Everything is easier when you have the money. You can avoid the hustle and reap the benefits much quicker. But that’s not what we are going to talk about today! Today we will focus on making the most out of the things that are free! We’d like to present you with free content promotion methods. Although these might take some serious effort and time to master, they are absolutely worth it. Free promotion methods usually circulate around generating organic traffic – a very genuine kind of customer engagement. Most importantly, these methods do work and will save you money!

So, without further ado, here are six things you can do to promote your content for free!

Launch social media channels

The best strategy is to join several platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ or LinkedIn are good places to start. From there, you will be able to share your content with your audience.

Now, newly set up pages will have no followers. There are however ways to gain them and quickly expand your fan base:

1. Use hashtags – Hashtags will give you extra exposure in fields you are active in. They are most effective on Instagram and Twitter.
   
2. Post a lot – Research shows that the more you post on Twitter, the more followers you will have: LINK
3. Post regularly – Minimize the number of people who unfollow you by avoiding posting in bursts. Posting a lot of updates in a short time span is likely to discourage people from following you – it simply looks like spam!
4. Follow other people – Follow all the influencers in your field, but also normal people who are interested in what you do.
5. Make sure that your page has a positive outlook – The tone of your posts, as well as your avatar, have an impact on the number of your followers. Avoid being sad, cynical or angry on social media. Be your authentic self and you will be much more likely to find followers that will stay with you: LINK
6. Be an informer, not a meformer – Share valuable information instead of posting personal updates. Research shows that informers have much more followers than meformers: LINK

Engage with your social media audience

Social media is a fast environment. People share, comment and post quickly and expect quick responses. You need to fulfil their expectations. the best way to do this – reply to their comments! There are two outcomes of you engaging with your audience that can benefit your business.

The first one is the fact that by engaging directly with people, you create a sense of genuine human connection. Customers like the sense that there is an actual human being on the other side replying to comments – they are much more likely to trust a person than a business. Solving problems that your followers might have, answering their questions or simply chatting creates

The second benefit is strictly promotional. Imagine you have a company that sells fishing equipment. A customer comments on one of your Facebook posts saying that they have a problem with choosing the best bait for catching a pickerel. You reply by sending them an article on pickerel baits and them message them with a 10% discount code for your online store. In this way, you won’t only promote your content, but also will probably turn a follower into a customer!

Keep in mind that social media activity should not just be limited to your profiles! Platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn allow you to join groups, which can be really focused and thematic. You can also find forums, which gather people from your niche.

Take care of your SEO

If your content can be found on the second page of Google it’s a bit like it does not exist at all. That’s why you need to take extra effort to make sure that your content ranks as high as possible in SERPs. There are several ways to do this:

1. Keyword research – A lot of search results is based on keywords. This is how your followers will be able to find you in search engines. That’s why you need to take some time and research, which keywords should you use in order to increase your exposure.
2. Build links – Link building is a great strategy for increasing the exposure of your content. Every time when somebody uses your article as a reference in their blog, you’ve built a link. Link building is however very organic and the best way to ensure that it occurs is to actually post high-quality content.
3. Improve your on-page SEO – Make sure that your page loads swiftly, is responsive and that your images are optimized. Also, create a version of your website that works for mobile!

Create valuable and re-shareable content

The most important task your content needs to fulfil is to bring value. No matter, which field your business operates in, your articles need to solve problems, entertain or provoke a thoughtful debate.

Such content will also be eagerly re-shared by your followers generating organic exposure.

Try your strength at creating viral content

When you think of viral content, the first thing that probably pops up in your mind are all these videos with people doing silly things or with cute animals. Or Buzzfeed what-type-of-pizza-are-you quizzes…

However, a well written, thoughtful and researched blog article can also go viral! There’s actually some science to that. Articles between 3.000 and 10.000-word count have the biggest chance of being rapidly re-shared. This is probably because, in order to write such a post, you need to really do your research and have some insightful points that you want to share. Having images in your post and a thumbnail leads to more shares as well.

Viral content needs to be surprising and unusual – it needs to have that WOW effect so that people would want to share it with as many friends as possible. Include jokes, be witty and present things in a way they are not usually presented – that’s the way to go viral. It’s all about generating an emotional response from the reader. It can be either positive or negative, but as long as you get these share numbers high, you’re fine! Don’t be afraid of a little controversy – sometimes this is what will make people pay attention to your content.

Use tags in your content

Content tag is a term or a phrase added to your post that relates it to other publications that are tagged similarly. This is a good method to suggest your audience similar pieces published on your blog. Categorizing your articles will also help your audience to navigate your blog – this can be specifically useful if you have a large content base.

Summary:

Promoting your content without any money is possible! Even though it will probably require effort and consume your time, it can be really effective when done right.

In this article, I mentioned several methods, which you can use to promote your content for free. Establishing an audience and connecting with them is probably the most important task you need to do in order to get your content out there. Social media are a perfect platform for that.

Another thing is creating valuable and relatable content that will be able to get organically re-shared. It’s good to treat each piece of content as if it was supposed to go viral – make it long, witty, insightful and provoking!

However boring it might seem, the technical side of promoting your content is as important as the rest! SEO, tags and the data behind viral content is something you should familiarise yourself with. Well, to be fair, familiarising yourself might not be enough – you need to become really good at it in order to be able to promote your content with no expenditure!

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