9 Ways to Distribute Your Content and Reach Your Target Audience

If you’re really proud of yourself for producing some exceptional content, you should be. Content marketing can deliver huge ROI, so go ahead and pat yourself on the back. But don’t get too carried away because producing great content is just part of the process. Great content doesn’t promote itself, so to get the results you’re looking for you need to leverage content distribution channels.

Getting your content in front of your audience is one of the most challenging aspects of content marketing. Vertical Measures draws a clear line in the sand between content promotion and distribution, defining promotion as generating buzz around your content and distribution as getting your content to appear in the search results.

In short, you’ve got to know who your audience is, where they’re hanging out and how to intrigue them -— not to mention, how they prefer to consume content. How do you do all that?

Let’s take a look at a nine different channels you can tap as part of your content distribution strategy.

1. Your Blog

Your blog is one of your most valuable content marketing tools. Why? Not only can blogging help you establish more credibility for your business and drive more organic traffic, but your blog is the ideal platform for distributing your content across the Web. Publishing consistently to your blog allows you to connect with a relevant audience as well as a potential customer base. What’s more, you can leverage your blogs RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to get your content discovered faster by search engines. RSS also allows your audience to subscribe to your content, meaning they get an alert every time you publish a new post.

2. Newsletters

An email newsletter is a useful content distribution channel because you have an already-engaged audience. At some point, your subscribers expressed an interest in your products and services. So sending them periodic updates of interest will help you stay top-of-mind. Once you have a subscriber list, you can use it to let your audience know about a free e-book download you’re offering, a webinar you’ll be hosting or even a new authoritative consumer guide you’ve just published.

3. Social Media

Like your newsletter subscribers, your social followers have taken the first step in engaging with your business. Use that expressed interest to your advantage by promoting your content to your social media audience via your Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn or Pinterest accounts. Social media distribution channels help you re-engage with your target audience and drive them back to your site to specific pieces of content. Since social updates are now included in personalized search results and social media is free marketing after all, it’s more important to push your content out through your social networks than ever.

4. Curation Applications

News curation apps are the hottest content distribution channel since, well, social media. An adapted form of social news, these apps, such as Flipboard and Pulse, are sharing platforms for topic-focused content. You can leverage curation channels by creating niche specific topics that are related to your industry and pair share-worthy content from other publishers with your own content too.

5. Guest Blogging

By guest posting on a site with an audience and reach that is potentially more powerful than yours, you can tap into their distribution and generate exposure and buzz for your own site and content. For instance, say you’ve just published an ebook and you want to promote it to a new audience. You can offer to guest post on a relevant, popular site in your niche and offer a sneak peek into content from your ebook. To get the full version of your content, readers would need to visit your site for the download.

6. Video Sharing Sites

It doesn’t take a high-end production company and thousands of dollars to produce a video. Technology has made it possible to create everything from simplistic PowerPoint voice-overs to recorded webinars with screen-sharing quite affordably. Videos can live on your own website to supplement your written content, or you can publish your videos to sites like YouTube and Vimeo for increased exposure and to leverage their expansive internal search engines.

7. Slide-Sharing and Presentation Sites

Turn your content into an attractive PowerPoint presentation for easy digestibility and share it on slide-sharing sites, such as SlideShare and AuthorStream. Write up an SEO-friendly summary of your presentations to improve your odds of your presentations showing up in the SERPs.

You can take it one step further, combining the best of video marketing and presentation sharing by using sites like Present.Me. This website displays a video of you, the presenter, discussing the information presented in your slides. This adds to the value of your presentations and reduces the likelihood of misinterpretation—as the data offered on slides is typically vague without further explanation, Present.Me replicates the experience of a live presentation digitally.

8. Infographic Sharing Sites

If you’ve gone so far as to turn your content into a slide presentation and broken down the information into easily digestible bits, creating an infographic might be a natural “next step” in content evolution for you. If you’re not graphics-savvy, you can hire designers relatively affordably to create sharp-looking infographics these days.

Infographics open up a host of additional content distribution channels. Sharing your graphics on sites like Visual.ly and infographic curation sites will put your data in front of more people and lead to more publishers embedding your graphics to accompany their own content. You can also pitch your infographics to other relevant publishers and provide a short, written introduction. Not only are you generating backlinks and brand mentions, you’re increasing the odds that your content will get in front of a wider audience.

9. White Paper Sharing Sites

A white paper is also another extension of the work you’ve already done, or a stand-alone initiative. White papers are easy to put together if you’ve created presentations from your content or even an infographic, or vice-versa—just expand on the data you’ve provided to create a short, informative piece of content. White papers have their own dedicated distribution channels, such as CIO White Papers and other business-oriented sites like InformationWeek.

If you’re smart about the way you distribute your content, and maximize your use of these distribution channels, you’ll find that you create an interwoven web that funnels your content to the most members of your audience as possible. In addition to drawing your target consumers back to your landing pages, you’ll also be enhancing SEO and generating follower growth on your social media networks while you’re at it. It’s a win-win situation.