New brands and businesses can find the world of online publishing really confusing. There’s a lot of conflicting information about what to do and what not to do when it comes to promoting your work. The good news is that you can follow some simple rules to make working with publishers of content to create better user experiences and to drive sales.
Use Online Publishing To Create Awareness
There can be a tendency for new players to take a snobbish attitude to online publishing. They invest way too much of their budget trying to win over one or two bloggers to try and promote their work – the reasoning is that the most influential bloggers will bring the biggest audience. In practice, that’s a bad way to work. You want to reach a wide audience and while a piece on a big site may bring a quick traffic spike… the truth is that once that piece vanishes from the homepage… you’re not going to get much additional benefit from it. It’s better to work with a wide-range of mid-tier bloggers to get established first and wait for interest from the biggest players – this will also boost your SEO efforts.
Set a Budget for Online Publishing Marketing
Author/Copyright holder: frankieleon. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
Most bloggers are going to want paying to promote your work. A site with only a couple of hundred hits a month might do it for free but that’s not much use to your traffic and conversions is it? Those bloggers that have large and well-defined audiences quite rightly expect to be compensated for their efforts when marketing for others. So have a budget in mind. For reference $50 is about right for a piece on a smaller site and you might need to pay $1,000+ for a market leading site to promote you.
Good PR Complements Rather Than Replaces Online Publishing Marketing Work
With an abundance of free press release sites out there it can be tempting to just keep creating press releases and dumping them out in the hopes that you’ll get some free links. The reality is that these sites tend to bring nothing but low quality links which harm your SEO.
Author/Copyright holder: Niuton may. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
Good PR also requires a budget and paying for being featured but online publishing often beats PR simply because each piece is unique rather than a word-for-word rendition of your press release. PR has its place in marketing but as a complement to online publishing rather than a replacement for it.
Quality Content is King
Author/Copyright holder: Sean MacEntee. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
This should go without saying but Google nearly any term and it clearly doesn’t go without saying… if your content sucks it sucks. You need to work with online publishers to create great content that adds value to your potential clients’ lives. If you want the click through; you have to have the content in place to ensure a great user experience from the get go. You can’t wait to deliver good UX until someone lands on your site.
Header Image: Author/Copyright holder: Techcitement. Copyright terms and licence: All rights reserved. Img Source
