10 Content Promotion Strategies That Work (With Examples)

Even if you create the best piece of content possible, it won’t perform well if nobody finds it. 

Relying entirely on organic visibility from search engines isn’t a great approach, as only one website will earn the top spot in the search results. 

Similarly, relying on social media platforms for organic visibility isn’t a great approach, as they usually only show your content to a fraction of your followers.  

That means you need an alternative method to get your content in front of your audience. 

The problem is that most content promotion strategies are either:

• Minimally effective: For example, sharing a blog post link on multiple social media channels isn’t a very effective strategy to earn more organic traffic.
• Too involved: For example, a trend report that surveys 1,000 bloggers will probably receive a lot of shares and engagement, but it’s unrealistic to expect you to do this each month.  

In this post, we’ll introduce you to some content promotion strategies that are effective and sustainable so that you can help each new piece of content you publish earn more reach and engagement.

Note: These strategies are only effective if you create valuable content worth sharing. These tips will help your content get initial visitors, but you will only earn more shares, engagement, and backlinks if people think it’s worth sharing with their friends. So, ensure you’re creating engaging content before promoting it.

1. Email Your List

Most audiences don’t check blogs regularly. 

So even though you publish a new post on your blog, your audience probably won’t see it.

To ensure your audience sees your new content, email it to them each week. 

The email newsletter is our main content promotion strategy at Copyblogger. Each week, we send the most recent blog post and various other pieces of content that Copyblogger owner, Tim Stoddart, has created. 

While I don’t have any exact statistics, I’ve noticed that the posts we promote to the email list often rank faster in search engines than those we do not promote. This is probably because search engines can see that the content is earning positive user engagement signals, so promoting content to your email list is an easy way to boost your SEO.

To start building an email list, create free lead magnets that people can download in exchange for an email address. 

For example, this is the lead magnet that we use here at Copyblogger:

Again, only promote high quality content to your list. If people don’t like the content you’re sending, they’ll just unsubscribe.  

2. Repurpose Your Content

If you create one piece of long-form content, like a blog post or video, you can extract snippets from it to post on social media and other platforms.

For example, if you are already creating video content, you can repurpose the audio into a podcast, hire a writer to rewrite the content as a blog post, and take clips from it to publish on YouTube shorts, Instagram, or TikTok.

Eric Siu is excellent at content repurposing. Here’s an example of how he took a single short video and repurposed it into four different pieces of content:

The main benefit of content repurposing is that you can take a single excellent content idea from a genuine expert and then use automation or less expensive talent to help it earn more reach across different channels. This way, you can publish a higher volume of content at minimal additional cost, yet the quality will remain expert-level. 

One mistake I often see is people simply resharing the original piece of content (like a long-form video or blog post) on social media.

This doesn’t work well for a few reasons:

1. Social algorithms tend to give less visibility to content with links because they want to keep users on their platforms.
2. Users can’t really interact with content links.

Here’s an example of a post that isn’t very well optimized for the social platform:

In contrast, here’s a great example of a repurposed piece of content well optimized for LinkedIn. The post includes a graphic and content repurposed from a book the author wrote and generated well over 100 comments:

So be sure to optimize the content for the marketing channel you’re publishing it on rather than just sharing it across different platforms. 

For example, if you’re repurposing a blog post into a social media post, consider adding an infographic to the social media post.

If you’re doing all of the content repurposing yourself and can’t afford to repurpose every piece of content, prioritize repurposing only your top-performing posts.

3. Run Paid Ads

Paid promotion is a great content distribution strategy if you’re trying to get more traffic and engagement to a bottom-of-the-funnel, high-converting piece of content, like a case study or customer testimonial.

Most people don’t organically share sales-driven content, so paying to get this content in front of the right audience is often the best promotion strategy. 

X and LinkedIn are excellent for B2B content promotion, and Facebook and Instagram are great for B2C content promotion.

Here are specific guides for setting up and running content promotion ads on each of these platforms:

• How to run sponsored content ads on LinkedIn
• How to use Quick Promote to boost content on X
• How to promote content on Instagram
• How to start running ads on Facebook

Another major benefit of paid social promotion is that you can specify the audience you want to show the content to with targeting filters. 

