Author Archives: Henley Wing

20 + Experts on How To Promote Content Before Hitting Publish (updated)

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Most people think content promotion is something you do after you’re done creating it. But the reality is that you need to plan how you will promote content right from the beginning.

Seasoned entrepreneurs don’t build a product until they know how they plan to sell/market it.

Seasoned content marketers shouldn’t build an epic piece of content unless they know how it will reach a wide audience. — Henley Wing, Co-Founder, BuzzSumo

I decided to ask 13 content marketing experts to share their strategies for promoting content. I also got them to reveal their biggest challenge with promoting content. Read on for their insightful responses.

How to promote content before hitting publish

Several themes emerged in the advice from these experts. Here’s a quick summary:

  • Know your goals
  • Start early
  • Work with influencers
  • Do your homework
  • Define your audience
  • Get buy-in from clients

Michael King, Digital Marketing & L

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15 Experts On How They Develop An Outreach Strategy

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Here, at BuzzSumo we obsess a lot about outreach, and we know a lot of inbound marketers do as well. The benefits of tapping into major influencers and communities is obvious: they help spread your content/brand to a wider audience.

But unless you’re a smooth, charismatic talker, or have many friends in the journalism industry, finding those influencers and convincing them isn’t easy at all.

Learning outreach strategy from experts

I decided to interview 15 inbound marketers, and ask them how they develop their outreach strategy, and their 1 greatest outreach challenge. Here is what they had to say:

Want to get started on your own outreach strategy?

Try BuzzSumo

Kristi Hines, Freelance Writer and Blogger

Kristi Hines on Outreach Strategy

1) When performing outreach, what is the end goal usually?

My main business is creating content for others, so my goal for outreach is to promote the content I’m creating (primarily blog posts) …

15 Lessons On Creating Compelling Webinars That Convert

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Here at BuzzSumo, we’re obsessed with finding ways to convert our leads into customers. We obviously invest time on customer service and educational content, but the most effective method of converting – by far – is through a webinar.

In fact, the conversion rate of webinar attendees to paid customer is a robust 20%.

Even though our product is easy to use, some people just don’t discover all our features (like our Content Alerts) until they attended a webinar. And even when they did use all of the features, our webinar taught them unique use cases they never thought of.

Since webinars are so crucial to converting users, we decided to ask some successful brands like Buffer, Hubspot, and Hootsuite for their secrets to creating compelling webinars. Here are 15 lessons from the best at what they do:

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18 Expert Tips On Organizing Your Content Creation Process

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Content creation can be a daunting and laborious task. And it’s not just the actual act of writing an article, or designing a slideshow. But also the planning, research, and collaboration. If you work in a large company, or agency, this challenge is amplified 10-fold.

So how do we keep our content creation organized, and remain productive (other than beer and coffee)? I decided to ask 18 content marketing experts to tell us their process, including the tools they use. Here’s how the experts streamline their content creation process:…

How To Pitch to Journalists: Expert Tips From Techcrunch, NYT and more.

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Tomorrow’s launch day. You’re a startup founder, and have invested weeks crafting the perfect pitch to send to 100 journalists. You’ve spent hours thinking of the perfect subject line, and story angle. You’ve even injected some human emotion into it.

You hit send, go to bed, and wake up waiting to see everyone talking about you on Techcrunch. But it’s already 10 AM and nobody has responded to your email. You wait another hour.. then another day… then weeks. And then you face reality: nobody really cared about what you had to say.

The brutal truth is that most journalists receive 100’s of pitches everyday. If your pitch isn’t 100% perfect, it will be ignored. So what are some tips to ensure your pitch will be read? I interviewed a few journalists from major publications like Techcrunch, Mashable, NY Times, Fast Company, and TheNextWeb and asked them what pitches they …

20 Experts On Finding Engaging Content to Share

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In order to engage your followers, we all know you need to share interesting content with them regularly. Of course, there are plenty of tools that help you schedule and share content, such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial. But what about finding content your audience will love? You can use Google, and browse your RSS feeds, but there’s got to be an easier, faster way, right? We asked 20 experts in the social media marketing space to share their favorite sources to curate content. Here’s what they had to say: …

40 Fears That Keep Search Marketers Awake at Night

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There’s little doubt that the field of SEO is rapidly changing. 6-8 years ago, SEO was simple: get as many links to your site, put your keywords in title, and wait for Google to rank you. Now, tactics like guest blog posting will land you in Google purgatory. But it’s not just the rules of SEO that’s changing: the way people are consuming media is as well. Social media platforms like Pinterest are growing in popularity, and the majority of people are consuming content in mobile devices. Some say it’s only a matter of time before SEO becomes extinct.

I thought it would be useful to get a sense of the fears, insecurities, and anxieties that search marketers are experiencing. So, I decided to ask 40 search marketers to name their greatest fear that keeps them awake at night (with the exception of babies, insomnia, and their favorite sports team …

20 Contrarian Rules on Content Marketing from 20 Experts

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After reading content marketing articles for a while, everything starts to sound like an echo chamber. People will tell you the same things again and again. You’ll hear trite advice like “Focus on quality not quantity” or “Don’t promote your product or brand too much”. The end result? You can easily follow advice blindly, without asking yourself if the rule applies to you.

While the most common advice does apply to most people, I thought it would be interesting to gather contrarian advice from experts. Here are 20 content marketing rules that challenge conventional notions (or just isn’t emphasized). …

20 Experts On Solving Common Content Marketing Pain Points

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Think content marketing can be challenging? Ask any content marketer, and they’ll be sure to tell you a few challenges they face on a daily basis. The Content Marketing Institute even released a report on the major challenges in the industry awhile ago. A few of the popular ones include:

  1. Creating content with a budget.
  2. Creating more engaging content.
  3. Inability to measure content effectiveness.
  4. Lack of integration across marketing.
  5. Lack of Buy-In/Vision.
  6. Feeding the content beast.

I’m sure most people would love to wave a magic wand and make these pains go away. Or at least figure out the best ways to solve them. So I decided to ask 20 experts in the industry a few weeks ago how they solved their biggest pain points. Here’s what they had to say.…