Your Content Distribution Needs a Checklist, Here’s Why

You’ve created relevant and important pieces of content. Now what? How will an audience find it? Content creators face these questions once pieces are published. From posting to social media channels to reaching your audience through e-mail making we’ll explain how to create a content distribution plan and the top 4 keys areas that should be on your content distribution checklist.

What does content distribution include?

The process of?content distribution?involves sharing and promoting your content in various formats and on various channels for your audience to consume.

Creating content for your business can take many forms.?Images, blogs, videos, and other content formats are distributed, published, and promoted through content distribution.?Through different platforms and media formats, you provide your audience with the type of content they consume.

What are three types of content?

There are a variety of content types that you can distribute to your audiences.?It is important that you evaluate your content assets before you start evaluating available content distribution platforms. Here are a few content types you can promote:

Blog posts

An article, story, or guide published in a blog or news section of a website is a blog post.?There are several types of blog posts, including those that cover specific topics, are educational, range from 600 to 2,000+ words, and include graphics like videos, images, or infographics.

White papers

White papers are reports or guides presenting the philosophy of a particular issue or organization on a particular topic. This will help the consumer when an issue is explained, a problem is solved, or a decision is made.

Videos

Videos are any content format that includes motion graphics.?Vlogs, live video feeds, customer reviews, presentations, and animated GIFs are examples of video content.

Why should you have a content distribution plan?

Creating a content distribution plan is important for a number of reasons.

• Through curation and creation, you can boost the impact of your content.
• Content creation and sharing are aligned with your team and the teams with which you collaborate. Implementing a content distribution plan ensures efficient collaboration among all of these parties.
• Your distribution performance can be measured against benchmarks and hard goals you’ve set for promoting and distributing your content from the content distribution plan. Setting goals can be done by looking at performance from your past published content or looking at what competitors have achieved for a similar piece you’ve created.

How do we create a content distribution plan?

To create a content distribution plan, use the following strategies:

• Consider the personas you’re looking to have engaged on the channel.
• Figure out what the goals of the post or promotion are.
• Settle a topic for the content and its purpose.
• Decide what types of content formats you’re going to create.
• Develop the tone that the content will have.
• Choose who is in charge of developing content and posting.
• Decide the Call to Action (CTA) for the content. Where should the traffic drive to?
• Set the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) metrics to gauge if the content has succeeded.
• Develop the content and post it to the appropriate web and social channels.

4 key areas on your content distribution checklist

Here are four main sections you should have on your content distribution checklist.

1. Post to social media accounts

Pushing your content to your social accounts is an easy way to get exposure immediately after publishing. Let your followers know about your latest post by posting to your social media accounts immediately after you publish it.

Some posts are not suitable for all social media accounts. Before posting updates, consider how your followers may differ across social media accounts.

Tasks include:?

• Posting new content.
• Check business mentions.
• Respond to comments or messages.
• Reach out and engage with followers.

2. Distribute through an email list

Another way you should distribute your content is through your email list. This helps give you a much-needed boost for your newly published pieces and increases the chances your audience will share them on social media.

Also, you make people feel like insiders by emailing them about new content you’re creating.

Tasks include:?

• Obtain email contacts through website subscription funnel incentives like paid promotions. For example, sign up to our list and receive 15% off your first purchase.
• Create an organized distribution list. These lists can be organized by demographics or by which promotion they’ve signed up for.
• Create an email with the content you want to share or promote.

3. Reach out to influencers?

If you mention any influencers in your content, reach out to them and let them know. Feel free to tag them in a social media post. You never know when they’ll turn around and share it!

You don’t need to be a famous person to utilize this strategy. It’s just a matter of mentioning someone influential. You’ll likely get noticed if you do it in a way that makes them look good.

Many influences share a variety of content from creators in similar niches. It might be possible to convince them to share the content you created! If you just wrote an amazing post, you can email, tag, or DM these influencers.

Keep in mind the more high-profile an influencer is, the likelihood of making contact could be tough. Try to stick with influencers that may be local or national. As your profile rises, the likelihood of reaching the higher profile influencers will likely increase.

Tasks include:?

• Set aside time to research who is an influencer in your demographic.
• Create a list of potential influencers to engage with.
• Research what is a motivator for your target influencers.
• Budget and determine what would be fair compensation for influencers.
• Reach out to prospective influencers through DMs or email.

4. Use your content to answer questions on Quora and Reddit

Forums and social networks like Quora and Reddit come in handy for distributing your content. You can also get some initial traffic by answering questions people are already asking. For example, if you wrote content on email marketing strategies and someone asks about?strategies, they should do to begin email marketing, you could answer their question and link to your blog post.

Audiences use Quora and Reddit to find answers. Search for topics you cover in your blog posts and try to get a consistent posting schedule on these platforms. Be careful not to over-share. It could look spammy and get you banned from some online communities.

Tasks include:

• Search topics relating to your products or services.
• Reply to questions with relevant information and links.
• Keep an eye out for any follow-up questions and maintain open lines of communication.

5. Use Google Alerts

Creating and promoting content to distribute takes a lot of effort. If you want to promote it long-term, you may want to go the extra mile.

One way to do this is to stay on top of new posts and discussions about the topic you just covered. Creating Google Alerts for your article’s key points is a way you could automate the whole process.

To do this, go to google.com/alerts and put your topic in the search bar. Then hit “create an alert.”

Google will email you whenever a new article is published about this topic. Discussions about it can easily be found this way – especially in article comments where you can link to your content.

Using this approach, you don’t need to plan time for promoting old posts because it sends you long-term alerts about new promotions.

Tasks include:

• Keep an eye out for new Google alerts
• Once a topic for a new post pops up, either use that to promote via social media channels to push for traffic to the website or social post.

We can help with your content distribution needs!

Let our content experts?help you?scale your content distribution efforts with our hand-vetted expert content writers and designers.