How to ace your content distribution strategy

The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

Let's talk about content distribution and how do you do it right.

If you would want to talk about content marketing, then I would say that 20% of your time should be spent on creating content whereas the rest 80% of your time should be spent on distributing the content across your multiple channels.

Content distribution is required for getting people to actually read the content or listen to the podcast or watch the video - whatever form of content you have created, it’s getting people to actually have a look at the content. If you have a remarkable piece of content but its just sitting on your website, what is the use of that content if no one sees it?

What I would recommend and what I try to do is that I first try to identify one piece of pillar content or central content or long-form content that I would you use to create multiple other forms of content. For example, let's say this podcast episode is roughly around 6 to 8 minutes and if I would have to create multiple forms of content from this podcast episode this is how I would go about it:

First and foremost, I would you record a video while I am doing the podcast and put that video up on YouTube. Youtube is the second largest search engine.

Next, I would convert that video or transcribe that video to a blog and put it up on my company's website or on my personal website.

Third, I would convert the video and extract audio from it and that's my podcast. I would distribute it across all my podcast networks - whether it is Apple iTunes, Google, Stitcher, Soundcloud. There are multiple network sthrough which you will distribute your audio

Fourth, I would say you need to put out your article / blog that you have written on external platforms. LinkedIn pulse can be used for posting an article on LinkedIn and getting a backlink to your blog or your podcast.

Fifth, I would say you should cross post your blog article on medium and Tumblr - other blogging platforms through which you could get better no follow backlinks.

Number 6 on my list would be to identify questions on Quora relevant to the topic of your podcast. For example, let's say you know I am talking about link building on my podcast. Go to Quora and identify different questions related to link building and use your blog content to prepare answers for these questions and respond to them. You could get your team to upvote all the answers.

Number 7 would be to use Twitter and again put a link to your blog

Eight channel would be Facebook. Post on your Facebook profile with a proper visual. Also provide a description and a link to your podcast episode.

Ninth would be to post it as a story on Facebook. Tenth on my list is Instagram. So, we could create stories on Instagram to introduce the podcast episode or you know we could have a basic post on Instagram account. Link to the blog via your profile. Instagram is where you can build a little bit of awareness about the content that you are going to be promoting.

Eleventh is Pinterest. You can create a visual board and pin images to those board and from those images link them back to your website.

If you have time, number 12 would be to use SlideShare so you could convert your video to simple presentation of maybe 4-5 slides and uploaded it and get a link from SlideShare back to your blog.

Number 13 on my list is email marketing. Make sure that you are having a link to your podcast in your email signature. Send emails to your email marketing list whenever a new episode has been published on your blog or you could do weekly emailers to your mailing list write via Mailchimp automation.

You can also distribute the content through paid channels. So what are the paid channels available for content distribution?

14th is sponsoring your post on LinkedIn.

15th is using the Facebook’s traffic objective campaign and driving traffic to the blog on your website.

Sixteenth is a more long term strategy. You need to be connected with niche blogs in your industry. Try to send them the continent that they can publish on their sites.

Just to recap, we should focus heavily on content distribution strategy as opposed to focusing on content creation. Yes to distribute content across these channels, you are going to have to convert the pillar content to multiple format and that's going to take time.

So maybe first you should do it by yourself and later on if you have a team to support you, maybe you should allocate tasks to your team to create all these 15 or 16 different formats of content.