new every day, then post once or twice a week instead.

As a minimum: whenever you create a new piece of content, share it right now, then schedule it again for a few weeks time. Then keep scheduling it once a month until you feel it’s no longer relevant or if you have enough new content to replace it.

By the way… if researching and posting non promotional and promotional updates for your business is taking up too much time, and you’d rather someone else do it, then we can do it all for you. Every month we will send you over a list of promotional and non promotional content to approve, all you need to do is type “yes” or “no” (which takes about 5 minutes) and then we optimise and schedule all the content on all your social media channels on your behalf. Easy.

Top tip: When it comes to sharing content on Instagram, this works a bit differently to other social media channels. On Instagram, I recommend you share your content as a post only once. Also, on Instagram, you can’t schedule any posts automatically in advance. So you will need to manually upload an image and a description of the blog post and tell people to visit your website/blog to read it

Send your content out to your email list

Difficulty: Easy

Cost: Free

Effectiveness: 9/10 (Very high)

Sending your latest and best content to those on your email list is one of the most powerful ways to convert your leads into sales.

How does it work?

Using your preferred email software, send out a mass message/broadcast to those on your list. Depending on the type of content, you might want to filter out some people (e.g. people who the content might not be relevant to).

It’s important to focus on ONE thing in your email message. So, if you have created lots of new content, don’t share everything in one email. Instead, focus on one primary piece of content to share in the email message. Keep the email short, sweet and to the point.

How often should you send emails out?

It depends on the amount of content you’re creating. As a minimum, aim for once a month. Ideally, once a week will be better (as long as you have enough good quality content to send people). Or you can do something in between (once every 2 or 3 weeks).

Here’s an example of one of my latest broadcast emails to show you what this can look like:

Most important principle to remember: only send out an email if you have content worth sharing.

Top tip: It’s sometimes a good idea to add a “P.S….” line at the bottom of your emails with a more salesy call-to-action. For example, a lot of my emails will say “P.S. Don’t have the time to do this yourself? Don’t worry, we can do it for you. Click here to book a meeting with me to learn more.”

It’s a very small and subtle message, so it won’t take away anything from your main primary message (the free content). And it’s a great way to get more leads converting into clients. I’ve lost count of the amount of people that book a meeting with me every time I add one of these lines at the bottom of my emails!

See also:  How to build an email list from scratch

Create a Facebook or Instagram Live Video

Difficulty: Medium

Cost: Free

Effectiveness: 7/10 (high)

If you’re feeling brave, then why not do a short summary of the main points in your content, and talk about it on Facebook and/or Instagram live?

How it works

In your video broadcast, don’t just say “Hey, we have a new blog post. Check it out. Ok bye.” Actually spend a little bit of time covering some of the main points in the content you’ve created and then at the end tell them how they can read/watch the content for more information.

How often should you do this?

If it’s a standard type of content (e.g. blog post, YouTube video, etc) then going live once is usually enough. If it’s a higher end piece of content (e.g. free comprehensive guide, a webinar, etc) then you can go live a few more times to talk about the content. In most cases though, you’ll only need to go live once.

Create an Instagram story about your latest content

Difficulty: Medium

Cost: Free

Effectiveness: 6/10 (medium)

You can use Canva.com to create some cool graphics to create a story about your latest blog post.

How does it work?

The Instagram story dimensions are 1080pm x 1920px. In Canva, you can create an image and/or simple video announcing your latest piece of content.

As you can see, there are plenty of ready-made templates available:

How often should you do it?

Just once on your personal and/or business Instagram profile.

Paid promotion on social media

Difficulty: Medium

Cost: Low (￡2 to ￡10 per post)

Effectiveness: 9/10 (very high)

This is a very effective way to massively reach out to a warm audience (people that know you) in order to build more trust.

How does it work?

Facebook and Instagram are going to be the best channels for this. Everytime you post your content on social media, you can “Boost” it through Facebook & Instagram paid advertising, for a few ￡’s or $’s.

The first thing you will need to do is set up a warm audience in Facebook. You can do this by going to your business manager > audiences > create custom audience

From there, you can choose a number of ways to reach out to people that have heard about you before (such as by uploading your email database or retargeting people that visit your website):

Then, when it comes to boosting your post on Facebook & Instagram, under “audience” select the warm audience you’ve just created within Facebook.

How often should you do this?

For as long as you like. This really comes down to your budget and how many people are already in your “warm audience”. Start off with $5 or so – see how it goes – and then you can always increase your budget if needed.

Top tip: Although you can boost your content to a cold audience too, it will be a lot more cost effective for you to boost your content to a warm audience. If you want to reach out to new people who haven’t heard about you before, then a lead generation campaign, will probably provide you with a better ROI on your advertising spend.

Other ideas for ways to promote your new content:

• If you mentioned anyone in your article, be sure to reach out to them and let them know. Either tag them on social media or reach out to them via email.
• If you’re a member of any groups, reach out to those in your community, and ask them to share
• Re-publish your article on medium.com and LinkedIn Pulse, a few days after going live on your website

Finally, I have one more secret to share with you.

At the beginning of this article, I said that “the old saying ‘build it and they will come’ is not completely true when it comes to creating content”. However, there is actually one way you can “build it and they will come”. How? Through Google.

Yes, you will need to put in a lot of work in the beginning, promoting your content, but if you do this and get out there more, naturally other websites will start talking and linking back to your content as well.

This is stuff that Google loves to see when deciding who to rank at the top of the search results.

So, in time, you will be able to build content and watch people from all kinds of places arrive on your website – through search engines, social media, emails, word of mouth and more.