Post good shit.

Chief Evangelist Officer, Cavana

I will discuss my one content promotion tactic that drives serious traffic. Being a seven day a week podcaster who just recorded his 1000th episode, I would be a little remiss if I didn’t point to my podcasting growth tactic. This works so well that in two and half years it took me from absolutely nowhere, known by nobody, to where I am now.

What that is, is interviewing influencers in my niche. People to whom I want to talk, like Lewis Howes, Neil Patel, Bryan Harris, and Greg Hickman are all past guests of Entrepreneur on Fire. Having conversations with them, building relationships with them, being a person of value to them, following up a full week after the interview with a thank you email, and really being appreciative of what they’ve brought to Fire Nation on the podcast interview. But most importantly, the biggest promotion growth tactic that I’ve used for my content marketing of podcasting, is what I do the day the interview goes live. I email Lewis, Neal, Jeff, Bryan Harris and I say, “Your interview just went live on Entrepreneur today. You shared an amazing story; you rock the mic! Fire Nation is going to love it, and I’ll be honored if you share your journey and your story with your audience. Here are all the links to do so.” I make it straightforward for them and give them links to share tweets, to share on Facebook, and on Linkedin.

By making it easy for them to share with their audience, nine times out of ten they do, so every day of the week Entrepreneur On Fire is being shared with a massive audience who has never heard of it. A certain portion of those people are going to listen for the first time, are going to like, subscribe, rate, review, share with their friends, and the snowball effect continues. So definitely making sure that this process is really easy for my guest, whose interview went live, is a critical component to my content marketing strategy. This strategy increases the massive audience where we consistently get over one million listeners per month with Entrepreneur On Fire.

Founder, Entrepreneur On Fire

For wide-reaching and sustainable amplification, the best tactic – which is more of a strategy – is to obsess over content re-use. Content is all about branding and brand exposure – getting your message in front of as many people as possible, and creating different formats of the same piece of content is the fastest way to achieve significant exposure. It all begins with a big picture concept that you want to be strongly associated with your brand. Ideally an original concept with a name you can own (an example of mine is Conversion-Centered Design). Then you should adopt the following process to get your concept in people’s faces:

• Define the name of your concept.

• Buy the .com domain (so you own it for future use).

• Write an ebook on the subject and create a landing page to give it away (gated).

• Use the confirmation page of the ebook landing page to ask people to share the ebook on social media (pick one network only to simplify the interaction).

• Add a link to the ebook landing page on a resources page on your website.

• Write a summary post on your blog introducing the concept and linking to the ebook landing page (to collect leads).

• Create a Slideshare deck to present a visual representation of a high level overview of the concept. Link to the ebook landing page at the end of the deck.

• Write a guest post on the topic on a high profile blog, linking back to the ebook landing page.

• Host a webinar to talk about the subject (using an Unbounce landing page connected to GoToWebinar via Zapier). You can email your leads, including those from the ebook landing page.

• After the webinar, turn the registration landing page into a gated webinar recording landing page to collect more leads.

• Use the webinar recording LP confirmation page to ask people to share the recording on social.

• Create a Slideshare deck from the webinar presentation slides.

• Split the webinar recording into a 10-part series of short YouTube videos.

• Add the webinar recording landing page link to your resources page.

The amount of evergreen content you can generate from a single idea is extraordinary and thinking this way can really take your content marketing to another level. The long term impact of this strategy (especially if you when you create your own branded terminology) is that you can own the first page of Google.

Founder, Unbounce

Create something meaningful that inspires, highly educates, or joyfully entertains.  With all the noise out there it’s got to add massive value so people are willing to look at it, then share it.

Founder , Lewishowes.com

Hire Keith Breseé.

Founder, Videofruit

Founder, Brass Check Marketing

For both myself and clients, leveraging building up a mobile database through SMS (text) gives you the most direct access your customers at any moment. Over 98% of SMS messages are opened and over 90% within 3 minutes making it the most immediate channel available. 

With this level of immediacy you have to use this channel wisely for situations that warrant time sensitive communications or location based alerts.  Whether you’re promoting a webinar, a flash sale or just driving a customer to visit your physical location, your mobile messaging campaign will be seen instantly and drive your customer to take any action you want.

