Quick ways to boost views on your best content: distribution checklist for startups
Small companies don’t have the luxury of throwing content on their social channels and automatically getting a lot of views. Even many larger companies have product fans but very little engagement when it comes to Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.
If you are getting under 20% engagement on most of your content, it’s time to redirect some of your attention from content production and put it 3X towards circulating content and building an audience. Startups have to find creative ways to promote the hell out of their content each time they produce something new.
Here’s a quick guide of basic ways you can easily get your content in front of more potential customers…
Don’t just hit publish and think you’re done.
Working with startups as founder of Modular, I’ve seen dozens of dozens of startups spend way too much time developing out content and zero time on distribution. What’s the point of good content if nobody sees it?
The effort you put into distributing your content in a brand-building way should warrant triple the amount of time spent creating that content. Say it takes you 45 minutes to write a blog post. That means you should really be spending 2 or 3 hours thinking about how you’re going to use that as a way to generate leads and conversion.
Not sure what to do with those few extra hours? We have a few suggestions:
6 content distribution methods to easily increase views:
- Draft tons of social headlines. How you talk about what’s inside an article has everything to do with whether it gets opened. Your article title and your social headlines are the single most potent converters you have!
- Make sure to have amazing images. Okay, we all know that most people judge a book by its cover, and even titles and social headlines can get overlooked without a compelling image. Make sure yours are relevant to your content and capture attention. The more interesting, the better!
- Load social headlines into Buffer or DistroSheet to be automatically distributed. These tools make it easy to drop in content to go out at optimal times. If you have the posting part of content distribution pre-scheduled, you can redirect your time to more genuine engagement around it.
- Actively respond to comments. Speaking of, show your customers you are attentive and listening by responding to their comments! You can show you care about ideas and feedback by playing an active role. Over time, this builds trust and leads to better ongoing engagement and even leads or customers.
- Post where your customer is active. Surfing forums and other conversational threads can help you find relevant places to share your content. Putting your content where your customer is already looking is a great way to reach them.
- Find Medium publications. Identify Medium publications and reach out to see if they’d want to feature your article.
- Repurpose and repackage. Find different images and write alternative titles for republishing and honing in on what works best.
These are all examples of active distribution.
When you first start out, your posts will probably get very few likes and very little engagement. But these are the basics of content distribution and can have an exponential effect over time, so stick with it!