It’s also fairly easy to set up ads. It may seem overwhelming initially, but most platforms are relatively easy after you get the hang of it. 

However, there is a lot of nuance to paid media, so the effectiveness of your ads will vary depending on your skill as a paid media specialist. It also requires capital, so this is a better strategy for content that’s proven to drive conversions.

4. Use Employee Advocacy

People like to connect with other people on social media. So instead of just posting content on the company page, ask your employees to share it with their audience.

Executives are particularly helpful for content promotion as they tend to have the largest social media audiences. 

Ideally, ask executives and employees to create their own thoughtful post about the content idea rather than just resharing it. Or, you can even ghostwrite a post about the content for them to share on social media.

Here’s a great example of how Beehiiv leverage’s its CEO’s social media presence to promote news and features. Rather than just sharing a link to the video on LinkedIn, the CEO took some time to write a LinkedIn-optimized post about it, including a bit of his own personal experience, and natively uploaded the video:  

You can also ask employees to like and comment on posts published by the brand to help boost those posts’ visibility.

A pro tip to increase employee engagement is to provide specific engagement requests. Many employees don’t know what to share or say, so giving them topic ideas or specific posts to engage with can help increase engagement.

If you have a large team of employees, you can use a tool like GaggleAMP to send specific engagement requests to specific employees.

5. Guest Post Strategically

Guest blogging is a common content promotion tactic, but it’s usually ineffective because most people only write guest posts to earn links.

As a result, the guest posts are usually poorly written and lack original ideas.

So it’s no surprise that the links inside the guest post to your content rarely get any clicks. 

Instead, guest post on the most esteemed industry publications and only submit a post when you have something genuinely insightful to say. Then, link back to only relevant content.

For example, this author created a data study and published the results as a guest post on an authoritative website:

Then, she further promoted it by writing more guest posts on leading marketing websites like CoSchedule and Ahrefs.

So if you have particularly interesting insights on a specific idea, first create a blog post on your own blog about it.

Then, reach out to other top publications in your industry to do guest posts on that one topic. 

You’ll then become known for that idea and your blog post on the topic will also earn some valuable links, aiding its promotion. 

The drawback of this strategy is that it isn’t very scalable. It requires a lot of effort to come up with a truly unique and insightful idea, and you’ll also have to have a really good pitch to land placements in top industry publications. 

However, it is a highly effective strategy to build links and earn a lot of promotion.

6. Collaborate With Influencers/Parallel Brands

Collaborating with influencers and other parallel brands is a great way to get your content in front of a new audience, and expert insights can elevate the quality of your content. 

There are a few different standard content collaboration strategies:

1. Webinars
2. Podcast/video interviews
3. Blog post interviews (interview them live but publish it as a blog post)

Getting an influencer to agree to a content collaboration is relatively easy. Usually, a personal message on LinkedIn or another social media platform is sufficient. 

The key is to have a personalized message and ask them to speak about a topic they are an expert on.

For example, if I wanted to interview marketer Adrienne Barnes, I would mention that I have an audience of marketers and want to discuss the importance of audience research. As you can tell from her LinkedIn profile, audience research is an area she specializes in:

I could also mention that I’d love to have her discuss her process for conducting customer research calls, as I can tell from her content that this is something that would be beneficial for her to talk about:

Allowing her to show off her services and skills to my community will incentivize her to agree to the content collaboration.

If you’re unsure which influencers to contact, you can use an audience research tool like SparkToro. Type in the keyword your audience talks about:

Then, you can scroll down to see a list of the most popular social accounts they follow:

Some of these people might be too big and may not respond. So another option is to look at other people with audiences similar to yours. Then, reach out to the influencers they often collaborate with. 

Or, if you’d rather just pay for an influencer to get on a call, you can use a tool like Intro to book a call with top influencers:

As you’re evaluating influencers, prioritize those with a relevant, loyal audience over those with large followings.

Once you’ve found an influencer who has agreed to collaborate with you, the next step is to ensure the content is high quality.   