Founder, Mobile Marketing Engine

Founder, Blogging Wizard

The content you produce for your audience has to be more than just original. Ideally, you want it to solve a problem. Once you’ve gained trust from your community members they WILL open up and tell you what their pain points are, and what they’re struggling with. At this point it’s on you, as the leader of that community, to get to work creating insanely valuable content that DIRECTLY solves one (or more!) of their problems. Do that, and not only will they consume the content fully (instead of just glancing over it), they will SHARE it with the people in their own communities. This sharing creates a ripple effect that no amount of SEO can – because it’s people driven – and people want to know, like and trust other people above and beyond everything and anything else.

Founder, Virtual Staff Finder

When was the last time you looked at something backwards? Have you ever tried starting from the end and working your way towards the beginning? All too often, people neglect one of my favorite traffic strategies — flip it and reverse it.

By starting at the end and working your way backwards you are given a guide of where to focus and what effort to exert.

Founder, My Social Sherpa

One simple content marketing strategy that drives serious traffic is to link out to relevant sites when it makes sense for the reader. On my NeilPatel.com blog I link out to over 100 URLs per blog post. When I publish the post I then email each of those website owners letting them know I linked to them and for them to check out the article and share it. This causes each of my posts to get hundreds of social shares, which drives thousands of visitors.

Founder , Neil Patel

Nothing I’ve ever done has driven serious traffic. I’m not being humble. It’s true. I earn every visit with quality and value and the promise of more than just the material. I use media and community to earn the right to sell and serve. It’s slower but works much better for me.

CEO, Owner Media Group Inc.

Our best content promotion is a variation of Brian Deans’s Skyscraper technique. Just like you never send people directly to a sale page, you don’t immediately ask for a link or share. Another way to put it is, you never ask for marriage on the first date. A lot of funnels look like: Traffic > Lead Capture > Nurturing > Low $ Offer > Nurturing > Core offer.  

Founder, Authority Hacked

My greatest source of traffic to promote my content is Twitter. It’s an awesome way to get maximum eyeballs on your content, when done right. For starters, it’s always good to add “click to tweet” boxes within your blog posts . As far as getting maximum exposure on Twitter, some research is required. Use popular hashtags (1 or 2 max) which you can find by using Twitter itself or free tools like hashtag.org or hashtagify.me Switch up the tweet content and try using tweets that have “#Fact: ” in the beginning then list an interesting fact from your blog post. You definitely do not want to post the same tweet over and over with your blog link because then you look spammy and will annoy your followers. Make a schedule for your tweets in sprout social, hootsuite or whichever social management tool you prefer. I tweet immediately after the post goes live, that evening, the next day, once on the weekend, and depending on how much you want to promote it, multiple times the following weeks. It’s really up to you and there are best times to tweet. For example evenings between 10 and 11 pm est is the best time for clicks. Engagement rates are up in the morning between 7 and 8 am In order to get the best response follow these tweet tips: – use headlines – aim for 8 words for a 21% higher  ctr – use a number for a 15% higher ctr – use a colon (the fact tweet works well for this) – capitalize each new word – use an image for 150% more retweets – use an infographic image for 832% more retweets To really get maximum eyes on your content, include blurbs from authority influencers and also any tools or companies that are relevant to your article. Then, tweet out to those people you mentioned. Nine times out of ten they will tweet out your posts to their followers. And some might make your blog post part of their regular tweet schedule which means they tweet it out more than once. And if you mention influencers and companies with large Twitter followings, this method is very very powerful and can send floods of traffic to your posts. The most popular blog posts of mine are ones that mentioned other companies and influencers. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. You are promoting them via your blog post so in turn they are more than happy to share with their audience because it gives them exposure. So it’s a full circle of promotion. Win win for everyone! Facts are from: modgirlmarketing.com/anatomy-perfect-twitter-post-increase-click-rate

Founder, Mod Marketing Girl

Skip content, create tools for big, lasting traffic. Let’s face it. There is tons of content out there. From blog posts, to reports, to infographics, people are swimming in information. They don’t need another blog post. What they need is something to help them be successful, or at least entertained. That’s where creating lightweight tools comes in. They’re an easy and cost-effective way to drive tons of highly-targeted traffic to your site. Want proof? Take a look at HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, or Qualaroo’s Survey.io, or Checkmarx’s Game of Hacks. All of these are lightweight tools that create a ton of value or entertainment for the people that use them. That value drives ongoing traffic that doesn’t just go away. They all act as natural lead gen opportunities as well. What’s the key to pulling this off? You want to leverage human curiosity. HubSpot’s Grader helps people answer the question “How good am I?” Users of those tools want to know how great they are or make sure they find out what’s wrong before their boss does. None of these tools are particularly expensive to build, especially when you use Elance or Odesk, and all deliver big traffic up front and over the long haul.

