Speaker 1: If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around to hear, does it make a clamor? Let me put it differently. If you publish an article on your website without telling anybody, will it get read? Watch this video to discover how to build a content distribution strategy to not let your content end up like a tree in a forest. My name is Katerina. Every week I share a video on copywriting and content marketing to help you get better at your job. Subscribe to this channel so you never miss a new video. In this video, we'll talk about What is content distribution? Three channels for distributing content. How distribution differs from link building. How to build a content distribution strategy. Popular content distribution platforms. Before we get into it, let me ask you a question. Do you distribute content after publishing? What's your most common content distribution platform? Let me know in the comments below and let's talk about it. Now let's dive in. What is content distribution? There is a reason why content marketing has the word marketing in it. If you just create content without distributing it, it's just content, not content marketing. Successful blogs don't get built on tons of content. Instead, they get built on a strategy that answers the question of how to get content into the hands of the right people at the right time and in the right way. In other words, content needs a distribution strategy. To distribute content, you need to turn it into something people want to share and promote it to your audience. Your success depends on two things. One, how effectively you can choose distribution channels. And two, how well you can distribute your content assets. And here is where it gets complicated. To better understand content distribution channels, you can put them into three baskets. Owned, earned, and paid channels. Owned channels. These are the channels that belong to you. Your website, blog, and newsletter. You may also include social media profiles and communities to your owned channels, but to be fair, they are more rented than earned. Owned channels include anything that you've created and have full control over. And since you don't control data and experience on social networks, they aren't your owned channels. Let's see a few examples. My owned channels are my website, blog, and newsletter. My YouTube channel, a channel on Telegram, a page on Instagram, and my Medium account are my rented content distribution channels. Sephora and Nike are great examples of brands that have built their own communities on their own websites. By offering a way for people to exchange their experiences and connect with others, Sephora and Nike create value for their customers beyond the products they sell. What type of content can you share on your owned channels? Blog posts, case studies, ebooks, white papers, courses, templates, checklists, infographics, webinars, videos, podcasts. Anything you want. Your owned channels are your main content marketing assets and you need to prioritize them in your strategy. By developing your owned channels, you can increase traffic, build brand awareness, and convert your audience into customers. It's more work to develop your owned channels than to buy ads on Google, but the rewards can ultimately be much higher. The pros of your owned media include easy to track and measure, works as long as your channel works, very cost effective if done right, brings great results. Cons. Hard to create, even harder to run consistently, doesn't provide immediate results, expensive, requires SEO, doesn't provide any guarantees. While earned channels are your property and you certainly need to invest in them, it's pretty hard to attract the audience, especially at the start, without going out there to get the exposure on the earned and paid channels. Earned channels. Earned channels refer to public relations and word of mouth. These channels don't belong to you. You earn them by writing guest posts, building relationships with your social connections, asking bloggers for product reviews, sharing content with influencers, figuring out content promotion tactics, and getting in touch with journalists for press coverage. The types of content you can share through your earned channels include mentions, shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations, guest posts. To earn unpaid publicity, you need to do two things. One, create content people want to share, and two, reach out to the right people to increase your chances of gaining organic visibility. Here are a few strategies you can try. Create link roundups. Curate content that you find useful and share it with your audience on your blog or social media. Once your link roundup is published, make sure you reach out to everyone you've linked to so they link to you or share your post on social media. Do expert interviews. Find some influencers and industry experts and reach out to them with thought-provoking questions. You can publish their replies in the form of an interview, an expert roundup, or an article with quotes from industry experts. Don't forget to ask these experts to share this post with their followers once you publish it. Get yourself interviewed. You can find some podcasts and sites that publish interviews and ask them if they would like to interview you. You can also make a list of conferences in your industry and try to become a speaker there. Create a product hunt with industry-specific valuable content. Product hunt is a place to discover new products. Content can also be a product. You can create a curated list of resources, tools, and products or even package a piece of content into a book and promote it on product hunt. Create a microsite or a side project focused on a specific idea and geared towards your audience. Here are a few examples of what it might look like. How much to make an app is a mobile app cost calculator built by a digital product studio. Blog topic generator is a hotspot tool that helps find ideas for blog post headlines. My creative type is a short questionnaire made by Adobe to determine your creative personality. You should try it out. It's amazing. If building microsites or side projects is too much, you can always create some pages on your website with useful free resources to share with your audience. For example, I have the Good Stuff section on my website with sensory words, power words, simple words, transition words, and the content mapping templates. These are free resources for writers. They can bookmark and use in their work. Write guest posts. Make a list of blogs that accept content from contributors and reach out to them with some ideas for blog posts. Guest blogging is not only a way to increase your brand awareness but also to earn backlinks to your website. Since I've mentioned backlinks, some of you might be wondering what's the difference between link building and content distribution. In fact, some of the techniques that I've just mentioned for earning