Sowing the Seeds of Promotion

We’ve posted often about content creation (here and here) and content distribution (here and here). With this series, we’ll shift focus to the promotion of online content.

Start with your contacts

The seeds of good promotional strategy sprout with the people you know. Your most targeted promotion will be directly through your personal network. Let’s call it interpersonal content promotion.

Look in your address book and push your content to a few of your most immediate contacts. Include your business associates, your clients, your friends, and even your mother. Craft e-mails to the two or three individuals that will find your content interesting, exciting, thought-provoking, provocative, or relevant. You know these people and you know their interests.

This kind of content promotion is highly engaging and extremely personal. With this method, you’re more likely to start conversations through comments or e-mail exchanges. You may even invite contacts to participate in a webcast or podcast you’re creating.

Build through participation creation

If you practice participation creation, your personal network will expand as you develop new relationships. These new contacts are your connection to a broader but still highly targeted audience.

Your co-creation partners have a vested interest in you and your content, and they will promote it within their own networks. You promote them, they promote you. It works out for everybody.

Analytics are easy

Using e-mail to send links to content makes it difficult to track the hits you get. Unique campaign URLs can be generated through Google Analytics, but this can be overkill.

If you sign up for a tr.im account, you can create a quick custom URL, insert it into your e-mail, and then send it to your contact. Tr.im tracks the response in real time and archives URLs for later use. Tr.im is free and very easy to use.

Takeaway

Start promoting your online content with your personal network. Build up that network through inviting participation in the creation of new content. Track the engagement with new contacts. Repeat this process and grow your influence.

Coming up

Next week we’ll branch out from interpersonal content promotion and discuss some narrowcasting promotion possibilities.

About the author

Brett Virmalo -

As a creative director at Tippingpoint Labs, Brett leads a team deploying ecommerce and content marketing solutions for global B2B and consumer clients.

Brett has worked with clients including PG&E, Kodak, American Express, TomTom, Putnam Investments, and most recently, Breville. He has been with Tippingpoint Labs since 2003 serving as a designer, developer, art director, and now creative director.