Founder , morganbrown.co

If you are desperate for traffic and use short-term methods, you are already too late.  I believe that you need to build online relationships early and often, so when you need the right people to share your content, they are available and ready to do that. First, identify your influencer set.  In this case, an influencer is where your audience is hanging  out on the web.  Then, actively share the influencer content (that is relevant and helpful to your audience) consistently, in multiple platforms, over time (months, if possible).  Then, “bake” the influencers into your pillar content, like ebooks, podcasts, blog posts and more.  Since you have already built a relationship with those people, they’ll be more willing to help you out when you need your content shared.  Plus, they are actually helping themselves since they are mentioned in it. Now, many companies share influencer content, but almost none do it systematically and have a strategy around it.  If you look at the majority of online successes today, they build sharing over time by cultivating these relationships and building an audience over time through email subscription.  I’m not a believer in short-term fixes.

Founder, Content Marketing Institute

For me the single most powerful content promotion tactic I have ever applied is writing free reports. Having a powerful introductory A-to-Z guide to teach others how to do something you know about is the perfect first impression content. It educates, builds trusts, and people can share it, plus of course it helps you build your list too since you give it away to people who join your email list. I wrote a report called “The Blog Profits Blueprint“, which I recently completely re-wrote for the current environment. Every day 50 people sign up to my email list from my blog just to get this report, which means I have 50 new people I can communicate with, build a relationship with, and offer my products to. In terms of traffic, a free report – if you do a good job – will spread far. People share it with friends. It’s also a powerful affiliate marketing tool since your affiliates can give away the report as a way to offer value to their followers, which then leads to potential affiliate sales for them. Having a powerful report is also a fantastic tool any time you are a guest on a podcast, as you can tell people to get your report as the best next step after listening to you. The same goes for the end of videos you publish on YouTube, you can end the video by giving them a link to get your report. As you can see, having a report that you really believe in is about the best online marketing tool available today because it’s a natural call to action for all other forms of marketing you do.

Founder, Entrepreneurs Journey

Find content in your niche written by your competitors that has attracted a lot of links and traffic.  Use Ahrefs to research links and SEMRush to identify content that’s driving a lot of traffic. Create a piece of content far superior to this piece of content and promote it heavily.  As well as doing email outreach, run a Facebook Ads campaign to drive eyeballs to this content.

Founder , Razor Social

In three months time I grew my email list from 1,000 to 10,000 by simply promotion a single piece of content. Here’s what I did: Trust – In order for people to want to share your content they need to trust you first. In the months prior to me 10Xing my list I was regularly putting out great content.  You have to always be giving value and serving your audience. Carrot – When it’s time you ask your audience to share, you have to have content with a very high perceived value. Im a professional music and advertising photographer in Nashville and I created a book teaching iPhone Only photography.  Buzz – I created a lot of buzz for this ebook by doing the following: 1) I told people it was available for a very limited time. 2) I ask my audience to share and I pulled in all the favors I could to get my friends to share. 3) I made it easy to share by creating click to tweets, and click to shares.

Photographer | Founder , iPhone Only Photo

My biggest promotion tactic is to build a database of people who’ve shared your content in the past. This is very simple, go to Topsy.com and enter the url of one of your articles and all of the people who shared it on Twitter will show up. Enter all of those folks into a Google Spreadsheet, then dig in to find their contact information later.

Marketing at, Shopify

“One of the content promotion tactics I’ve had most success with centers on a platform that’s been a real revelation to me – namely Twitter.There’s so much you can do with Twitter to create targeted visitors, because it’s a really versatile platform – but what I like to do is relatively simple: 1) Fire up BuzzSumo and search for popular blog posts based on your target industry keywords, (you can also use Scoop.it or Alltop) 2) Use Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique to beat the original article you’ve chosen by adding in multi-media content (audio and video), new images, facts and details based on in-depth research 3) Enter the URL of the original blog post you selected into the search box on Twitter, and create a simple Excel spreadsheet of everybody who has tweeted about it 4) Reach out to everyone (yes, everyone) who shared the original post, mentioning your much better version and also offering to share some of their best content too, (you can use BuzzStream for this part of the process) 5) If people respond, thank them personally and give them a heads up that you’ve shared their content as promised Although this technique is time consuming, I’ve had some great results using it – and I advise you to give it a go. If you want more information on how it all works, I’ve written about the process in more detail here: The Triple Twitter Traffic Technique.”

