This post is part of the 60 Day Project – one post a day to help you prepare your business for success in 2021. Subscribe using the button below to get new posts sent straight to your email.
If you’re following along, we start with a working content strategy and check all of the boxes there when it comes to how we create our content.
But if we don’t take the next step and work on distributing that content properly, we’ll be frustrated with the results that our content gets.
Let’s quickly look at three ways to increase the distribution of your content so that not just more people see it, but more of the right people see it.
By that, I mean people who will engage with your content, and take the next step in that journey to subscribe, follow, or even become a customer or a client.
Publish To Existing Channels
Important to start with what you have, and get it working as much as possible. Most people encourage posting three to four times per day to try and reach as many people as possible.
That doesn’t mean that you should be posting calls to action or asking for things in each of these posts. But onec per day or so it totally within reason.
Look at the profiles that you follow and engage with online and see what they do. What do they post, how often, what do you click on and comment on?
Reach Out To Potential Partners
Whenever you post, are there people that you can reach out to who might be able to help you share it with their audiences? Whether it be on their profiles, or in groups or forums, who else would benefit from sharing your content?
If you’re sharing their work, it helps them look good to re-share your content with theri audience.
If you have a big launch or a piece of content you really want to get out there, you can reach out to people who have a similar audience to you to help promote it at a specific time, right as you launch.
In marketing circles this is called a “joint venture”, and often there’s a financial incentive for partners to help promote content.
These partners, or affiliates, are incentivized to share your product or company by getting a percentage of any sales that come from their referral or link.
Giveaways is another form of this – using people who you may not even know to share your work with their audiences.
Who do you know that might help you share your content with their audiences and can benefit from doing so? It’s rare that people will share your stuff without any direct reward or incentive, so think about that when you reach out and ask them to share.
Pay For Reach
There are also ways that you can pay to get more views on your content. You can boost a post on Facebook, or run a post as an ad. You can drive traffic to your work using ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit – any number of platforms.
It can be expensive, but it is an option that can work, and is often used in conjunction with other strategies.
Get Resourceful
Think about how many people need to see your work in order to get the results you’re after. For example:
You sell an online course for $99. You want to make $10,000 per month from your work. In this case, you need 101 people per month to clear that threshold. One of out every 50 people that visits your website will purchase a course, so you need a little over 5,000 visitors per month to your site.
Working backwards, you can determine what your needs are, and measure what is currently working or not working.
If you’re only getting 500 visitors per month, you know that you’ve got to do something to get 10 times the traffic in order to get the sales you want for your business.
How are you going to do it? Get resourceful, work with what you have, and make sure to measure what works and what doesn’t.
It is also important to be patient – many of these distribution efforts can take months to start working. SEO, for example, can take 6-8 months to start showing signs of the work you’re doing at the beginning. Don’t give up too early.
The results in your business are completely within your control, if you take the responsibility seriously. Figure out what your business needs, and get to work.
The difference between someone with a lot of followers and not much money, and someone with a lot of revenue but fewer followers comes down to the way they each use their content.Use this content strategy to reach the goals in your business faster.
This post is part of the 60 Day Project – one post a day to help you prepare your business for success in 2021. Subscribe using the button below to get new posts sent straight to your email.
Today I want to share basically everything I know about creating content with a purpose.
What’s that purpose? To reach the specific goals we have for our business.
Whether your goal is more sales, more freedom, more control, more followers, it doesn’t matter. Content marketing is a free way to get the outcomes you want for your business and your life.
The common story that I come across is a creative or artist who has spent years building up their social media following, with nothing tangible to show for it.
10,000 or even 100,000 followers on a social platform has no inherent meaning other than people are interested in what you post.
The number itself doesn’t equal sales, or revenue, or freedom, or any of those things.
So the disconnect between followers and results is where we need to put our focus today.
How do we use content to get the results we want in our business?
Let’s dive in:
Creating Content With A Purpose
Most creatives approach social media with the idea that they need to post as much as possible, get more followers, and somehow the results take care of themselves.
I have rarely seen this to be true. Every so often there’s an outlier that creates a new social profile or YouTube channel or blog and it becomes a massive hit and they can start to monetize off of all of the awareness they’re getting.
We can’t build a system around outliers. Rather, we have to look at what works across industries and people who have figured out how to turn content into results.
Years ago, I was taught the 4 Cs from Jeffrey and Daniel Harmon, collectively known as the Harmon Brothers.
This is a team that has made a business out of creating content that gets results for their clients. Just look at their home page.
Harmon Brothers Clients & Results
Here’s the 4 Cs they taught me and my business partner years ago:
Content
Collaboration/Cross Promotion
Consistency
Call to Action
Let’s walk through them one by one, because it’s likely that you’re doing one or two of these quite well, and just need to add the rest to get the results you’re after.
The Content
When we talk about content, we’re not only referring to the video, image, tweet, or post. The content refers to everything – your title, your thumbnail, your hashtags, your profile.
