48 Content Distribution Platforms (Psst: 5 Are New And Untapped)
Originally published on Content Mavericks blog.
Bonus Material: Content Distribution Checklist
Want to find new, untapped platforms to amplify your content to a targeted audience who will be more likely to buy your stuff?
If you do, then you’ll love this complete list filled with both common and not-so-common content distribution platforms you’ve probably never heard of.
Filter through the list to find the best platforms to distribute your content (any platforms with a 🔥symbol are used in my content distribution strategy).
NICHE MEDIA PLATFORMS
Slack List
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Free, Paid
Slack List has a handpicked selection of the most engaged Slack communities across all different niches. Find a community related to your niche, and participate in the group discussion.
Pro Strategy: When you have a relevant piece of content, post it in the relevant Slack channel in the group with a few key bullet points on what it’s about.
Official Website:
https://slacklist.info/
Product Hunt
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Free
Product Hunt is where people go to launch (and pre-launch) the best new products every day. Most products are SaaS tools, but you can package any piece of content into a product and promote it on the platform.
Pro Strategy: Convert your content into a pdf, then launch it as a free (or paid) product on Product Hunt.
Official Website:
https://producthunt.com/
Facebook Groups
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Free, Paid
Facebook Groups are where people go to talk about topics on anything from travel, to relationships, and marketing. Look for a Facebook Group related to your business with 10+ likes and comments on recent posts.
Join a group and participate in the group discussion every 1–2 weeks. When you have a piece of content you want to distribute, tell the Group owner why you think the group would enjoy it, and ask permission to post about it in the group.
Pro Strategy: Offer group owners $100 to pin your post to the top of their group for 7 days. If your content helps the group, they may take you up on the offer.
Official Website:
https://facebook.com/groups/?category=discover/
HARO
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Free
HARO is a platform you can use to pitch journalists who are looking for sources to include in their upcoming content. After signing up you’ll be added to the Master HARO list where you’ll get three emails a day at 5:35am, 12:35pm, and 5:35 pm ET.
You can choose to get all reporter enquiries in the Master HARO, or select which industry-specific queries you’d like to get.
Pro Strategy: Build quality links to your site by finding journalists reporting on sites with >30 domain authority in your specific industry (use the Moz browser extension to check domain authority).
Reply to them within 10 minutes of their submission, as journalists are often on tight deadlines and will pick the first quality sources they can find.
Official Website:
https://helpareporter.com/
Quuu Promote
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Paid, New
Quuu Promote lets you select the most relevant category for your piece of content. It will then promote your content via real people who have signed up to share content in your category with the Quuu app.
Below are two articles, and their stats after 30 days that I promoted in the “eCommerce” and “Inbound Marketing” categories:
Official Website:
https://quuupromote.co/
Triberr Promote
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Free, Paid
Triberr is a platform that connects professional bloggers and influencers to get more shares on their content. You create a tribe (or join someone else’s tribe) then start sharing each others content. Simple!
Cool Feature: You can use Triberr Promote to enter a URL to one of your blog posts and select a relevant category. Triberr’s system will then determine the most likely users and tribes to share your content. A Tribe Boost costs $15 for a 7 day promotion.
Note: I wouldn’t recommend Triberr Promote. After testing it, the results were disappointing. The platform only drove 3 clicks to my piece of content.
Official Website:
https://triberr.com/promote/
BuySellAds
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Paid
BuySellAds is a platform you can use to run ad placements on high quality niche websites, in almost any niche. They have ad inventory for banners, native ads, sponsored content, and emails.
Pro Strategy: Find 10 placements on 10 different sites in the category most related to your content. Run ads to one piece of content on all of them for one week. Keep the winners and cut the losers.
Official Website:
https://buysellads.com/
Chamber Of Commerce
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Free, Paid
The local Chamber of Commerce will often help promote it’s members to business owners in the local area via their email newsletter.
Pro Strategy: Do a Google search for “chamber of commerce submit content [city]” to find out where to submit your content. Easy!
Official Website:
https://austinchamber.com/membership/member-news/
Forbes BrandVoice
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Paid
Forbes BrandVoice let’s you publish your content to the same streams as Forbes editorial content. You can get native ad placement on Forbes home page, and use Forbes’ AI powered content management system to tell stories that get more reach.
Forbes will even send out tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn posts on their company account to get your content more distribution. Costs to publish begin at $50k and increase based on the amount of content you’d like to publish.
