The Complete Guide to Building a Successful YouTube Channel

There are opportunities everywhere for content marketers.

Different channels, different types of content, and different websites.

One that I think is criminally underutilized is a little site you might have heard of:

YouTube.

It’s by far the largest video sharing site—nothing even comes close to it.

Get this: YouTube has over 1 billion users.

Those billion users account for over 4 billion video views a day.

You can find literally any type of audience on YouTube, which means that just about any business can find a way to benefit from marketing on it.

And while other video sites have decent levels of traffic, most businesses could start today on YouTube and do fine because it’s far from saturated.

In truth, few businesses actually invest in YouTube marketing.

Why?

Because it’s difficult. Compare a video and a blog post about the same topic and of similar quality levels, and the video will cost more.

Smart businesses know that the cost can be worth it, but the higher barrier to entry scares away the rest.

If you’ve been considering marketing on YouTube, or you’ve just started and haven’t really found your feet, this post is especially for you.

I’m going to show you all the key components of creating a YouTube channel that thrives. Your videos will get views, and those views will lead to subscribers and sales for your business. 

Video is still content, so you need to start with an audience

You should treat a YouTube content strategy just like you would treat a content strategy on any other channel.

Your content needs to be created for a specific audience you want to reach.

The more you define your niche, the more your content will resonate with viewers.

At this point, there are three main aspects you need to determine.

Aspect #1 – The type of person: First up is the type of person you want to create content for, which should be the same type of person who buys your product(s).

For example, if I were creating a channel from scratch today, I would be creating content for business owners and marketers because they are also the ones who buy my training courses and hire me as a consultant.

Try to get even more specific than that. For example:

• beginner marketers
• expert marketers
• marketers in North America

You can often narrow your audience by being more specific about their knowledge level of your topic and location.

A narrow audience is a good thing because it allows you to make your content just that more targeted.

You can’t create content for beginners and experts at the same time, so if you try to, at least half will always be dissatisfied.

Aspect #2 – What do they want to do? The second part of defining your audience is to specify their main goals.

Are they trying to make more money? make their home look better? learn to cook better? get in shape? And so on…

Determine the things they care about the most. Ideally, it will relate to your product as well, but it’s not always necessary.

For example, I could create content for “expert marketers who want to get in better shape.”

Even though those videos wouldn’t be directly related to my products, they still attract the attention of my target market. This would allow me to get my marketing advice in front of them and, eventually, my products as well.

The main point of content marketing, including videos on YouTube, is to attract the attention of your target audience.

So, if you see a need that hasn’t been filled, jump on it regardless of whether it’s directly tied to your product.

Aspect #3 – How do they want to consume it? Finally, you just want to do a common sense check and determine whether the audience you’ve nailed down actually wants to get their solutions in the video form.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the whole audience, but it should be a large part.

Video is great for certain types of content:

• tutorials
• overviews of strategies
• education on a specific topic
• demonstrations
• product reviews

Marketers, and just about any audience, would love to get fitness tips through videos. It makes sense because it’s the simplest way you can show movements and explain complex topics.

But it won’t suit all types of content.

For example, let’s say your audience wants to find resources.

You can’t exactly put a list of tools and resources in a video because it’s not easily scannable.

Once you’ve come up with an audience with a specific need that can be fulfilled with video, you’re good to move on to the next step.

3 Steps to videos that attract views

Marketing on YouTube has a lot of similarities to SEO.

To get views, one of your main goals will be to rank in YouTube’s searches without putting in more effort than your initial promotion.

You could try some black hat tactics, just like in SEO, to get the extra views, but that’s never a long-term solution.

Instead, you need to create videos people actually want to watch. There are three steps to it.

Step #1 – Accomplish or entertain, pick one: Ask yourself why someone watches a video. There are really only two reasons why.

Either they want to learn something to solve a problem, or they want to be entertained.

You need to make sure that your video accomplishes at least one of these, if not both.

The reason why understanding this is so important is because it will shape how you make your videos.

Does a super long introduction help your viewer learn what they want? No, they don’t care about a theme song. This isn’t a TV show.

Does the viewer care about an in-depth history to the problem? Again, no.

They want their solution delivered as concisely as possible.

Your goal is to make your videos as useful as possible because that’s what’s going to bring you subscribers and long-time viewers.

Step #2 – Quality always comes first: Even though YouTube is far from saturated, one aspect that really impresses me is the quality of the videos put out by popular channels.

They’ve quickly figured out that viewers won’t watch low quality videos.

Compare this to blogging: the standard level of content has only gotten to a high level in the past few years, and there are still plenty of businesses producing ugly content without much value.

There are two main types of high quality videos that you’ll come across and that you’ll probably want to produce yourself.

Let me clarify what I mean by quality: I’m talking about how good the video looks.

High quality videos look professional: they have good lighting, aren’t blurry, and look like someone invested some time and effort in them.

The first type is the classic white background. Derek Halpern often uses it in his videos:

Not only does it look professional, but it keeps the focus on you rather than some random things in the background.

The other kind of popular video is the whiteboard video, where narration is done alongside drawings on a whiteboard:

These look great and are an entertaining way to explain complex products.

How do you make videos like these?

Well, the white screen background (you could also go with a green screen) type of video is pretty easy.

It’ll cost you a few hundred dollars in a photography store to get set up the first time (for a low cost version), but that will last you a long while.

Here’s a great video on how to get your own setup:

Once you have the screen in place, you just need a decent camera, and you’re good to start filming.

The whiteboard videos are a bit trickier unfortunately.

If you don’t have the illustration skills yourself, you don’t have any choice but to hire someone to do it for you.

Create a job posting on any of the major freelance sites to find a whiteboard explainer video creator or designer, and you should get a few applicants with experience:

• Upwork
• Elance
• Guru

On top of filming a high quality video, you will also need to edit it.

