How to Promote an Article: 76 Content Promotion Strategies for Blog Content

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Where there’s traffic there’s hope. Every visitor is a potential conversion, as in a lead, a customer or a subscriber. But no traffic means no conversions.

This is why content marketers work so hard at content promotion. They understand one of the first rules of content marketing:

The best content doesn’t win.

The best promoted content wins.

This is a guide for content promotion, complete with 76 specific content promotion activities. Together, they are a checklist for driving traffic to blog articles.

We’ve broken down the tactics into three sections.

We’re showing how to promote the article before, during and after the go-live date.

Section one (1-8): Promotion prep work (pre-publishing)

These actions are taken during the content creation process. Each increases the potential reach of the article.

Section two (9-57): Launch day promotion

These actions are taken on the day or two around the go-live date. They include social media and email marketing.

• Social promotion
• Email marketing
• PR and outreach
• Places to add links

Section three (58-76): Post-launch promotion

These are done in the days and weeks after an article is published. Because the job is never done. It just begins again.

• Ongoing social promotion
• Paid promotion
• Syndication
• Repurpose content

We’ve prioritized the tactics within each section.

This is based on our experience of the effectiveness of each tactic. As usual, prioritization is the key to success.

How has this article already attracted 26,000+ visitors? This is revealed in the final tip at the end.

Section one: Pre-publish promotion

Although these tactics may seem like aspects of content creation, they are really all about content promotion. You are engineering the article to get traction.

1. Ask a related question on social media

Step one is to socialize the topic. Go to social media and post a related question. Did people engage with your post? Did it trigger conversation? Who engaged with you? Did their input deepen your understanding the topic?

Make a list of these people or save the link to the social post so you can go back and see who is interested in your topic. You’re going to connect, collaborate and co-promote later.

2. Align the post with a keyphrase

Search is one of the most durable ways to drive traffic over time. Align your content with a keyphrase so Google can help people find you. Do a bit of keyword research and pick a phrase that meets two criteria:

• People are searching for it (good search volume)
• You have a chance of ranking for it (not too competitive, based on your website’s Domain authority)

Use the phrase at the beginning of the title, in the header and several times in the body text.

3. Work on the semantically-related phrases

Find the phrases that are semantically related to your article, then as you write your article, incorporate these into the piece.

• Answer the related questions (they’re in the “People also ask” box)
• Touch on the related topics (they’re suggested by Google as you type a query)
• Go deeper than the articles you’re competing with (the other pages that rank for your target phrase)

Now you’re targeting the topic, not just the keyphrase, which is the key to search and Semantic SEO. Here are the step-by-step instructions for finding the phrases most closely related to your topic.

4. Include contributor quotes from experts and influencers

Content created together with other people is much easier to promote. This is one of the reasons that contributor quotes, roundups and interviews are so popular. They include “ego bait” which drives social engagement.

An ally in creation is an ally in promotion.

Include others in your article so you’ll have opportunities to mention them in later social posts. Unless the article is filled with people, it isn’t optimized for social media.

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