Episode 070 - The Plan To Promote Your Content

So here we are, the second episode of 2022. If you haven't caught last week's episode with James, VP of Growth from Codeless, you might want to go back and take a listen to that. He shared some great insights into content. I mean, that's what this show is about, the Content Amplification Podcast. And we focused on quality in that episode. You know, you hear content is king, and that is still very relevant. And a lot of times you may be sucked into the idea of I need to put out a lot of content. I'm Obviously more content, more quality content is great. You don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity, and that's what we talked about in that episode. Now what happens when you have a great piece of content that you created? What do you do with it? And that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. Stick around, let's get into it. Let me first start by saying, or just asking you, how the heck are you doing? I mean, 2022, do you remember when we rolled into 2020 and what a crap year that was? And then 2021, here we are, 2022. Let's hope that we do things a lot better and, uh, you know, there's some great leaps and bounds happening in this world this year. So we're going to be talking in this episode about what do you do with the content that you create. You know what, focus on creating that great piece of content. Figure out the questions that your potential audience, your potential customers are thinking, what they are frustrated with, what obstacles are they facing in their life, in their business. In their world and how can you help them with content. And that can be a podcast, it can be a video, it could be a blog, an ebook, whatever it is. So you create that awesome kick-ass piece of content. Now what do you do with it? And that's what we're gonna talk about today. Now I'm gonna put a little disclaimer here. I did not come up with these ideas that I'm gonna talk about today. This episode spawned from a LinkedIn piece of content that I watched by a gentleman by the name of Ross Simmons. If you've not checked him out, you want to look him up. A great thought leader in the content production space. And he really talked about what do you do after you created that piece of content? How do you start promoting it? And the video just is him talking about do this on day 1, do this on day 2. And I took that video and I just wrote it out into a document bullet point checklist, and that's what we're going to go into. So you have a great podcast, you have a great blog, you have whatever it is. What do you do on day 1? Well, the first thing you're going to do, and I'm going to reference some social accounts here and you may not have them and that's okay. This may make you think about getting them, but it's up to you whether you want to do that or not. So day 1, you're going to tweet out that content. And if you've got a company Twitter account and a personal Twitter account, you're going to want to do that on both of them. 'Cause it's important to get it out there as much as you can. Next, you're going to share it on LinkedIn, again, on your company account and on your personal account. Then you're going to share it on Slack is what he used. Now, you know, I use Slack with some of my clients. You may not use it, but if you've got a team, whether it's Microsoft Teams or maybe you're just using Messenger or any type of internal communication you have, with your employees, you wanna share that piece of content with them to help them see that it's there for one, but there's another reason for that. And you wanna share that you've put it out on these social accounts because you want them to go and like it, you want them to share it as well on their personal accounts because that's gonna help grow and reach that audience. Next, if you mentioned anybody in the content, whether you did an interview or you quoted somebody or you referenced a report, a statistic, whatever it is, you're gonna wanna send an email to that person or that company and say, hey, you know what, I just created this great piece of content on this topic. I referenced you in this. Just thought you might wanna check it out. Because you never know, they may share it out as well, and again, expanding your reach. Next, you may have some friends that really supported you in your business, you're really close with. I know you have them. I have them as well. You can DM them, send them a link. Hey, check out this piece of content I just created. If they really are supporters, you know what, and they may know somebody that could benefit from it, again, they're going to most likely help by sharing it out or even again DMing it directly to someone else, and it just spreads from there. Now you also may have an email list of subscribers. You don't want to forget them. You want to share that out to those newsletter subscribers. If you've got a sales team, send the content to them. They have prospects. They have people who have not purchased yet. They have people that are on the fence, kind of leads that have gone cold where they can say, hey, here's a great piece of content that our team has developed. You might want to check it out. And again, we'll send it to them. All this that I just mentioned happens on day 1. And then what happens on day 2? Well, take that content and go into a community or a forum where your ideal customers live. Now make sure that you're abiding by the rules of the forum. There are a lot of Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups where if you just come in like guns a-blazin' and start posting content that isn't relevant, they're gonna ban you and block you and kick you out, and that could ultimately get your account shut down. You don't want to have that happen. So make sure that you are going in and seeing what the tone of the room is, what the forum is, what kind of questions are being asked, and then start to engage. And then start to reference that piece of content that you have. Next, you're going to check out Reddit, a huge site. If you've never checked it out, go to it. It's R-E-D-D-I-T. Sign up for the free account. Find a sub-community on there to start engaging in the discussion. And just like the other forums that we talked about, you want to start to post your content in there. That's day number 2. So we covered 1 and 2. Now day 3, You're going to repost that content to Facebook, to LinkedIn, but you're going to write the post differently. You're going to reference the same article, but you're going to write it differently just so you're not writing the exact same thing showing up in your newsfeed. And you might want to consider posting in the morning and in the evening because you never know who is actually on in those different times. And I guarantee there's probably a different audience checking out on the social channels