7 Tools to Promote Your 10X Content

Content marketing has been around for much longer than most would think. It has been one of the biggest buzzwords in recent years in the digital marketing industry, but can also be one of the most difficult and time-consuming marketing tactics.

In the 2016 surveys for B2B and B2C done by Content Marketing Institute, they found that marketers are still having trouble showing the effectiveness of content marketing.

The results showed that 38% of B2C and 30% of B2B marketers are able to show its effectiveness, so we all have some work to do:

Creating valuable, entertaining, and helpful content is just one part. Promotion is the other half, and you should be spending just as much if not more time promoting your content than it took your team to develop.

With the rise of content online, it is difficult for your content to stand out.

That is why industry leaders like Rand Fishkin preach about creating ’10x content.’ The basis is that your content is 10 times better than anything that is already out there.

Others have called this the skyscraper technique, where your content is more detailed, informative, visually appealing, and helpful than anything else out there on the web.

This can be very time-consuming, but the long-term results are well worth it. At the same time, don’t always expect instant results in the weeks after you hit publish either.

Always take the time to make your content development efforts really stand out, but don’t slack on promoting your content because if you just build it they will most likely not come.

These tools can help you figure out how to get your content in front of your industry influencers and your target audience.

1. Buzzsumo

This tool can be used to find content that has already performed well.

The idea here is if content similar to what you are producing has received a lot of social shares and mentions, then creating something even better should gain the right traction among a similar group of social networkers.

Start by creating a free account, which will allow you to give it a test drive. Simply put in the topic of the content you want to promote (use quotes to be more exact), and you can filter by the date, language, country, and content type.

2. Majestic

Majestic is an SEO tool that reports backlinks for a website. You can use it to help figure out where to promote your content in two ways:

1. Analyze the high-performing content from Buzzsumo by putting the URL into Majestic and finding out what domains linked to those pieces of content.
2. Evaluate backlinks your competitors are getting to compile a master outreach list to target for mentions to your content as well.

When analyzing content found from Buzzsumo, compile all of those referring domains and add them to a targeted outreach campaign that is specifically going after sites that have linked to a similar piece of content.

For competitor analysis, put the domain of your competitor into Majestic and go to the Pages tab, which is sorted by the pages with the most backlinks.

Export this and look through the URLs to find similar content to what you are promoting. Then take that URL back into Majestic and search the backlinks of that specific URL.

What it returns is all of the domains and backlinks to the content of your competition. Similar to the strategy earlier, compile these in a master list in excel and the next step is reaching out to those sites to get your content out there.

3. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is great for finding influencers, websites, and blogs for your content to perform organized outreach campaigns. It has a lot of great features tracking outreach campaigns in particular:

• Creates templates to help make outreach quicker by filling in the contact’s name and other general information. Be sure to still personalize every email you send out for best results.
• Tracks email opens so you know which outreach emails are working the best.
• Shows when a link in an email is clicked.
• Monitors the links you get from outreach.

BuzzStream has a link prospect tool where you input the keywords or industry topics of sites you want to reach out to. The tool will scrape the web for results and bring you back an outreach list.

You can also just search Google and compile a list of industry relevant sites with their Buzzmarker browser plugin.

4. Followerwonk

A Twitter tool built by Moz, Followerwonk helps to identify influencers in your industry.

It gives you data on how often they retweet, percentage of tweets with links, mentions, as well as their followers and other profile metrics. This helps you narrow down the likelihood of an influencer retweeting your tweet or responding to you.

Once you have identified the influencers and targets you want to promote your content to, you should follow them and retweet something of theirs on a somewhat normal basis.

Then when it comes time to ask for a favor, in this case, a retweet or mention on their site, chances of success are better since you have been promoting their content already and they may want to return the favor as long as you have amazing content that will help their audience.

Followerwonk also helps to “Twitter jack” by identifying the users that are following your competitors and comparing up to three of them at a time. Those that follow all of your competition would have a higher likelihood of following you as well if you are also putting out great content and engagement on social media.

5. IFTTT

If This Then That is an online automation tool for anyone – but marketers can use it to help automate tasks and free up time spent on manual outreach and promotion. IFTTT works by creating recipes: If this happens, then do these. You integrate your apps like Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, e-mail, RSS feeds, etc. and create a recipe for when something happens with one app or site, then do something else on another app or social site.

A simple example is sharing your content on Facebook and having it automatically share on Twitter. Facebook has a tool to do this at Facebook.com/twitter – but it doesn’t pull in images (it only tweets that I just shared an image), using a fb.me/link and looks too automated and spammy.

But there is a lot you can do for marketing purposes. Here are just a few examples:

6. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a content repository for people browsing the web in search of discovering new content that fits their interests. For marketers, this means you can submit your content and add it to the interest of your target market, along with tags that are relevant to your topic. This helps to gain some referral traffic and shares for your content from your potential target audience.

For marketers, this means you can submit your content and add it to the interest of your target market, along with tags that are relevant to your topic. This helps to gain some referral traffic and shares for your content from your potential target audience.

You can also do StumbleUpon ads for native advertising, but we have found that submitting the links to targeted interested groups has been helpful in gaining shares and targeted traffic.

7. Outbrain

Saving the best for last, Outbrain helps to gain awareness for your content and your brand on authoritative sites. It gives you the analytics to see what content is producing the views and clicks to get the awareness you are looking for.

You can drill down targeting by the location, what platform you want users to see your content, how long you want it to run, and at what cost per click and budget you want to set.

It also allows for tracking codes so you can prove results from specific Outbrain campaigns.

Then you can look at your social shares, backlinks, and analytics to see what content is performing the best.

Double-down on that high-performing content, create similar content on different tangents which is even better, and continue testing and sharing using Outbrain to have a fully functioning and automated content promotion machine that works with all of these other tools to help get your content in front of the right audience – and potentially even go viral.

Put in the work and your content will succeed

Don’t expect every piece of content you create to go viral or get a ton of referring domains and backlinks.

Most content falls flat. It’s what you learn from those failures that help to create content that shows the results you want.

Build relationships with industry influencers and experts, seed your content to get their input, get the help from industry publications to promote, and use these tools to get your content in front of your target audience to help get your brand out there and improve your web presence.