Official Website:
http://www.brandvoice.com/
Disqus Ads
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Paid, New
Disqus’ sponsored story unit gives you the ability to target people across the web on over 10,000 sites. Their ad unit show’s up inside the comments section of sites who use the free version of Disqus comments.
If someone sees your Disqus ad, you can be pretty sure they’re a dedicated reader on the topic, and therefore more likely to be interested in your content.
Official Website:
https://about.disqus.com/advertise/
BuzzFeed
🏛Niche Media Platform | 💰Paid
Buzzfeed Advertise allows you to access their audience of millions of millennials. You fill out a form, then Buzzfeed’s team will help you either create, adapt or extend your content to best reach their audience.
Official Website:
https://advertise.buzzfeed.com/
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social networking platform. It gives you a simple, fun and creative way to capture, edit and share photos, videos and messages with friends and family.
Pro Strategy: Direct message someone with a similar follower count and fan base to you. Ask if they’d like to shout out one of your pieces of content on their account in exchange for you shouting out one of theirs.
Official Website:
https://instagram.com/
Snapchat
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Snapchat is a multimedia messaging app. It lets you easily record and view Live Stories from friends. A story is a series of snaps your friends can see for 24 hours (unless they save it to their Snapchat). You can also chat with friends and explore news in Discover.
Pro Strategy: Snap a teaser of your content with an attachment to the link that goes to the full version. Your followers will see the URL title at the bottom of your snap and will be able to swipe up to view it in Snapchat’s internal browser.
Official Website:
https://snapchat.com/
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Pinterest is a social media app that uses images to discover new content on the internet. It is popular for sharing recipes, home ideas, travel ideas, style inspiration, and more.
Pro Strategy: Create pinnable images for your top content by using Canva to create an optimized Pinterest graphic with a 2:3 aspect ratio. Then get an assistant to pin it to Group boards relevant to the topic of your content.
Official Website:
https://pinterest.com/
YouTube
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free | 🔥Yes
YouTube is a video sharing website where you can enjoy videos and music you love, and upload original content to share with friends, family, and the world.
Pro Strategy: Install the Keywords Everywhere browser extension, type your topic into the YouTube search bar, then look for YouTube search suggest topics with organic search volume that you can create a video on.
Official Website:
https://youtube.com/
Vimeo
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free, Paid
Vimeo is a video sharing website with tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos. They have some of the most advanced social distribution and lead generation features of any video hosting platform.
Cool Feature: On Vimeo’s paid plan you can upload a video and publish it to your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn profiles as native videos (not links) in one click. You can then analyze the stats (plays/likes/comments) from every platform on one dashboard to see which gets the most engagement.
Official Website:
https://vimeo.com/
Udemy
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Udemy is an online learning platform where professional adults go to learn topics they’re interested in. It uses course content from online content creators to offer both free and paid courses.
Pro Strategy: Repurpose your content into a series of three minute videos and offer it for free on Udemy as a mini-course to get more traffic.
Official Website:
https://udemy.com/
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free | 🔥Yes
Facebook is an online social media and social networking platform that lets people connect with friends, family, and other people you know. You can share photos and videos, send messages using Facebook Messenger, and record live videos using Facebook Live.
Pro Strategy: Every week write one post on your Facebook wall teaching something you learnt that week. People will appreciate you sharing, so when it comes to promoting a piece of content, people will be more interested in what you have to say.
Official Website:
https://facebook.com/
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free | 🔥Yes
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that allows people to manage their professional identity. You can share status updates, photos, videos, and send messages using LinkedIn InMail.
Pro Strategy: Every week highlight one of your customers results with a LinkedIn post. Professionals in your network will see it, and over time you’ll build up a reputation as someone who consistently gets results in your field.
Official Website:
https://linkedin.com/
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Reddit is a discussion website with a constantly updating feed of breaking news, fun stories, pics, memes, and videos. Redditors submit content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members. The key to get on Reddit’s front page is getting #1 on a subreddit within 24 hours.
Pro Strategy: Find the most relevant subreddit related to the topic of your content. Write a short intro about why you created it with a link to the full piece of content, then use bullet points to break down the key takeaways so Redditors get value from your post and upvote it.
Official Website:
https://reddit.com/
Medium
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free | 🔥Yes
Medium is an online publishing platform that attracts some of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers. People go to Medium to read and write big ideas and important stories.
