You’ve realized that content marketing is a key strategy to drive more traffic to your website and grow sales, so you’ve spent time creating engaging, detailed blog posts for your website.

Now that the article is live, nothing is happening.

Your content could be getting lost in the crowd without the right content marketing distribution plan in place. In order to see any results, you need to effectively promote your content so that your target audience will see it. Many marketers believe you should spend 20 percent of your content marketing time actually writing your content and 80 percent of your time promoting it.

The following will show you how to create a content marketing distribution plan in five easy steps so your content will be seen and shared by as many people as possible.

Send articles to your email list

The people most interested in your content should be the first to hear about new posts. The subscribers to your email list are already interested in you, so they’re more inclined to read your blog post and share your content on social media.

Send the people on your email list a weekly round-up newsletter of your new content or send them an email each time a new article is posted.

If you don’t already have an email list, you need to start building one now because it’s one of the most effective tools for lead generation.

Schedule social media posts

Social media platforms are a great way to get your content seen by new people. 81 percent of marketers found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing, according to Social Media Examiner.

You don’t just want to send one tweet and be done with it, you’ve got to create a schedule to share your posts many times on multiple different platforms. You can use a tool like Buffer to schedule your social media posts at optimum times to encourage shares and increase your visibility.

Repurpose your content

While blog posts are great for SEO and educating your audience, it can be difficult to engage people with a text based post because many are now searching for more entertaining mediums like video. Repurposing your blog posts to appeal to your audience members who respond best to visual content is a great way to distribute your existing content further.

By repurposing your best written content into videos and infographics, you can save time and drive new traffic to your website. Infographics perform very well in B2B industries and you can use a tool like Piktochart to easily turn a text post into an eye-catching infographic or for repurposing content into video format, a tool like Lumen5 is a great option.

Answer your audience’s questions

There are people all over the internet searching for answers to their burning questions, using search engines, forums and discussion groups. If you can participate with your audience in these places and answer their questions, it’s a great way to promote your content.

A site like Quora is one of the top places on the web where people go to find answers to a number of different topics. You can join the site and offer your expertise, it’s a free and effective way to promote your content and show yourself as a leader in the industry.

Reddit is another forum where you can accomplish this. Also try searching for Facebook or LinkedIn groups related to your industry where you can join in on the conversation as well.

Pay to promote

Another way to get your content in front of a ton of new audience members is to pay to promote it. Paid content promotion is up 5x since 2014, according to Orbit Media. And while a huge bonus of most content marketing is that it’s basically free, paying to promote your posts can really be worth your while, especially for new businesses and entrepreneurs.

Instead of sharing your content on social media and hoping that some interested users find it and click on your site, Facebook ads allow you to target your ideal audience. You’re able to pinpoint who should see your content by selecting age, location, profession and interests preferences so that your content will be sure to reach the right audience.

Creating an easy content marketing distribution plan is going to diminish a lot of the stress that comes after posting new content, since you won’t have to sit around worrying that it’s not being seen or shared. If you follow your content marketing distribution plan every time, you can guarantee you’ll get a ton of eyeballs on your content.

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