in the morning than there are in the evening, so you wanna reach those. This one here was something that I learned about by just watching the video. I never knew this even existed. It's a site called Quora, and I think I've named it right here. It's Q-U-O-R-A, Q-U-O-R-A, so Q-U-O-R-A. Check it out, free account. Again, this is a site where people are asking questions. So you go on there, you type in a keyword or whatever it is around the topic. So for example, I have a blog post on our website at bluecowmarketing.ca where we talk about how to edit your podcast in Adobe Audition, which is what I'm actually recording this episode in. And I talk about how do you record, how do you edit, how do you export, and there's like 7 or 8 YouTube videos in there in this blog post. And this comes up a lot in organic search. So I could go in there now and I could look up podcast or podcasting or whatever key phrases. And if people are asking questions about how do you edit your podcast, I can give them some tips. And this is the key thing, you don't want to just post in the link. You want to actually give them value and respond back and be like, hey John, or hey Sally, that's a great question. It took me some time to actually learn how to do it. But you know, we've got things rolling pretty well and we like to use Adobe Audition. In addition, I actually have a blog post about that where I cover how to create your whole podcast using that software. Here it is if you want to check it out, right? Something along those lines. This is outbound marketing. This is going out and starting to engage with people in these different platforms, in these different audience networks to start to build trust and build reputation for yourself and then share that content. Everybody likes a great deal, and I bet you are no different. And that is why we have put a page on our website where we are listing not only the best deals in technology that we find, uh, resources, downloads, but also equipment. We get asked a lot here at Blue Cow Marketing, what equipment do you use for podcasts? What equipment do you use for creating videos? So we went ahead and we found the best equipment that we actually use and we posted it on our website, and you can find that at any time at bluecowmarketing.ca/tools. Now let's get back to the episode. So that's day 3. Now days 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever you want to go from there, this is where you start to remix that content. You can turn it into carousel content, you can create a YouTube video where maybe you're talking about the content, Maybe you're just taking and doing an animated video for it, whatever it is, but you need to create a piece of content that goes on YouTube. Maybe you're doing a SlideShare, an Instagram Story, a Reel, right? You're taking that content in smaller bits and mixing it up and putting it out there as well. Again, referencing back to the original organic piece of content. Then you're going to upload that content to medium.com, a huge article-based platform out there where you can get a free account and you can post your article or your blog or whatever it is on there. Here's the key with that: make sure even though you may just copy and paste that blog post word for word and put it on there, you do want to put a link in there back to your original piece of content on your website. It's going to give you a backlink for SEO purposes, but it's also going to get people who are interested and find value in it a way to go and see who you are and find out other pieces of content. But you don't want to leave it with just that. You also want to embed a piece of content into that. Now, the step before this, we talked about making a YouTube video. Take that YouTube video and embed it in there. If your major piece of content initially is maybe a blog post and you then create a podcast about it, you know, you could use that and embed it in there, right? You're just wanting to have something embedded that is more of a rich media piece of content. And the next one, the last one in there, is to do the exact same process you did with medium.com and upload it to LinkedIn Articles. Now LinkedIn Articles is only available on the personal account side of it. You can't do a LinkedIn article writing in their network from your business account. So as the business owner, you'll do it on that page, and that's going to obviously get a far greater reach than just posting it into your feed from your blog or your website from there. So why am I telling you all this? It was because up until I watched the video and the way that he so elegantly put this together and shared out this, I said I need to share it with you guys. You guys are, you've been with me, this is episode 69 I believe, or actually episode 70. It's crazy to think that we're on episode 70. You know, and if you've been a listener for quite some time, you know, the show has evolved. We've had interviews. You know, Jodi has been with us for a while. The last two episodes ago were her last ones with us. Now I'm flying solo again in this, and I needed to share it with you. I needed to get it out there. So I'm actually going to put this document on our website. I don't know what the URL is, I just came up with that as I did that, so let me just come up here. It'll be bluecowmarketing.ca/contentchecklist. So if you go there, I'll just have this PDF document where you can download. I might actually even put a link to a Word document as well if you want to edit it, and then you can get this list. And it's really just one page, quite simple, and you can just print it off and then check the things off as you go and be a great resource for you moving forward. So again, one piece of content, one quality, awesome, amazing piece of content that solves a problem, answers a question, provides value that you create— even just do it once a month and then promote the crap out of it. One input, multiple outputs. That's the whole concept behind content amplification is you want to do as little initial content creation and get the most value out of it. And if you follow this framework and promote it just like this, you're going to get the most bang for your buck. Thanks for listening. You got any questions, you know where to reach me. We'll see you next week.

Running your own business is hard. Those long hours, the doubt, the challenge to meet demands. But you're resilient, strong, dedicated. You do all of this for more than profits, success, or money. You do it because you care. You care about the people who shop here, eat there, drink here. You care about your community. You care about your team. Despite all else, you care. No matter what life throws your way, you power through it with grit and perseverance. You are the epitome of dedication. You are a small business owner. For this reason, Blue Cow Marketing salutes you.