Pro Strategy: Use the following headline formula to get max reach on Medium: number + outcome + time frame. For example, if I wanted to attract business owners who want to get more traffic to their content, I might use a headline like “10 Ways To Get 1,000 Visitors To One Piece Of Content In 1 Week.”
Official Website:
https://medium.com/
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free | 🔥Yes
Twitter is an online news and social networking platform that people use to tweet short 280 character messages. It is very popular among people in tech, celebrities, and anyone who wants to share quick status updates to a fan base.
Pro Strategy: Write multiple tweets in your own thread (aka tweetstorm) telling a story related to one of your highest converting pieces of content. Put a link to the full piece of content in the last threaded tweet. Pin the first tweet in the thread to your profile page so everyone checking out your Twitter profile sees it.
Official Website:
https://twitter.com/
Steemit
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free, New
Steemit is a blogging and social networking platform where everyone gets paid for creating and curating content. It uses the Steem blockchain to reward publishers and curators for posting and upvoting articles on Steemit with digital cryptocurrency tokens called STEEM.
Official Website:
https://steemit.com/
Mix
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free, New
Mix is a content discovery platform for blog posts. You curate and share articles you like to Mix, and Mix learns what you love to show you even more.
You can curate your own collection with posts from different URLs, then boost those posts with ads.
Pro Strategy: Make a collection with a fun and interesting name to stand out from everyone elses (i.e. “Content Is Currency” vs. Content Marketing). The collections you create can show up in someone’s ‘For You’ feed.
Official Website:
https://mix.com/
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Flipboard suggests content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites and other websites. People flip through the articles, images, and videos suggested, and then flip them into their own curated Flipboard magazines.
Pro Strategy: Create a Flipboard magazine with your best posts around one theme. Then embed the magazine at the bottom of relevant posts.
Official Website:
https://flipboard.com/
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Pocket is a platform for managing a reading list of articles from the Internet. As people search the web, they save web pages to Pocket so they can read and watch the content they’re interested in later.
Cool Feature: Request access to Pocket for Publishers and add a custom footer message with text and a link to your highest converting piece of content. Your custom message will appear whenever someone saves one of your pages to Pocket.
Official Website:
https://getpocket.com/
Quora
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free | 🔥Yes
Quora is a question-and-answer platform where people ask questions on any topic, then get connected with people who have quality answers on the topic.
You can tell Quora what topics you know about in your Profile settings, and it will send you new questions to answer via email.
Pro Strategy: Go to SEMRush > Organic Research > search for quora.com > then do an Advanced Search for the topic of your content. Find a Quora question that ranks 1–10 on Google with search volume, then write the best answer to get ongoing traffic.
Official Website:
https://quora.com/
Yahoo! Answers
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Yahoo! Answers are similar to Quora. People ask questions and the most highly rated answer gets displayed at the top of the page as the best answer for the question.
Pro Strategy: Go to SEMRush > Organic Research > search for yahoo.com > then do an Advanced Search for the topic of your content. Find URLs starting with answer.yahoo.com that rank 1–10 on Google with search volume, then write the best answer to get ongoing traffic.
Official Website:
https://answers.yahoo.com/
StackExchange
🏛Social Media Platform | 💰Free
Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer websites built by people passionate about a focused topic. You can join communities on anything from writing to world-building to showcase your expert knowledge.
Cool Feature: The person who asks a question can mark an answer as “accepted.” This shows everyone in the community the answer worked for the person who asked. It also increases the reputation score of the person who answered it so they become more trusted by the community to write quality questions and answers.
Official Website:
https://stackexchange.com/
PAID MEDIA PLATFORMS
Google Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid | 🔥Yes
Google Ads is a platform owned by Google where you can pay to display advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network.
With Google Ads you also have access to the Google Display Network (GDN) which is the largest advertising network available on the internet. On GDN you can reach 90% of internet users through 2 million sites and apps using banner ads.
Pro Strategy: Create a single keyword ad group to run a Google search ad to people searching for the main keyword related to your content. Then retarget them using a 300x250 Google display ad to a customer case study related to that topic.
Official Website:
https://ads.google.com/home/
Bing Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Bing Ads is a platform owned Microsoft that offers pay per click advertising on the Bing search engine. Clicks costs are generally lower than Google, but there is less search volume. Also, the demographic on Bing is generally older than Google.
