You have great content... but how do you promote it?

I've been a freelance writer for a few years now, and though it's been a pretty satisfying job, I've always wanted to write for myself. But one thing I've been grappling with for a while is the promotion of all the "great" content that I churn out. I mean, what use is literature without readership? So my question basically is, how do I promote pure informational content with no commercial undertones whatsoever.

I'm not selling anything, not putting up any ads etc; just making quality resource sites for the fun of it. I may add some monetization later on... like a couple years down the road but for now, it's out of the question. I'm of the opinion that if you can provide real value, and your site becomes a part of your visitors' lives, they won't mind a few annoying banners on the side ;)

I thought up a few ideas myself and I'll list them here. Any contributions you can make to this will be appreciated:

1) Good (and natural) on-page SEO, so the articles can rank for low-competition keywords without needing too many backlinks.
2) Posting useful comments on relevant blogs and forums to build some reputation.
3) Creating some good linkbait (still a novice at this).
4) Doing some free (as in no monetary cost) viral marketing. Like creating useful reports or case studies and giving them away, and encouraging people to share them.
5) ...?

As you've probably figured, I don't want to spend a lot of money on this effort for now because I'm not expecting any real ROI in the short term. The only real reward for me is any popularity I can garner and then leverage that in the future. As for content, I can put up like a 100-150 page resource site up in a month or two and then add 2-3 quality articles every week.

Your suggestions?

You can post your articles to social bookmark sites aswell, also as you are a writer you have an advantage over many of your competitors. You have the scope to produce some truly great content, that your competitors will not be able to compete with.

And quality content = links = top of the search engines = traffic.

Thanks a lot for the social bookmarking idea, Pagi. It was something I had thought of a long time ago but eventually forgot. Cheers!

Here is what we do....

1) create great content that people want to link to (the most difficult but most essential part of the job)

2) show it of off on your own site... our homepage looks like CNN, MSN or another news site... but no ads... instead it is 100% promotion of our content (income will be generated inside)

3) if you get a reader of an article be sure to promote related articles with attractive links to them

4) put up bookmark/share buttons so others can share your content... getting on reddit, digg or slashdot can bring huge traffic (we had an item on slashdot recently and got over 100,000 visitors and several thousand links in a couple of days)

5) if you have a great article that has not been posted to reddit or digg or other sites then share it yourself or ask a friend

6) find authority sites in your theme that link out to other content. tell them about your new articles... ask if they will add you to their list of related content

7) if you don't have a blog, start one. Blogging is highly over rated but the value of them is they produce a feed that others can subscribe to... use the blog to announce your new content.. then others can see your new content without coming to your site... if they like it they will visit your site to read

8) pick the one or two most influential blogs in your topic theme and get to know the blogger... find a way to help one another by cross promotion of your content

9) pick the most influential sites in your them and advertise your new content there using adwords... this can be expensive... the goal is to get a few links - it does not take many. maybe you can find a site frequented by lots of bloggers or other linkerati and this method will work

@EGOL:



Thank you. That's a lot more info than I could've asked for.

Great advice from EGOL - I'd agree get a blog AND link out to other sites you want to notice your site (especialy bloggers).

EGOL: Great post. I've seen you post a number of times and its always been some really solid advice.

So I have a brief follow up question:

First, in reference to point #7 - one of the first things I did was to create a blog, however I'm fairly stumped as to the best way to utilize it. My company's website is 100% content driven, but almost all data (charts, graphs, etc) - so unfortunately there is virtually nothing new that is comparable with articles (just new info in the charts). As for the blog.... so far, I've been using the blog as almost a press release mechanism - explaining new and upcoming features, new product offerings, progress and plans, etc. We did this at a prior company I was at and it worked out pretty well.

I guess my question is how would you suggest I attempt and push out content to other bloggers/content sites? We have fresh content daily, but so far the best idea I have is to expand the blog to include industry news/info and attempt to push out that new content to indirectly pull traffic into the main site.

I don't know anything about your business but what you describe here is all about YOU.

To make a blog successful it needs to be all about OTHER PEOPLE.

If you have new products make content about how the reader can use them, how the reader can enjoy them, how the reader can make money from them, how the reader can get them free or at low cost. Nobody wants to read or link to a blog about YOU. They want to read a blog about ME.

If you have positive news about customers post it and make them look like heroes. That will make them feel good and link to you. If you provide a service to a company and save them a lot of money write the article and make it sound like how smart THEY are (not how smart you are). This will make them proud and they will link to you.

Get to know your best customers and find out how they use your product. Then post a stories about several of them showing how they enjoy, how they make money, how they save money, how they become more efficient. Give them all of the credit and say that you just helped a little.

Now that you have this generous blog that is all about other people everyone will see what good guys you are and link to you. Every customer that you feature has clients or friends or suppliers or chambers of commerce or Kiwanis Clubs or lives in a town with a website. Now your potential linkerati has expanded enormously.

Write to the chamber of commerce of your customer and say.. Hey... have you noticed how smart your member is.. we have a feature about him on our website. Maybe you would like to link to it from your website to share their success with people in your community.

When you feature someone on your blog call them on phone and talk with them. Ask if they have a blog or company has a blog or friends have a blog or mother has one. Get their URL. All of these people is a potential link, some are potential blogroll links.

Make your blog about other people because they have more friends and contacts than you do.

Egol, thank you tremendously for the in-depth response. That is some terrific advice, and I will absolutely implement it immediately.

After I read your post, I re-read some of our blog entries, and you are absolutely right. A simple phrasing change of: "We just launched X" to "X is launched and So-and-so was our first client to try it, and here is their experience" changes the tone drastically. I will definitely start to gear the blog more towards our consumers.

Again, thanks for the response!

(p.s. - tried giving you a rep point, but as a new member, apparently I don't have any lol).

My respect to you. Site without banners and ads is a great human step! I wish you were siccessful in your site promoting...
P.S. Backlinks won't be harmful for your site!