Everyone in the content marketing industry has been in the situation where they spend a few hours crafting the perfect piece of content. You have the perfect headline, your industry analysis is insightful and groundbreaking, you’ve gone through ten drafts to make the piece perfect. You expect this will be the “War and Peace” of your blog so you hit the publish button and nothing happens.

You don’t get any likes or shares and you keep hitting the refresh button on your analytics platform expecting something to change and nothing. You start questioning yourself – Did you write a dud? Maybe or maybe not. You might have just forgotten some of the key promotional methods you should always follow with new content.

1. You Have No Promotional Plan – If, when Leo Tolstoy finished his book “War and Peace” and just put it in his closet, no one would have ever read it. The same goes with your blog posts! You need to have a plan on where you’re going to promote your articles and take the time to promote it.  Just because you have a blog, you can’t expect the world to find it. Take the time to come up with a promotional plan for every blog post you do. Try using social media, emails, SEO, paid sponsored ads, and more. You can have the most viral piece of content, but having an initial promotional plan always helps get the ball rolling.
2. Only Using Organic (aka:FREE) Marketing Tactics – Search engine optimization (SEO) takes a lot of time to bring in traffic. Social can bring in a lot of great free traffic, if and only if, you already have a large fan base. The same goes for using emails, it takes time to develop a list. Even if you have a high ranking SEO site, a huge social following and a large email list, it will still help to launch your content with paid sponsored listings.

   On Facebook only 1 in 6 page fans will typically see your posts. On Twitter, with its huge fire hose of tweets, it’s also easy to get your content lost. Paid placements help overcome these issues and also introduce your content to potential new followers. You can also use products like Newsbullets, to help spread your content to other potential audiences. Just remember to target your audience using things like time of day targeting and geography to get your correct audience

3. Throwing Good Money After Bad – We have always been in the situation where we are on a roll and produce hit after content hit and we feel invincible. We think we finally cracked the code and can consistently produce perfect content. Sometimes as much as we hate to say it, we all produce duds. Even Steven Spielberg fails sometimes, remember “Howard the Duck.” If one of your new pieces of content just isn’t catching on, maybe its time to stop your paid ads and move on. Try to analyze what went wrong and learn from your mistakes.
4. Releasing Your Content at the Wrong Time – The prime time for most businesses to release content is Tuesday – Thursday from 11am – 3pm. This does vary by industry so refer to your own analytics on both social and your website to figure out the best time to release new content. On social media, the bulk of your shares, retweets and likes happen within the first hour so plan accordingly. Paid sponsored advertising does continue to bring in traffic for days, weeks or even months but it’s always best to launch new content in prime time.
5. Make Sharing Easy – You should make sharing your content on your website as easy as possible. If your using WordPress as your content management system (CMS), make sure to add a social media sharing plugin to your system to make it easy to share the content. If you have a custom solution, you can use tools like sharethis.com to make social sharing even easier. Also, don’t forget to include an email sharing plugin or button, in addition to social sharing. You will be surprised by how many people use it.