Content Promotion Hacks from Pirates of the Pacific

philippine-eagle*

This is a guest article by one of the foremost link builders from the Philippines, Venchito Tampon, with a few cosmetic changes by myself.

When you’re doing content marketing for almost three years, you already know which content promotion strategies are effective for your brand and for your competitors.

Otherwise it’s time for you to test which tactics have been working for brands in your space, and replicate those methods to your own advantage.

In this post, I’d like to get the word out on three content promotion hacks for your content whether it’s already been published on your blog or is still in planning to be created in the future.

Following up based on first outreach results

Why do outreach emails fail?

It’s because outreach specialists spend too much time on the following things:

  • Creating email templates that are automated and can easily be attached to emails using tools like Canned Responses.
  • Populating lists of link prospects (sites/blogs) to increase the odds of getting more responses from them.

They tend to forget to small but impactful details to improve email marketing efforts, such as:

  • Day and time of outreach (first and ongoing replies)
  • Headlines/subject lines of emails sent
  • Placement of links inside your email

The day and time of outreach should be considered not only in sending your initial outreach messages but in replying to your subsequent emails (for ongoing conversations with prospects).

Gmail allows you to see the day and time you received the response of your prospect.

In that case, it is better to reply or at least schedule your response to that email at the time it was sent to you.

Here’s a screen shot of the day and time an email was sent via email:

day-and-time-outreach

You can see it just below the email replies.

Your chances of continually conversing with your prospects using that approach are higher than just replying to them whenever you can.

Pro advice: list down the exact hours you received responses in your outreach and you’ll see some patterns of peak hours that you can use to schedule effectively your outreach.

Using peak times for sending out messages

Email marketing helps brand marketers to engage with their target audience (particularly their subscribers) using content-based initiatives such as

  1. newsletters
  2. exclusive content
  3. discount programs

that will help their potential customers to know more about the brand and evangelist it to their peers and followers.

When you want your email marketing campaign to become more effective in achieving results (sales, partnerships, high click rate, etc.), you can test any of the following aspects:

  • Day and time
  • Headline
  • Placement of link

The day and time matters most in email marketing because it dictates whether or not your emails will get read by your subscribers and your links will be clicked on.

Go to your Google Analytics account and then click

Acquisition –> Channels -> Email. Select Secondary Dimension –> Users- Country/Territory

to add specific countries and identify where your email subscribers who clicked on your links are located.

You can schedule your email newsletters during peak hours of your most engaged subscribers (use the top countries above as your basis).

For headlines, you can log in to your email marketing platform. I highly suggest you use GetResponse. It is an email marketing tool that can help you track results of your campaigns.

open-click-rate

Though there are many variables that will affect open rates of your emails, it is essential to test which types of headlines work best for your campaign.

A few tweaks like turning the subject line into small caps, adding benefits or actionable wording (“how to”) could help increase your open rate.

Adding the same link in different ways

For link placement, it is always best to consider that people nowadays tend to skim emails (just read sub-headlines and a few sentences) and decide if they are worthy to read in full.

For bloggers, you can replicate this email template from Neil Patel:

link-placement

As you can see, the highlighted selections are hyperlinks pointing to the same blog post with different text variations.

This type of email marketing approach can increase the chance of getting clicks from email subscribers.

Additional techniques

  1. Consistently provide free exclusive content to email subscribers in order to build trust, authority and community for your brand (don’t just self-promote your product in your emails).
  2. Add some twists like bonuses (e.g. a content upgrade) to your most important pages or landing pages to get more subscribes from your current site visitors.
  3. Provide an easy way for subscribers to unsubscribe to your newsletter but never push them to do so (using words like manage your subscription instead of unsubscribe is a good thing to do).

Conclusion

There are many ways to improve your content promotion efforts by simply becoming more creative with simple things that will yield great results.

Always invest in testing new tactics, strategies and tools to adapt to user behavior and intent. Just imagine you’re a pirate in the pacific and your life depends on it.

* Creative Commons image by shankar s.