If you think that content promotion is going to be easy, you’re in for a big surprise: it’s not.

Figuring out how to promote content is hard, but it’s an even harder task to promote content in a targeted way.

Promoting content in a targeted way is the difference between a good content strategy and a bad content strategy. 100 views from 50 people who are likely to buy your product or service are A LOT more valuable than 100 views from 0 people who are interested in your offering.

When you promote content in a targeted way, it takes more patience than just general promotion of content to all eyeballs on your site. However, the patience is very much worth it and you’ll benefit greatly when the right people are viewing your content, rather than everybody and anybody viewing it.

In this post, we are going to help you figure out how to promote content in a way that will actually grow your business. To do this, we are going to examine 5 ways for you to effectively promote content.

The five ways to promote content that we will examine are:

1. Share new content with your email list.

2. Post your new content on social media (multiple times).

3. Mention an influencer or another company.

4. Submit your post to an online community.

5. Make sure it’s easy for readers to share your content.

Let’s get started…

1. Share new content with your email list

If you don’t have an email list, it’s going to be insanely hard to do this task (and you should really start growing an email list!). Growing an email list is one of the best things that you can do for your brand.

Email is a valuable marketing tool because it's one of the simplest way to cut through all of the other marketing messages out there and reach a large percentage of your followers.

Here’s an example of the power of email for driving website views:

You send an email about a new blog post to 50,000 subscribers, and 30% of those people open your email. 30% of 50,000 emails sent means that 15,000 have opened your email. Of those 15,000 opened emails, 15% of the people click to your website to read the article. That 15% of 15,000 emails means you have 2,250 on your fresh new blog post… not too shabby!

It’s worth it to spend time trying to grow your email list because it’s one of the most impactful ways to continuously grow your traffic and overall website/brand reach.

2. Post your new content on social media (multiple times)

People are often timid when it comes to posting on social media frequently, but if you post your new content on social media multiple times, your traffic WILL grow. There’s no reason to be afraid of over-posting, because it takes a lot to truly annoy your brand fans on social media.

When sharing your new content on a social network like Twitter, each post is an opportunity for your brand to end up in front of thousands of new people. Each of those thousands of readers has the potential to share your post with thousands of their readers. That's why social media image sizes you use are important.

Let’s examine just how impactful this can be:

If you have 1 person with 200 friends share your post, and each of those 200 people on average has on average 100 friends, that one piece of content has the potential to reach 4,000,000 people!

You can see why it’s so important to post your content to social media multiple times. Each post to social media is an opportunity to capture a new audience for your brand.

3. Mention an influencer or another company

Mentioning an influencer or another company in a blog post is a brilliant tactic for using somebody else's audience to your advantage.

Once you’ve mentioned another brand or an influencer in your content, you need to do some outreach to try to get them to talk about your post.

A simple email, similar to the one below, works perfectly for outreach:

This tactic is simple, but a very effective way to leverage bigger or more well-established brands to grow your own brand.

4. Submit your post to an online community

Submitting your post to an online community, where your target audience is is a great tactic to have your content discovered by the right people.

This tactic is actually somewhat difficult. While you can submit content to communities on your own, you risk getting called out or banned if you’re relentlessly promoting yourself.

To avoid getting called out or banned on a website like Reddit, Hacker News, or Inbound.org, don’t submit every post you write-- simply submit the best stuff. Better yet, focus on making it easier for you readers to submit to these sites for you.

If you are forced to submit your content yourself, make sure that your only engagement on that community isn’t just you promoting yourself. Do things such as being an active community member and responding to other posts or questions will go along way in helping establish you as a valuable member of the community, not a self-promoter.

For a helpful list of groups that entrepreneurs can post to, as well as other unique promotion tactics, we recommend checking out this guide by Ryan Robinson (Ryan is a writer and content marketer who has worked with some of the world’s top entrepreneurs and startups).

5. Make sure it’s easy for readers to share your content

If it isn’t easy for your readers to share your content, nobody is going to share it. That’s why you need to make sure it’s easy for readers to share your content.

When people share your content with their network, it’s the most powerful endorsement of your brand possible. You should do things such as add social share buttons in strategic locations on your page.

One of the simplest ways to add social share buttons to your website is to use something like AddThis. AddThis is a suite of social sharing tools that makes it MUCH easier for your readers to spread the word.

Now what?

Now that we’ve covered some ways to promote your content, we want to share the easiest way to turn your content viewers into high quality sales leads. One of the best ways to turn your traffic into leads is by using a tool like LeadBoxer. LeadBoxer makes it so that you collect high quality leads on your web pages, with no forms or buttons. Click here to try LeadBoxer, for free.