This checklist will work for sharing all forms of content whether it is a blog post, eBook, video or whitepaper. However, if your content is some form OTHER than a blog post, you should also be writing a post about it on your blog. So while not all content has to be blog related, you should always be blogging no matter what your content type.
If you don’t have a blog, check out this video: How to Create a WordPress Blog in Under 5 Minutes
Next step is to prepare a summary of your content.
Make Sure your Content is Epic
There is a huge caveat to this checklist is that your content must be EPIC. If you create crap content, most of these techniques will yield little to no results and will be a huge waste of time. If you don’t know what epic content is, take a look at these guides:
- Advanced Guide to Content Marketing
- Write Epic Shit
- The Research and Science Behind a Perfect Blog Post
- A typical Tips for Writing Awesome Blog Posts
- What Makes Content Spread: The Anatomy of a Post That Got Over 500,000 Likes
- Create Epic Content
- The Definitive Guide to Content Marketing
Now you have your epic content, its time to prepare it for promotion. I use Evernote to do this, but you can easily use Notepad, Word etc..
Headlines
I usually prepare a number of headlines (5-10). I keep the best for myself then use the rest for posting on social media, content syndication and content repurposing (ie naming a slide show or pdf etc)
Brief Description
Write a few of these, one to three sentences long. This are needed when submitting to many sites
Post Excerpt
Grab the first paragraph from your post or the intro
URLs
Take the URL of your post and your blog, you can also add tracking IDs with Google Analytics to track different traffic sources.
Shortened URL
Bitly.com is the most popular
Once you’ve prepared your post, its time to start promoting! Follow the below checklist to generate a huge wave of traffic to every piece of content you create.
*Don’t forget you can get this as an interactive checklist inside Process Street, allowing you to track the promotion of multiple pieces of content, customize and hand off to your team. Start a free 30 day trial of Process Street to see it in action.
Comment on related Blog Posts
Posting on relevant high-traffic blogs can bring in a bit of traffic, it won’t be anything monstrous, but it can bring a steady stream of a few thousand visits a month if done well. If you want to really generate traffic from blog commenting, you will need to be the first commenter. To do that you can use a tool like Mention to watch for new posts in your on high traffic blogs, then quickly jump on to reply.
I don’t do this at the moment. Generally what I do is after I publish a post, I search 2-5 variations of my post title. For example, on my post “Why I Moved from Dropbox to Google Drive” I did a search for “Dropbox vs Google Drive”, “Google Drive Review” and “Dropbox Review”.
I then searched just the first and second page of Google for articles that allowed comments, posted a quick response to the article and included my link. Don’t bother going past could of pages as 90% of people don’t visit the second page of Google. Sometimes your comment won’t get approved, but if your content is EPIC and RELEVANT you should get approved no problems.
If you don’t feel comfortable posting the URL to your post in the comment, most comment systems allow you to include a link to your website that will be attached to your user name. Here you can include a link to your content, although it will probably get a lower click through rate.