Ultimately, the questions you ask influencers determine the quality of the content.

To get better responses from influencers, send the influencer a list of the topics you want to discuss beforehand and ask them to bring some anecdotal examples of their experience with each topic. This will make your content much more interesting, and it will be truly unique.

In addition, notify the influencers when the content is live. You can ask them to either share it on social media or with their email list to get more attention.

Most influencers are happy to share it with their followers as they’ve also invested time into creating that content.

Even if you aren’t doing a video or podcast interview, you can still collaborate with influencers by collecting quotes for written content.

For example, you can sign up for a free service like HelpaB2BWriter.com to submit a quote request. 

7. Create Original Data 

Original data tends to naturally generate organic shares. Even though publishing original data technically isn’t a content promotion tactic, you’ll find that this type of content naturally earns more organic traffic and social shares. 

However, some data studies get significantly more brand awareness and engagement than others. 

The key to outstanding data is that it provides a data-driven answer to a burning question that will give them the insights they need to achieve better results from their strategy.

For example, many SEOs wonder whether internal linking from authoritative pages is really an effective method to increase rankings in the SERPs. 

So great original data would be a stat like “90% of the blog posts in positions 30 or lower in the SERPs increased by at least 20 positions after internally linking to them from another page with a page authority score of at least 30.”   

This is excellent because it answers the hotly debated question of how effective internal links are at increasing rankings. It also gives people an actionable takeaway as they know they should internally link from highly authoritative pages.

In contrast, here’s a piece of original data that isn’t as helpful:

“50% of marketers plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2024.”

This isn’t very helpful because most people already assume that most companies are increasing their content marketing budgets. It also doesn’t give you actionable information on making your content marketing strategy more effective.

To create great original data, take a list of all of your customers’ most commonly asked questions and then figure out a way to answer them with data. 

This can be as simple as running a few experiments and then writing a case study about it. This case study on updating content is an excellent example of analyzing your own data to answer burning questions. 

In this case, they analyzed 50 blog posts three months after being updated and then used the data to answer burning questions like “What are the chances I’ll lose traffic if I update my blog post?”  

Most SaaS companies also have access to raw data that they can analyze to answer key questions. 

If you don’t have access to raw data, partner with a company that does have data or at least has an audience you can survey.

Andy Crestodina is a great example of a marketer who uses this strategy frequently. For example, he partnered with Question Pro to complete this data study. 

There are also plenty of creative methods to collect data for free. For example, Andy Crestodina famously hired a VA to look up a list of popular websites in the Wayback Machine to see when they were last redesigned. 

Then, he used that data to create a statistic to answer the question, “What’s the average lifespan of a website design?” (The VA found that it was about 2.5 years.)

Pro Tip: If your website has low authority and your social accounts have few followers, publish the data as a guest post on a prominent industry publication. Or collaborate with an industry influencer to kickstart engagement. As I mentioned earlier, creating original data technically isn’t a promotion tactic. While original data tends to organically earn more shares and engagement, giving it a kickstart by collaborating with influencers will certainly give it a boost.

8. Cross Promote With Email Lists

I’ve discovered two things:

1. People love free content promotion.
2. People tend to reciprocate favors.

If you promote someone else’s content to your audience, there’s a good chance they’ll promote your content to their audience.

So, reach out to some of the top content creators in your industry and ask if they have any content they’d like promoted to your email list. 

You can look for creators with:

• Large social followings
• Large email lists (Beehiiv newsletters, Substacks, etc.)
• Websites with a lot of organic traffic (they also tend to have big email lists)

Ideally, reach out to people with a history of sharing content from other creators. For example, you can see that this email newsletter tends to actively promote content from other creators, so it would be a great candidate to reach out to: 

If you’re still struggling to find creators, use a tool like BuzzSumo or SparkToro to find social media accounts, websites, and other publications your audience follows:

Ideally, reach out to brands with a similar-sized audience to yours. Otherwise, the value exchange in a cross promotion won’t be equal. 