unpaid publicity are also used by link builders to get backlinks to their websites and increase search rankings. The difference between link building and content distribution is that link builders measure the number of backlinks and their quality and content distribution experts measure referral traffic, direct traffic, social traffic, reach, and shares. That's the whole difference. Also, link builders often have to pay to publish guest posts with two follow links. Pros of earned media. Credible, transparent, increases brand awareness, free. Cons. Earned media is hard to earn, doesn't deliver immediate returns, referral traffic is usually low, hard to measure, can be negative, no control, almost impossible to plan, not scalable. Paid channels. Finally, paid channels include search engine ads, social media ads, native ads, sponsored content in online publications, paid influencers who are ready to speak about your brand. Unlike owned and earned media, on paid channels you can get quick and measurable results in the form of conversions, referrals, downloads, and impressions. Pros of paid media include easy to measure, A-B testable, easy to create, immediate results, scalable, cons, often junk, often ineffective, expensive, not credible. If you decide to use paid channels, you need to remember that not all content formats feed these channels. For example, a how-to guide that drives a lot of organic traffic won't necessarily bring you as many leads if you link to it from a paid ad. A PPC landing page where the visitors land after they click on a PPC ad, on the other hand, is more likely to convert visitors into customers because these people are ready to buy. You need to take into consideration the final stage to decide on your paid promotion tactics. And this brings us to the next question. How do you build a content distribution strategy? It's a complex question that deserves a separate video, but let's talk about it really briefly in seven steps. Step one. Learn about your audience to define where they can be reached most effectively. Step two. Research content channels and platforms where your audience consumes content to define content types and formats that can be shared on these platforms. Step three. Make a list of all channels that can be used to promote your content. Step four. Look at your existing content and see if it can be repurposed to share on other platforms. Step five. Create a new content plan and specify where each new content idea should go. Blog, Facebook, Slack, Quora, Medium, or a third-party blog. Remember that one piece of content can be shared on several platforms, but you need to respect the platform, meaning you need to repurpose your content to fit the expectations of the audience there. Step six. Define the KPIs to track. For example, metrics for the content shared on your owned channels can include traffic, rankings, downloads, and conversion rates. Your owned channel metrics can include likes, shares, referral traffic, and the number of backlinks to your website. And your paid channel metrics can include cost per click, conversion rates, referral traffic, and impressions. Step seven. See how your content is performing and define the content pieces and channels that bring the most traffic and attract the most leads. Tweak your strategy based on this data. 10 popular content distribution platforms. Finally, let's talk about some platforms where you can distribute your content. Social media. Content that you publish on your owned channels can be shared on social media, but because people expect different things from different social media networks, you need to repurpose your content to fit these expectations. For example, Instagram is a visual platform. People come there to relax and have fun. Don't overcomplicate the images that you share on Instagram. Make them interesting and fun. Twitter. Twitter's character limit can be very restrictive, but you can repurpose your content into a Twitter thread. This format allows you to expand on a point and get into some storytelling. For example, a step-by-step guide can easily translate into one step per tweet thread. You can also share the most important points of your video, podcast, or blog post via Twitter threads. LinkedIn. LinkedIn's audience is less receptive to the whimsy of Facebook or Instagram. People come to LinkedIn to discover content relevant to their careers or to make themselves visible to their potential partners, employers, or employees. Content that works on LinkedIn includes work opportunities, career advice, and business inspiration. Facebook. Facebook is a versatile platform where you can share videos, images, and short-form textual content. I would recommend using Facebook groups to share valuable content and Facebook ads to boost your posts. The average organic Facebook post sees only 0.07% engagement. Q&A platforms. Quora. You can use Quora to look for questions related to your industry, answer them, and post your own questions on Quora. A pro tip would be to use tools like Ahrefs to search for Quora questions that rank well on Google so that people could find your answers not only on Quora but also on Google. Reddit. You can use Reddit to search for questions relevant to your industry and actively participate in Reddit discussions trying to promote your content there. Blogging platforms. Medium. You can create your own medium publication as an addition to your blog or submit your posts to some popular publications in your niche. Substack. You can start an email newsletter that makes money from subscriptions using this platform. Communities. Slack List is a collection of Slack communities across different industries. You can use it to find chat groups in your niche to participate in group discussions and share relevant content. Product Hunt is a place to find new products. As I've already said, content is also a product. You can package your long-form content into a book and promote it on Product Hunt. So there you have it. Here are a few content distribution highlights that you need to remember. Focus on creating valuable content. Prioritize owned channels in your content strategy. Be active on the platforms where your audience can be reached most effectively. Experiment with paid channels to see which ones bring results. Always be on the lookout for new content distribution channels. Don't be afraid to share stuff. The more you give, the more you get. If you have any questions about content distribution channels and platforms or you want to see more videos like this, just post a comment underneath this video. Don't forget to give this video a like. I've got more content coming out every week so you definitely want to subscribe to my channel for more useful stuff on copywriting and content marketing. I also have daily writing tips on Instagram so make sure you follow me there too. All the links are in the description below. I'll see you next time with a new video. Thank you for watching. Я Катерина. До зустричи.