In commerce, the work is not done after you’ve crafted the product.
Creating the product is just the first chapter.
A significant part of the job lies in selling it.
The same is true if your goal is to make money blogging.
Publishing blog posts regularly are not enough.
Promoting your content is a necessary next step.
But promoting indiscriminately rarely wins, either.
Just think of all those unsolicited promotions you’ve kept neglected in your inbox, marked away as spam, or thrown straight into your trash bin.
These days, you need to be more mindful who you send your promotions to.
You need to qualify.
Find the leads related to your niche and identify those most likely interested in what you have to offer.
The more related their interests are to your topic, the higher your chances are of getting noticed.
And, the more influential they are, the higher potential return there is for you.
You might end up with a shorter list after all this filtering, but they will be higher-quality leads.
More bang for your buck, as they say.
Doing this sort of targeted promotional campaign is not as easy as it sounds, though.
So in this tutorial, I’ll show you some of the top promotion tactics that helped us get our blog from 0 to almost 80k monthly visitors, and how we sped things up with the help of our tool, NinjaOutreach.
How to prospect relevant authorities to help promote your content
In our experience, there are really two main content promotion targets:
- People who you believe might be interested in sharing the content
- People who have been featured in the content
Promoting to people who have shared a similar post
One group of people who might be interested in sharing your post are people who have shared a similar post before.
You can qualify them as people who have demonstrated an interest in the topic you have written about and who may be interested in your point of view on that topic.
Take note that if you must promote your post to these people, make sure your content covers something that their previously shared post did not.
Yours should either be more comprehensive, more recent, or an entirely opposite take.
It must add value to the original article, and not merely be a rehashed version.
In line with recent content marketing adage, your content should be at least 10x better.
How to find prospects who shared related content
There are two searches you can do.
First, open NinjaOutreach and click Prospecting > Most Shared Content then type your topic keyword: “email marketing.”
Click the Exact Match box and hit search.
Search results using this method display a breakdown of the total number of shares per platform.
Now go through the search results and identify which posts are a lower-level take on what you have written.
For any untoward results, click the delete button below the Add prospect button.
Once you’re done removing any bad results, it’s time to get your promotion prospects by clicking the View Sharers button.
This will reveal the people who have shared that post.
Add these people to one of your existing lists or create and name a new one for your campaign.
Now you have your outreach list of people who have shared similar posts.
*Note: view post sharers is no longer available in NinjaOutreach.
For an alternative, check out the Ahrefs Content Explorer. The tool shows the Twitter accounts and websites of people who shared certain posts.
Just do the same search process on Ahrefs Content Explorer and click the “Who tweeted.”
You’ll get the Twitter handle and related website of the article sharers.
Just click export to download this data into a CSV, then follow this process to import this data into your NinjaOutreach list.
NinjaOutreach will automatically crawl for valid email addresses and once the import is done, you can start reaching out to these leads.
How to find the influencers featured in your content
It’s natural to expect that if you’ve been featured in a post, and it’s a really good post, you would want to promote it.
In this method, you’ll be reaching out to the influencers who you’ve either quoted or whose articles you may have cited in your post.
For example, in this SEO expert roundup, we quoted 55 influencers!
Say we just published the post, and that we want these influencers to help promote it.
Take the URL of the post and paste it into NinjaOutreach Link Extractor tool.
You can also highlight the desired links then right click and choose “View Selection Source” or “Inspect” then copy the html and paste it into the bigger form field below.
Once you have your URLs, you can import these into your NinjaOutreach list.
Just click Lists > Import > Choose Websites as type of import, paste URLs in the form field, select the name of the list you will add these new prospects to, check the box for discarding duplicates, then hit Submit.
This will send the websites internally where they will be crawled and returned to you with contact info, SEO metrics, etc.
Remember not to paste more than 1000 URLs at a time and to paste only one URL per line.
You will receive an email notification when your websites are crawled and ready in your list.
Setting up your promotion outreach campaign via email
Before doing your outreach, make sure to integrate your email first.
Once that’s done, you can now set up a promotion campaign to your prospects via NinjaOutreach.
Important Tutorials:
- How to send emails and followups
- Send emails through contact forms and
- Manage outreach campaigns with NinjaOutreach.
If you go to Outreach > Templates > Create Template > Load Pre-Written Template, you can choose to modify some of our ready-made scripts.
Below is an example of a template you can send to your list of prospects who have shared posts related to your topic. Modify this to fit your campaign.
Below is another example of a script we like to use when promoting to people that were featured in our post. Again, don’t send as is but modify it to fit your own particular campaign.
Hey [First Name]!
Just wanted to pop in and say that we’ve included you in our (your post title)
Check it out!
(your post url)
Thanks for providing a valuable service, and if you feel inclined to share the post with your audience, we appreciate the exposure.
Here’s a simple tweet you can send out 🙂
(click to tweet)
Cheers!
Dave
Promoting via social media to people featured in your post
To promote via social media, export your list into a CSV.
This will also extract URLs to their social media profiles. Use this data to tag them on social media.
Below is a format I typically use when promoting on social media.
As final reminders, when promoting your posts, remember to:
Use link management tools to help you track the clicks and shares that your URL gets, for example, bit.ly or goo.gl.
Always include an easy-to-share social media formatted post.
Use tools like Click-to-Tweet for Twitter, or Share Link Generator for LinkedIn, Facebook, and other platforms.
This will remove the need for people to manually compose a social media share.
They’ll just click your link and their status will be auto-populated by your pre-written post, ready for sharing.
And, believe it or not, that’s it.
It may not seem like much, but doing these promotion tactics at scale, in synergy with our backlinking and guest posting campaigns, have helped us get more eyeballs to our posts.
Give it a try with NinjaOutreach and let us know how you did!