You can also reach out to parallel brands. For example, if you have a webinar platform, reach out to landing page builders, email marketing companies, and other parallel companies with similar audiences. 

Then, send a message like this:

Hi (name),

I liked your latest post about (X). I think that (one insight that you got from it). 

I also have a (industry) audience and am looking for some content to send in our monthly roundup newsletter. 

I’d love to share a piece of content from you. Is there anything in particular that you’d like me to promote to my audience? If you have no preference, I’ll just include this one, as I think it’s relevant to our audience. 

Thanks!

John

This message works because you aren’t asking them for anything. You’re only providing value.

This is an easy way to build genuine relationships with industry influencers and parallel brands.

After you promote their content to your list, some creators organically offer to promote your content to their audiences. 

If not, I’d promote their content at least twice before asking them if they’d like to promote some of your best content. 

Again, carefully vet who you promote to ensure they do frequently share content from other creators. Otherwise, it won’t be an equally valuable trade for you.

However, most people are happy to share your content if you’ve already provided substantial value by sharing their content.
Note: This strategy only works if you already have a substantial audience. If not, start building an audience. You can do that by guest posting and doing data collaborations with other influencers. 

9. Redirect Old Blog Posts And Internally Link

Redirecting old blog posts with little traffic but a handful of links can help your content earn more authority and improve the overall health of your website. 

Similarly, internally linking from other high authority pages on your website to your new content can help increase visibility and rankings in the search results. 

So while neither of these are technically promotion tactics, they are both excellent content strategy best practices that can help your new content easily earn more organic traffic.   

To figure out which blog posts to redirect to your new piece of content, Google:

inurl:yourwebsite.com “target keyword”

Then, see what old content shows up. I like to turn on the Ahrefs Chrome extension to see traffic and backlink statistics. I redirect the pages that receive little traffic and are relevant to the keyword I’m targeting with the new piece of content.

For example, we have a lot of content here at Copyblogger that could be redirected. Here’s an example of a lot of content targeting the keyword “SEO copywriting.” So I plan to redirect all of these posts to a single post we just republished on the topic. 

Redirecting these posts to a single post transfers the link juice and the little traffic that these posts have to the new post. As a result, that new post gets some links as soon as it’s published, which will give it a better chance in the SERPs. 

This tactic is great for larger websites that already have a lot of outdated content as reducing the number of posts that receive little traffic improves the overall health of the website. 

The other tactic we use is internal linking. 

Specifically, we have a few cornerstone content pieces on broad topics. Then, we link out to other more specific pages. Those other more specific pages also link to one another. 

Here’s a visual example of our internal linking strategy. In this case, you can see that the social media ultimate guide links to other niche topics within social media. Then, those niche social media posts also internally link to one another.

This internal linking strategy is effective because it helps search engines find your new content and understand what it’s about. 

While this is the main internal linking strategy we use, you can also link from other relevant, high authority pages (pages with a lot of links) on your website to help it earn even more traction.

To find high authority pages on your website, you can use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush and click on the “best by links” report. 

Then, you can look through those pages and figure out a way to naturally internally link from those pages to your new piece of content.

10. Revisit and Repromote Old Content

Finally, continue promoting your older content. 

This is particularly important if you have evergreen content. If you notice that it starts to slip in the rankings, but you think that it’s still relevant, just use one of the promotion tactics in this post to boost it.

Often, you don’t need to spend more money to refresh it. Instead, a new influx of traffic from promotion efforts is enough to spike user engagement signals and help it rank better again.

So keep an eye on your content that is slipping the most in the rankings and then use one of these tactics to promote it. 

How To Start Promoting Your Content Today

All of the tips in this post are the blueprint you need to promote your content and see a higher ROI from your content marketing efforts. However, if you want more help and , consider joining the Copyblogger Academy. 

You can ask more specific questions, get one-on-one feedback from the team behind Copyblogger, network with other content creators, and access several content marketing courses. 

Or, if you’d rather just have the team behind Copyblogger promote your content for you, reach out to the Digital Commerce Partners. They can work with you to develop a full content marketing strategy, from content creation and ideation to promotion and distribution.