What I’ve found to be most important when it comes to content is to make it as “native” to the platform as possible.
The most recent example of this in 2020 is the recent battle between TikTok and Instagram Reels. You see plenty of people trying to copy/paste their tiktoks over to Instagram, but Instagram isn’t promoting those as much as their native version (*cough* copy *cough*) of that short-form content.
Similarly, if you post a YouTube video to Facebook, it will get much less distribution from the platform than a native video you upload directly to Facebook.
One of the videos I produced has over 18 million views on YouTube:
But when they added the video to Facebook, they uploaded it natively and it added another 340 thousand views:
The same thing goes for blog posts. Whenever I paste the content of a blog post into a new Facebook post, rather than just linking to the post on my site, there are 10x the views.
The platforms want to keep people on their platforms. The more you can post natively, the more they will share your content with your audience.
You’ve got to give the platforms what they want – native content.
Collaboration & Cross Promotion
The size of your audience is what it is at any given moment. When you’ve got a big piece of content that you’re going to publish – a new album, a sale on your products, etc – you’re limited in your reach.
The fastest way to exponentially reach more people is through collaboration and cross promotion.
I’ve used this principle over the last month to grow my newsletter faster than I have been over the summer. I started reaching out to other newsletter publishers with a similar audience to mine and asking if we could each promote the other’s newsletter to our audiences.
The results speak for themselves:
Total subscribers for the last three months in ConvertKit
Some other ways people use this principle are in collaborations on YouTube – inviting another channel of a similar size or greater than you to be in a video on your channel.
Podcasts are built on this principle – you invite a guest on to be interviewed and get their audience to consume your content when the guest shares it with them.
Instagram giveaways often include products or services from multiple vendors, and they all benefit from each other posting and requiring that you follow all of the accounts in order to be eligible.
Who else out there has an audience of the people you’re trying to reach and how can you work with them to collaborate or cross promote each other’s work?
Consistency
I remember years and years ago when Devin Graham (aka DevinSupertramp) spoke to a bunch of us YouTubers here in Utah at a meetup. One of the things he mentioned that has stuck with me is the concept of consistency.
It was around the same time we had this chat with the Harmon brothers, and so it was really reinforced over a short period of time.
If you have an online following, you need to be consistent with how you release your content.
Whether it’s once a month, or once a week, or four times a day, the consistency is key.
People want to know that if they follow you or subscribe that they know what they’re getting into.
Whether it’s explicit – “new episodes every Tuesday!” – or not, decide on a publishing schedule and stick to it. You can scale it up or down over time – look at this 60 Days Project for an example of scaling it up – but be clear with your audience and bring them on the journey with you.
How many of you have a favorite podcast that you listen to on the same day every week? That’s the power of consistency. They associate an entire day with your content.
(For me, every Tuesday is for Scriptnotes, and every Wednesday is for Akimbo…)
Calls To Action
This is the one that most people avoid or forget to incorporate into their content strategy.
A “call to action” is what it sounds like – an invitation to do something.
“Click the link in my bio”
“Watch now”
“Subscribe”
“Tag a friend”
When you forget to do this, your content – as great as it may be – serves no purpose other than to give your audience something to consume.
(Or, possibly, to scroll by with the flick of a thumb…)
When you include a call to action, you’re telling your audience that they need to DO something in order to GET something.
Now, you don’t want to – or need to – be “salesy” about it. You can do it gently, naturally, and in a way that makes the experience of consuming your content a pleasurable one.
If someone posts a new song that they released, I want to listen to it, or add it to my library, or purchase the full album.
I don’t want to have to work to find out how to buy it!
You have an opportunity to make it easy for your fans to be your fans!
Calls to action are an opportunity to pull your fans closer to you and engage at a deeper level.
Someone sees your content with no call to action = they keep scrolling.
Content with a call to action = a percentage of people will click on that link or do that thing you asked them to do, and those are then given an opportunity to become an even bigger fan.
Someone who has purchased your music is a bigger fan than someone who just follows you online.
Someone that comes to your show is a bigger fan than someone who just purchased your music.
See what I mean?
Calls to action are like different parts of a freeway. You have the slow lane, the fast lane, and the express lane! You’ve got to give people options.
Maybe the slow lane is to subscribe, then the fast lane is join your email list, and the express lane is to hire you and become a client.
What are the ways that you can create opportunities for people to become bigger and bigger fans of your work through calls to action in your content?
One note – limit yourself to just one call to action. You don’t want to give people too many options – like, follow, subscribe, share! No thanks.
Give me one action to take and make it as simple as possible. Then at that point you can invite those people who took that first action to take another.
Focus On The Outcome
Going back a bit to where we started, what is the outcome that you are after?
More fans? (Why?)
More revenue?
More freedom?
Choose the outcome that you’re working towards and then “reverse engineer” your content to help you reach that goal.
Oh, and before I forget my own call to action – I’ve added a “work with me” page on the site, so that you can easily take the next step, if you enjoy posts like this one and want to take things to the next level with your business.
