For the most part, content promotion articles focus on the release of new content. Today I want to focus on getting the most out of (and in some cases reviving) existing content.
We often see clients who have a variety of content already. When possible, I always advocate using what is already on hand indiscriminately.
For the next exercise, we have to start by identifying the contents; Let's look for the unwanted and underrated contents.
- Unwanted content = content that exists but no one has noticed. It has very few social media interactions and little traffic.
- Underrated = content that exists, published, and did well, but never reached its full potential.
It is important to note that, in many cases, we have been alerted that content that is unloved is because it is essentially invisible but potentially very valuable. A good example of this would be an internal knowledge base maintained by a sales team.
Identification of pages with potential
It's often easier to spot underrated content than it is to find unloved content.
Our preferred method is to analyze a domain in Ahrefs.com Site Explorer, go to the “Top Pages” tab and start working through the URLs you find.
You can also use the function “Best By Links”, which will display all pages in order of highest social interaction. This can be helpful in terms of you being able to find content that can be successful with some additional promotion.
I tend to collect all the URLs I find and then work on them and review them together with other sources.
The other sources being, in this case:
- The client (or perhaps colleagues at your company) alerting you to “invisible” content.
- Google Analytics to identify pages that maybe get some traffic, but don't have social interactions.
- Sitemap or domain tracking.
You should now have an archive of all your existing content. You are ready to match this content against any content opportunities in your market that you have previously identified, or as a result of evaluating the content you have found and researching possible opportunities.
This could include things like:
Keywords – Create keywords around certain thematic areas that are worth targeting.
Broken Link Opportunities – It is likely that you have identified sources of broken links.
Link Opportunities – Perhaps you have detected a niche within your market that is particularly attractive from a linking point of view.
Now you can evaluate whether the content you have fits that opportunity. It probably won't be perfect content, but it's close enough that you won't have to create new content.
If you really need a new piece of content, set that opportunity and do it for everyone else for now. Let's remember, right now we are focused on promoting existing content.
Editing existing content
I said we weren't going to create new content, but there is some work involved. Unless you're very lucky, the content you discovered will probably need some attention before it's ready to be promoted.
Reuse/reformat
So… I lied. This involves creating a new piece of content. But, in my defense, you are taking an existing asset and creating something that matches the opportunity you are targeting.
In essence, you will be able to extract ideas from the content to produce something that is worth promoting. A good example of this could be taking the main ideas from a webinar and turning it into a cheatsheet; This can be promoted as a much more easily consumed resource than a full seminar.
Consolidate
This is by far the most common scenario. Clients come to us from other vendors who have said that 4 blog posts a month will change their business. In isolation, most of these blog posts are not worth promoting. When consolidated, they can become something more substantial.
Improve
This involves improving a piece of content that is almost ready, but perhaps missing a section or two, or could be updated with the latest industry best practices.
Optimize
This could be improve the format of a piece to make it more digestible or – perhaps more crucial – adjust the page to target specific keywords. For example, we just finished working with a client to update and optimize their existing blog posts for the specific keywords that drive high search volumes in their market.
On the one hand, this meant a solid blog post that was completely ignored now sits in the top three results for a term that gets searches around 10,000 times a month. These are not commercial keywords, but rather informational queries that have the potential to drive people to the client's commercial landing pages.
Promote existing content
#1: Reach people who have shared similar content
A good place to start when promoting content is proactive outreach. What better place to start than with people who have already linked to similar/related content?
This can be a manual process: searching for various keywords related to the search content, identifying websites that have talked about the content, putting each URL in Ahrefs, Majestic or Open Site Explorer to see the links, see who is worth contacting, and then make real contact.
To this end, we have built our (free) tool Similar Content to take reduce the drudgery of this process. Enter keywords and find the content that ranks first for these words, gather the pages that link to your content, examine and eliminate low-end material, and keep the best links for you to review and export, to contact them.
You can find people who link to similar content or, with the right keywords, you can find people who link to related content. Both groups of potential customers may be interested in linking to you.
For example, let's say you have a piece of content that is about keeping children safe on their smartphones. You may want to identify those that link to high-ranking “Internet Safety” content, as they are likely to be interested.
These prospects will potentially be interested in your content, as they They fill a void that currently exists in your site.
#2: Look for broken link opportunities
I know I've said it before, but we're launching Linkrot.com later this month (if all goes well) and this will automate the process of searching for broken link opportunities. For now, prospecting for opportunities can largely be a process.
This can be alleviated with extensions like Linkminer by Jon Cooper at PointBlankSEO. And of course, there are prospecting tools on the market today that can help with your search, like BrokenLinkBuilding.com.
Broken link building is a very powerful thing and, in my opinion, it is still underused. For the uninitiated, at its most basic level it is a) find pages that used to exist but now not anymore and that people have linked, b) adaptation of your content to meet this opportunity, and c) contact those who link, to suggest that they update their link by changing this broken link to a link on your page.
Take a look at this table:
As you can see, the posting rate (percentage of people who link vs. the number who were contacted) is considerably higher than other reasons for posting.
As a side note, before you go ignoring the other techniques: the opportunity set is significantly smaller for building a broken link. So, while it is possible to convert more leads into links, there will be fewer opportunities to begin with.
One of the quickest ways to find broken links manually is to search for resource pages in your industry and scan for dead pages.
#3: Come up with a new angle
This applies in particular to assets with underrated content. Niching can have a significant impact on your publication rate.
This may involve more than just fine-tuning your prospecting efforts and email template. You'll likely adjust your content to better fit where you're aiming.
A simple example would be directing you to another country. Maybe you've had success reaching out to schools in the US. With some adjustments to content and approach, you may be able to find schools in the UK or Canada who might also find your content useful and worth reading. link.
#4: Consider paid promotion
In the past, I have recommended Outbrain and recommended Taboola. In the early days of these two platforms we saw very good profitability, but I am not ashamed to say that we cannot make them work any harder.
Consumers are increasingly blind to these links “around the web”; It seems that there are limited quality controls in terms for advertisers so they have become more and more spammers (damages click-through rates); and lastly, due to the increase in popularity, traffic is not that cheap.
A platform that I think is underrated is StumbleUpon paid Discovery; We find it useful to amplify content along with having proactive outreach.
I also like Facebook advertising as a way to reach very specific audiences. However, it is usually only used by paid media outlets like this one, where the goals of a campaign go beyond link building because it is very difficult to draw the direct line between your Facebook ad spend and the number of domains you have. reference.
#5: Connect your content to a larger story
Yes, I know people say press releases are dead. Certainly, as a form of link building or press generation method, it could only be used for that. However, for advertising content, it could still be very effective.
We've found if you can tap into a developing story and go hyper-focused, then you can either A) generate some type of coverage from your content or B) boost that coverage to leverage even more coverage with some proactive outreach.
You might think this sounds like a technique for generating a new piece of content, but that's not the case. We've recently found this approach useful in campaigns where prospects are indifferent to our standard outreach approach. They feel that the topic we are talking about either doesn't matter or doesn't apply to them. A well-written press release can change all that.
You're turning the topic over in your head, making it an expanded story rather than just a piece of content. A punchy title, some official statistics, and a nice quote from the CEO can help generate some initial coverage. You can then take that initial coverage and use it as social proof in your proactive outreach.
Source: Moz-Blog