Pro Strategy: Import your profitable Google Ad content campaigns into Bing Ads to get more scale out of people searching on your keywords.
Official Website:
https://bingads.microsoft.com/
Oauth
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Oauth is a platform owned by Yahoo that offers both search ads on the Yahoo search engine, and native ads across premium owned-and-operated Yahoo sites like TechCrunch, Aol, Yahoo, Tumblr, and Huffington Post.
Pro Strategy: Sync your profitable Google Ad content campaigns to Oauth to get more scale out of people searching on your keywords. All changes you make on Google Ads, including bids, budgets, and keywords, will be instantly synced on Oath.
Official Website:
https://gemini.yahoo.com/advertiser/
Amazon Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Amazon Ads offer a way to drive Amazon searchers directly to a specific product you’re selling on Amazon.
You choose the product you want to advertise, decide which keywords to target and how much you want to bid, then get started with a small budget.
Pro Strategy: Package your most popular content into an eBook, upload it to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, then advertise it using Amazon Sponsored Products Ads.
Facebook Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid | 🔥Yes
Facebook Ads offer do-it-yourself ads you can use to target people across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger.
You choose an ad objective, select your audience, and then decide where you want to run your ad based on the ad inventory Facebook has to offer.
Pro Strategy: Get new visitors to your content by running a $10/day Facebook website clicks campaign to your most popular piece of content. Use a strong content upgrade to convert traffic to email subscribers. Your content ad will fly under people’s BS radar so you get a higher click-through rate than competitors, and cheaper clicks.
Official Website:
https://facebook.com/business/ads
Snapchat Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Snapchat let’s you advertise to audiences that have been built and packaged using Snapchat and third-party data. Their targeting allows to you to reach people based on their online and real world interests and behaviors.
Cool Feature: Using Snapchat’s data integration with Nielsen, you can put your content in front of people who have already bought products across 16 different categories. You can go as granular as targeting people who’ve bought razors at Dollar Shave Club, flowers at 1800Flowers, or shoes at Zappos.
Official Website:
https://forbusiness.snapchat.com/
Twitter Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid | 🔥Yes
Twitter Ads lets you setup objective-based campaigns. Unlike other ad platforms, with Twitter ads you can target people with interests similar to other accounts followers using Follower look-alikes.
Simply target a big influencers Twitter handle in your industry to start getting your content in front of people likely to be interested in your topic.
Pro Strategy: Use a Twitter Card to increase the click-through rate on content you advertise. Unlike a normal tweet, the Twitter Card will make the image in your tweet clickable, and allow you to add a headline below the image.
Official Website:
https://ads.twitter.com/
Pinterest Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Pinterest Ads offer you the opportunity to reach people while they are actively deciding what to do or buy next. The ads look like regular pins, only you pay to have them seen by more people.
Pro Strategy: Advertise an educational piece of content directly related to your product so people who shop and plan on Pinterest see it and are more likely to buy. Make your pins tall, not wide using a 2:3 aspect ratio so your pin stands out when people see it in Pinterest’s column layout on their mobile device.
Official Website:
https://ads.pinterest.com/
LinkedIn Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
LinkedIn Ads offer the ability to target active, influential professionals. You can target people in their LinkedIn feed using Sponsored Content, in their LinkedIn Messenger using Sponsored InMail, and on the site using Text Ads.
Pro Strategy: Target decision makers based on their Job Title with content directly related to their job. For example if I wanted to reach people who have the job title “Head Of Content”, I could advertise a piece of content like my blog post The Ski Slope Strategy: How I Got 1.7 Million Free Clicks In 365 Days (Without Link Building).
Official Website:
https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads/
Quora Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid, New
Quora Ads let you target people already looking for answers to questions related to your business or industry.
Pro Strategy: Target questions where you have a piece of content that answers it better than all the other answers. This will make your ad look less like an ad, and get more clicks than competitors using broader topic and interest-based targeting.
Official Website:
https://quora.com/business/
Pocket Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Pocket for Sponsors let’s you buy sponsored ad placements for your content using Pocket’s ad inventory in the Firefox New Tab, Pocket’s native mobile and desktop apps, Pocket Hits email newsletter, or a dedicated email to Pocket’s full email list.
Cool Feature: Pocket’s Content Research team has access to data on over 4 billion pieces of content from over 40 million domains that have been saved to Pocket. You can pay them to analyze the data and tell you what topics to create content about, based on the content in your niche that gets saved to Pocket the most.
