The goal of your content marketing is to get more leads, more organic traffic, and more shares. The issue is that getting more shares is about more than just writing great content or having it created for you by a content strategist. Instead you need to use several methods to make your content shareable.
What does that mean really? How often have you seen an amazing post on social media and shared it with your friends and followers? From Twitter to Facebook, this happens all the time. How often do you see the same post shared a few months later by another friend? This happens regularly as well.
This is a score that can be measured using a Net Promoter Score survey that can be created using a WordPress NPS plugin. This survey asks your customers one simple question: how likely would you be to recommend our company (or website, or content) to a friend or colleague?
Once you have determined your NPS, how do you improve it? How do you get your content to be shareable like those other pieces that go viral? Here are seven ways to boost your content share potential.
Make Content Versatile
There is certainly a time and place for content that answers a single question or serves a single purpose. However, most of the time content that serves more than one purpose is more shareable and tends to be relevant for longer. So what is versatile content?
Attracting more visitors, inspiring loyalty in your brand, and even earning more conversions from your existing visitors are all great purposes for content. Optimizing it for search engines, your readers, and conversions all at once is the best practice.
Concentrate on Key Pieces
Not every piece of content will go viral. What one says the most about your brand and is optimized the best? Is there a core group of landmark content that really represents your brand?
Many companies will concentrate on creating as much content as possible as fast as possible. If this content is mediocre though, it can hurt your brand more than it helps you. Concentrate on creating great content that is versatile for better results.
Work with Fast and Lean Professionals
At the same time that you need to be concerned about quality, you also need to be concerned about costs. If you are working with content creators or content strategists, be sure they work quickly and produce great content for a reasonable cost.
This does not mean going places like Fiverr, Upwork, and other “cheap” writing sites. The content you get there will hardly be worthwhile, let alone will it be the kind of cornerstone content you need. Also, a professional will provide you with timely content that will meet all of your needs at the same time.
Keep it Evergreen
Remember when we said you see the same post shared on social media a few months later? This means that content was evergreen or has an extended shelf life. While you might want to write about the latest industry news or the latest conference in your industry, this is content that has a definite expiration date.
While it is harder to create content that will be relevant for a long time, it is really worthwhile, and something you should strive for as a company and a brand.
Utilize Free Distribution
A cornerstone of any business involves three pillars: production, distribution, and marketing. So how are you distributing your work? Without Google penalties, you can duplicate your work on Medium and LinkedIn content platforms among others. You can also share your content for free on social media networks. There are even plugins for WordPress that allow you to automate this process.
You should also of course pay to boost posts and market your content just like you do your products, but whenever you can, use free distribution channels to get the word out.
Revisit, Reinvent, Reuse
There is nothing new under the sun, or so the saying goes, and it is true in many ways. Every year similar articles come out about every industry and go viral. From “SEO is Dead” to “Facebook is Irrelevant in 20xx” we see these posts again and again.
What this means is that you don’t always have to create new content to make it great. You can simply reuse old content, revisit old topics, and reinvent them to make them more recent and relevant. This kind of content will not only be shareable, but it is less work for you and your content team.
Let Them Be Your Guest
One of the best ways to get more shares is not to author everything yourself. Instead, get others to do it for you using guest posting. The author will share the posts that they wrote, and probably some of yours as well. You are expanding your own network by using theirs, and they are expanding their reach using your network. If you can get influencers in your industry to guest post, even better.
Getting others to share your posts with their network means their network will also share them, and so on. This is one of the many keys to shareable content.
What is your content’s share potential? Use these seven steps to increase it and to make your content marketing more profitable and successful.
