One of the huge, seemingly unanswerable questions where content marketing is concerned is ‘How exactly do I promote my content?’
Believe it or not I’m deleriously happy when people ask me this question because so much of the time, entrepreneurs get trapped by The Cornfield Paradox and believe that, if they build a business, people will come to it, tripping over themselves to hand over cash.
While that would be a lovely surprise, and may well happen at some point, it doesn’t happen spontaneously.
There is a Golden Trident when it comes to content marketing and blogging, three core things you need to hit if you want everything to work as well as possible (or at all!), and promotion is one of them (the other two being understanding your ideal reader/client, and ensuring your content is high-quality and truthful).
Skip To The Best Bits...
But hustling is hard.
Where content is concerned the core aspect of the hustle is getting your SEO right, that’s the big one, but beyond that there are ways to leverage social media to promote your content and, contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t necessitate paying for a lot of adverts.
Ads can be very helpful if used correctly, to promote the right elements of your content, but a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have the budget for it, and even if they do, that money can often be better spent elsewhere.
I’ve never had much luck with paid adverts, because until very recently I’d spend so much time building The Write Copy Girl and helping my clients with their content marketing, I hadn’t been able to fully focus on my own.
And it takes a lot of focus.
Creating regular content is a huge part of it but the aspect I’ve always fallen down on was lead magnets and content upgrades – giving people the opportunity to subscribe to my list wherever possible.
There were two reasons for this, and they’re reasons so many biz owners share:
- Time. I’ve been stuck in a time-vortex since TWCG launched, with an ever-increasing amount of client work (which is fabulous) and a universe that refuses to provide me with any more hours in the day (which I view as cruel and unusual punishment).
- Tech. I’m actually good at the techy side of things but I find website creation tedious, and for the longest time I couldn’t get a system in place on my website that allowed me to easily add content upgrades that actually connected to anything. For whatever reason, every time I tried to hook one up, it didn’t work. I outsourced a couple, but the core of Divine Blogging where lead generation is concerned is regular content upgrades, and I didn’t have anyone who was available on a pretty much weekly basis to do this for me.
Now I have a super-slick system in place that lets me do it myself in a couple of minutes while I’m uploading the blog post to go with it. As a result, I’ve got lead magnets and content upgrades galore with a bucket load more ready to come out later in the year. Now I find myself in the same situation all my clients do at some point:
How exactly do I promote all these lead magnets and content upgrades?
As I said, SEO is a huge part of it, but the other massive part is social media.
I’ve really fallen out of love with social media in the last year or so, Facebook particularly, but I’m trying to find may way through the bump in our relationship so I can start to leverage my own platforms for lead generation and growth.
I know how, I simply can’t find the time or impetus. For those of you who don’t know how, or are stuck in the same boat I’m currently paddling and need a few easy ways to use your social media to get people signing up to your list, there are a few simple things you can do.
Here are 5 super easy Twitter growth hacking tips to promote your lead magnets on Twitter:
#1 Grow Your Twitter Following
This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s something a lot of people overlook. The simple truth is, if you don’t have many followers the number of people actually clicking through to your site is going to be minimal. Of those people only a percentage will subscribe, and it’s usually a relatively small percentage (a 1-2% conversion rate is considered good!).
So if you only have a few hundred followers, you’ll be very lucky if half ever actually go to your site. You’re not doing anything wrong, it’s just how Twitter works, a lot of people don’t want to leave the safety of Twitter and venture to your website, and a lot of the ones that do won’t have time.
So you can, in the best case scenario, expect 1-2% of roughly half your Twitter following to signup to your list.
And that’s a best-case-scenario for most people.
I’m not trying to dishearten you, I’m simply trying to help you understand it really is a numbers game on Twitter: more followers means more site visits, means more conversions. Of the five tips on this list only one directly relates to lead magnets, and that’s simply because increasing your following and engagement is the real key here, not putting out lots of promotional posts to pimp your content upgrades.
If you want to grow your list using Twitter, the biggest growth hack is to focus first on growing your following. The short answer to doing this is regular content creation and sharing, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. My Divine Blogging method is capable of consistently generating 1000+ new followers a month, and I will be sharing a post on exactly how that works a little later in the year. For now, make sure you’re getting the other things on this list right…
#2 Rock Your Hashtags
If you’re even slightly familiar with Twitter you will know hashtags are ‘the thing’ that gets you the most attention. The biggest mistake I see people make is to use too many hashtags in their tweets. They cram them in thinking this will help.
I have clients who still persistently add extra hashtags to the tweets I write for them, no matter how many times I try to gently explain they’re shooting themselves in the foot, because it’s seriously difficult to wrap your head around the concept that more isn’t better.
Two hashtags per Tweet is statistically proven to be most successful.
The most recent reliable data I’ve seen on this is from before the character count increased from 140 to 280 so I am a little more lenient than I used to be as I strongly suspect this number will go up as a result. If you want to risk four, try it out, but my advice is to vary it – some tweets with one, two, three, or four at the absolute most, and some with none at all!
#3 Pin A Really Engaging Tweet
Like Facebook, Twitter will allow you to pin a tweet to the top of your feed, so it’s the first thing people see when they land on your profile.
Make it a good one.
That doesn’t mean make it the one you want everyone to see, or make it one that’s directly promoting your lead magnet. Find the tweet that gets the most engagement and clicks through to your website, and pin that.
Keep checking back to make sure it’s still your most engaging pin, and rotate it with new ones that outpace it.
#4 Stop Resharing Your Old Tweets
Until as recently as the new year this tip would have been the opposite. In fact, one of the biggest pieces of advice I’ve doled out over the years is to have a content scheduling system that comes with an automatic reshare system.
That’s no longer the case.
In fact, resharing old content is now going to damage your engagement and following, not only on Twitter but also on Facebook and other sites, because the algorithms have caught up.
They’re constantly evolving and their core focus is user experience and, if we’re being a little cynical, encouraging people to advertise because it seems like the best option left for boosting engagement.
Twitter have rolled out a couple of big updates this year and one of them was to make it virtually impossible to reshare an identical Tweet you already posted. It used to be that you simply couldn’t share the same tweet too close together, now you can’t do it at all, and if you do find a way around it (changing a word or two for example) your engagement will still suffer.
People on Twitter haven’t changed, the algorithm has, stop resharing!
#5 Share Your Lead Magnets
This is another one that seems like a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how often people don’t do it. Create some dedicated tweets for your lead magnets and share them regularly. Use eye-catching images, appropriate hashtags, and make sure you emphasise that they’re FREE.
Don’t be disheartened if people don’t click on them directly – they’re not stupid, they know you’re going to ask for their email address, and they might not want to give it. But seeing that you regularly share free content will lodge in their brain.
They’ll remember.
They will start to associate your brand with value and freely offering help, and in time, they will click. Even if they don’t, they are actually more likely to click on your non-promotional content because of the positive impression you’re building.
Don’t flood your feed with promotional posts (not even free ones!) but when you create a new content upgrade include a couple of tweets directly promoting it in your schedule that week. And have regular tweets going out once a week or once a fortnight to promote your big lead magnets.
I’ll be back very soon with a much more detailed post on using Twitter to promote your content and grow your business. And I will be back on Twitter myself very shortly too, putting the method that works so well for my clients into practice for my own business. Pop over and follow me (if you’re not doing already) so you don’t miss more tips in the future…