Founder , Content Champion

I’d answer this in two ways. 

Author, Everybody Writes

We share all new posts to social media multiple times the day of publish and to our email list. Then the post gets added to our social media rotation, ongoing til forever I guess :)  For scheduling multiple times to social, I do it a couple of ways (all via Buffer) – in the browser extension, I can schedule multiple updates at once, dropping them into slots 3x the first day and then 1x the following day, 1x later in the week; then the post goes into the rotation from there. Or what I find myself doing more often is hitting the blog post page itself and using the extension to “Share Next” multiple times, which adds a string of posts into the Buffer queue. Then I’ll log into Buffer and rearrange the queue to what feels best. Building a big email list and social following has been key for us!

Content Crafter, Buffer

My favorite tactic is creating long-form content from presentations and webinars we’ve done. Google loves long form keyword-rich content dripping with authority. People like to share this content as well. The challenge is the time and cost of creating 3000-word articles regularly. We found a solution on our hard drives and in our archives. A recorded webinar typically has everything needed for long-form content. A subject matter expert has taken the time to frame the information. Ripping the audio to be transcribed creates a draft of the text. Images are pulled directly from the slide deck as needed. All that is left is some editing and positioning. A talented editor can do this for a few hundred dollars. We’ve been able to produce long-form content month after month from our presentations and webinars at little expense (and little time on my part). We believe in this approach so much that we’ve launched a service to provide exactly this. http://webinar2content.com.

Founder, Conversion Scientist

Founder, ZacJohnson.com

Founder, nichehacks.com

Founder, Success Ground

Founder , SEO Hacker

I use IFTTT to email me when someone asks a question about a topic related to one of my blog posts. Whenever I get the email, I review the question, and if relevant, I answer the question with a link to my blog post.

Founder, Content Promotion Plan

Founder , Kopywriting Kourse

Write expert roundups that target med/low competition…high search volume (1000+/month) keywords :) Like this one: http://www.robbierichards.com/seo/best-keyword-research-tool/. Ranks #2 in Google for “best keyword research tool” (last time I checked)…7,000+ visits, 1,200 shares, 500+ email subs…and some affiliate sales. 

Founder, RobbieRichards.com

One content marketing tactic that never stops working for me is inviting experts to provide quotes for my article (This is what I am doing now by the way!)If you manage to get niche influencers write for your site (even if it’s a short blurb), you’ll find many of them to be willing to help promote you the final piece. You’ll see many more comments and shares.I like running this tactic as a separate weekly or monthly column on my blog discussing recent trends and getting expert opinions on each. Here’s a step-by-step guide on promoting your expert interview to get more contributors actively involved.

Founder, My Blog U

Your content needs to be able to carry its own weight. You can try every tactic in the book, but if the page / content sucks, it will only go so far. Focus on the quality of the content before worrying about traffic tactics. If it’s awesome, and you get your content in front of eyeballs, it will go far. If it’s mediocre, you’re just wasting your time.

Founder , ConversionXL

Lets be honest here-all traffic generation costs money. Be it ppc, content marketing or the time it takes to perform interviews etc

The key to a positive ROI however is to become far more effective and communicating with the audience you are already getting….

By tracking your audience on your site, you can build multiple “Custom audiences” to retarget and bring them back for more.

The cost to show new blog posts, campaigns or anything else to this audience can be almost 10x less than the initial acquisition costs…

Why pay through the nose to bring them back, if you can re-engage with them for less? Why focus on the front end traffic only, if you can instead let those who already enjoy your content (and their friends) be aware of your latest content? In an age where new content is constantly emailed or posted daily, for a few cents per day you can stay top of mind with your audience, make sure they “dont just bookmark” but actually come back and read, and even build “Lookalike” audiences based on your current readers! The next step of course is segmenting those audiences based on content consumed, interaction and time on site, and the psycology or your “copY’ that brought them to you…..thats when that moves from traffic to customers wink emoticon

Founder, Inbound Ascension