Official Website:
https://getpocket.com/sponsor/
Outbrain
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid | 🔥Yes
Outbrain offers a native advertising platform where you can show your content to people browsing related content on major publisher websites like CNN, ABC News, Fortune, Wired, and Time.
Outbrain’s predictive recommendation engine analyzes a link to a piece of content you give it, then shows it as recommended content at the bottom of related articles in their ad network.
Cool Feature: Use Story Sequencing to retarget a second piece of content to someone who already clicked an ad in your first Outbrain campaign.
Official Website:
https://outbrain.com/
Taboola
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Taboola is a native advertising platform where you can show your content to people browsing related content on top publisher sites like Business Insider, USA Today, NBC, TMZ, and Daily Mail.
Cool Feature: Use Taboola’s Data Marketplace to target audiences that are in the market to buy specific products. Advertise a piece of content highlighting a unique feature of your product to convince them to buy from you.
Official Website:
https://taboola.com/
Sharethrough
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Sharethrough is a native advertising platform that lets you run ads on top tier publisher sites like Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Mental Floss, Health.com, and Law Street.
Cool Feature: You can use Sharethrough’s Native Ad Generator to create, view and share a native ad before you turn it live in your account.
Official Website:
https://sharethrough.com/
YouTube Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
YouTube Ads offer you the ability to target people when they watch or search for videos. You can go as granular as targeting ads on individual YouTube videos, or as broad as a run-of-network (RON) campaign across the Google Display Network.
Pro Strategy: Record a short 45 second video. In the first 30 seconds give a teaser of the #1 tip from your piece of content. In the last 15 seconds give people a call to action to visit your site to see the full piece of content.
Official Website:
https://youtube.com/yt/advertise/
Vimeo Ads
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Unlike YouTube, Vimeo is against ads playing before videos start.
Instead you create a Vimeo Brand Channel to host your content, then once your content is ready Vimeo will run a combination of media placements, PR, and social media to help you reach their audience.
Cool Feature: You can tap into Vimeo’s Brand Creative Fund to connect with creative filmmakers who can turn your idea for a video into a reality.
Official Website:
https://vimeo.com/about/advertisers/
Dedicated Emails
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
Dedicated Emails is a platform that will help you find the perfect email list to run a solo ad to. They are specialists in pairing products with highly responsive email opt-in lists in political, outdoor, health, and finance markets.
Cool Feature: If your solo ad campaign doesn’t ROI, Dedicated Emails will often keep trying so you get a positive return on your investment every time.
Official Website:
http://dedicatedemails.com/
ArcaMax
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
ArcaMax is a publishing platform that publishes advertising-oriented newsletters, editorial text newsletters, and comic strips via email. They have over 300 newsletter titles and keep their lists clean with double opt-in for every email subscriber.
You can contact ArcaMax to get an ad placement in one of their online newsletters, solo emails, or website banners. Below is an example of one of their comic strip newsletters and the circulation it has.
Official Website:
https://arcamax.com/mediacenter/
NewsMax
🏛Paid Media Platform | 💰Paid
NewsMax is an American news and opinion website that’s divided into four main sections: Newsmax, Newsmax Health, Newsmax Finance, and Newsmax World, each with their own subsections.
Newsmax readers are buyers looking for offers that improve their health, financial well-being and lifestyle. If you’re targeting 45+ year olds who love to keep up-to-date on the latest health, finance, and world news, Newsmax will have an ad placement that can work for your content.
Official Website:
https://newsmax.com/advertise/
What Platforms Should You Promote Your Content On?
There’s A LOT of content distribution platforms out there to choose from.
The key is to have a content distribution strategy that focuses on using niche, social, and paid media platforms to consistently push people to your owned media (aka website, email list, etc).
Owned media is where you can build your own audience (retargeting list, email list, and buyers list) so that over time you have your own lists to distribute content to.
To get started:
- Pick one platform from the list.
- Test promoting your content on that platform for ONE month.
- If it works, keep doing it. If not, come back here and try another one.
To keep yourself accountable, download my content distribution checklist and add one platform you’re going to try to the checklist.
Then let me know in the comments below right now:
What’s the one platform you’re going to try?
Sincerely,
Chris “Growing My Owned Media Platform” Von Wilpert
ABC. Always be clappin’.
