Content marketing today involves two things: content creation and content promotion.
Both are needed to achieve success in digital marketing, especially if your goals are to increase brand exposure and to improve monthly sales for your business.
In this post, we will only focus on the second important phase in content marketing – that is content promotion.
There are many ways to promote content but there are only a few strategies that work effective in getting results for the brand, i.e. bringing in traffic and potential clients/sales.
To make those strategies easy to implement, content marketers would definitely need tools to speed up their content promotion process. Tools could be products purchased from other companies or internal web tools such as WordPress plugins.
Here are seven WordPress plugins that are useful for direct and indirect content promotion.
SumoMe
SumoMe is one of the free email-capturing plugins you definitely need to install to your WordPress blog. Aside from its ability to get your visitors’ emails, there are other notable features/benefits of the SumoMe WordPress plugin that are worth trying out. Here are a few of them:
- Seeing where your visitors are clicking (or not) on your page (heatmap feature). This helps you prioritize links, images, and pages that need more attention (or promotion) to increase their page discovery.
- Helps you offer free incentives to your visitors, which will increase your daily email signups. This allows you to easily connect with them via email and promote your content in a non-aggressive way.
- Adds preferred social sharing buttons on your pages to encourage social sharing from your visitors and amplify the content/page being shared on social platforms.
Incapsula
Indirect content promotion includes fixing little details on your website that will make a big impact for your website speed, security, and SEO performance.
Incapsula has a WordPress plugin that can help you secure your website as well as accelerate loading times on any webpage, which will later on translate to higher performance level in search results (remember that site speed is one of Google’s ranking factors).
Why is pagespeed important in content promotion?
- Allows visitors to easily access the page and gets them to share it immediately.
- Faster page speed will allow CSS files (e.g. images) as well as links to be instantly visible after a few seconds of load, which will give emphasis to those elements (images and links).
- The faster the pagespeed, the higher the probability of ranking in search results, which can provide opportunities for content/pages to be discovered by new search visitors.
ManyContacts
Aside from SumoMe, you can install another email capturing plugin called ManyContacts to add an email opt-in box in the upper side of your website.
The ManyContacts plugin has notable email marketing features:
- Has an easy to setup platform, which is a good training ground for newbies in the email marketing field.
- Has color and text options that you can choose from to complement the design of your website.
- Provides details for each person who subscribed to your email list (name, email, country and specific converted landing page).
- You can offer an incentive to your visitors by redirecting them to the landing page (e.g. ebook downloading page) after they subscribed to your email list.
Q2W3 Fixed Widget
Fixing widget in your sidebar is important because it adds focus to the image/links you want to get discovered by your new visitors or readers.
If you’re not a hardcore programmer, then you need a plugin to help you fix your preferred widget in your sidebar. Happily, Q2W3 Fixed Widget plugin allows you to do that.
Ways to maximize the use of that plugin for content promotion:
- Fix an email opt-in widget to increase daily email signups.
- Create a customized image in your sidebar and link to your landing page or high quality content.
- Make it easy for your visitors to follow you on social profiles by fixing your social widget in your sidebar (doing this will not only increase your social following but also help you add social shares to your page/content).
GetResponse
Email marketing has been a common method to amplify one’s content and to improve the page’s visibility on other marketing channels such as social and search.
GetResponse has an email integration plugin that can help you setup optin forms in your website in order to get subscribers from your existing group of visitors.
Useful features of GetResponse:
- Analyze your email marketing data to understand how you can provide uniquely useful content to your existing users.
- Create landing pages that best suit your audience’s needs.
- Test your emails to improve its content and your method of delivering value to your audience.
Qeryz
By asking questions to your visitors, you build connections with them. This makes it easy for you to get feedbacks or promote a link/page that they might be interested to see or even share to their peers.
Qeryz has a micro-survery plugin that not only helps you gather data from your visitors (through micro-survey forms), but also allows you to expose your page/content after asking a few questions.
Other notable features of the tool:
- Easy to understand platform that will allow you to export data/information (answers) to questions you’ve asked in your surveys.
- You can set a specific URL/page where you want your survey to only pop up.
Final thoughts
Content promotion, when done right, can take you into many places. It adds more exposure to your brand, naturally earns links for your content, and creates a community around your website.
With the plugins I’ve shared above, you can already start promoting your content with minimal efforts you can do within your site alone.
Venchito Tampon is the sole author of Digital Philippines, a link building blog that publishes actionable link building strategies and content marketing tips. He also provides high quality link building services for local and offshore clients based in UK, US, and Australia.
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