Good editing allows you to make the video flow nicely from one section to another to keep the viewers’ attention.

Again, you’ll need to hire a freelance video editor if you don’t have the skills yourself.

Step #3 – You need to make a name for yourself: Having your own YouTube channel is a lot like having your own TV show. You need subscribers who will watch your videos on a regular basis.

That’s why a single video, no matter how good it is, is not enough for YouTube marketing success.

Compare it to the pilot episode of a TV show. Even if it gets good ratings, that doesn’t ensure that it gets picked up for a second season.

You need to commit to making regular videos for your channel.

Take Derek Halpern, whom I mentioned before. He has close to 90 videos on his channel from my quick estimations.

He created those over a period of a few years.

This does a few major things.

Firstly, it gives him the chance to accumulate subscribers. Even if your first video doesn’t impress a viewer enough to make them subscribe, maybe another one of your videos in the sidebar will.

On top of that, every time a subscriber sees a video, there’s a good chance they will share it. This will lead to more views every time you release a new video.

The number of views your videos will get is not linear. It will start slowly, but like a snowball, it will grow exponentially over time.

If you’re going to do whitehat video marketing on YouTube, plan to give it a year or so before you see real results—but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to get them sooner.

Start with basic video SEO

The next step of making your videos work for you is optimizing them for search.

Your primary goal is to get a video to rank in the results of YouTube searches, but it’ll have an added benefit of ranking in Google results as well:

Videos often show up in Google results, and it can drive a decent number of views to your video.

I wouldn’t rely on showing up in Google because videos don’t show up in all searches. However, it can be a nice boost to your views, and you can maximize your chance of showing up in searches by targeting phrases with the following keywords in them:

• tutorial
• review
• test
• what is ____
• video
• explanation
• how to ____
• walkthrough

Now back to YouTube optimization. There are two major parts of the ranking algorithm that you need to optimize for.

Part #1 – Your video information: The first thing YouTube looks for is whether your video is relevant to a search.

It’s a fairly simple search engine; it looks for keywords in three areas of your video:

• the title
• the description
• the tags

You don’t need to—and shouldn’t—keyword-stuff.

Include your keyword once in the title, once or twice in your description, and in the tags if it makes sense.

Here’s an example of the description from Brian Dean’s “advanced SEO” YouTube video that he ranks highly for:

He mentions the keyword at the very start and the very end of it.

But notice there’s a lot more to the description than just the keyword.

YouTube doesn’t have much to work with when it comes to ranking videos. The title is only a sentence long, and tags can’t be weighed too heavily because they contain limited information.

This makes the description the main source of additional information for YouTube’s algorithm.

By including a detailed description of the video, you’ll naturally include related terms the algorithm can use to understand the topic of your video. This will make it easier to rank for relevant terms.

Part #2 – User engagement and feedback: Not surprisingly, YouTube’s algorithm has taken an approach to ranking videos that’s similar to Google’s approach.

Instead of just using the basic information an uploader provided with a video, it also looks at how users interact with your video.

The simple concept behind it is that if users are indicating they really like your video, it’s probably a good one to show to more people. Naturally, the algorithm ranks it higher.

So, what does it look at?

There are a few major areas of user feedback YouTube can consider when evaluating a video.

The first is how much of the video most viewers are watching.

If they all drop off after the first 10 seconds, that’s a bad sign. But if 50%- 60% of your viewers watch the whole video, that’s fantastic.

You can check this in your account’s statistics, where you’ll see a graph similar to the one above.

Where else can YouTube get feedback from?

• Overall views - From YouTube’s perspective, if a video is getting a lot of views without its help in the search rankings, it must be good. More views typically lead to better rankings (as long as the audience retention is good).

• Rating (thumbs up and down) - Users can also rate a video by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. The higher this ratio is, the better.
• Views to subscribers – If a video is really good, a lot of people who view it will click the “Subscribe” button underneath. Similarly, no one will subscribe after watching a bad video.
• Views to favorites or social shares - Just like with subscribing, people will also share a video only if they like it.
• Comments - If a video is inspiring a lot of comments, it may be good. YouTube can’t put much weight on the comment count since comments could be negative too.

Using all these factors, YouTube comes up with an appropriate score for each video to decide how to rank it.

The biggest thing you can do to optimize these engagement factors is to make high quality videos (as discussed above).

There are a few other small things you can do as well, which I’ll show you throughout the rest of this post.

Views rule YouTube rankings

While there are several factors that contribute to YouTube rankings, quality views are the most important.

When I say “quality views,” I mean a situation when the average viewer watches most of the video.

For almost any term you search, the results will have one thing in common: all the videos will have a lot of views. Here is an example:

For “advanced SEO,” the lowest view count of the top results is over 3,600.

It’s important to understand what “a lot” is to an algorithm.

The difference between zero and 2,000 is greater than the difference between 2,000 and 200,000.

Once you have a few thousand views, you have what you need to rank.

Why? Because now YouTube has a large enough sample size to compare your video’s engagement to the others’. Things such as retention and rating become viable ranking factors.

The takeaway:

You don’t need to get hundreds of thousands of views to rank well, but you do need to find a way to get your first few hundred and, if possible, first few thousand on each video.

As you get more and more subscribers, you don’t have to focus on promotion as much because your videos will automatically get thousands of high retention views from your fans.

When you’re starting out, you have many options to promote your videos. I’m going to show you four of the best ones.

Option #1 – Cross-promotion: If you already have a bit of a name in your niche, cross-promotion is a great place to start.

The idea is to participate in a video hosted by the top YouTubers in your niche in order to get exposure to their audiences.

Rand Fishkin does it often:

At the end of this video, you should be able to ask the viewers of the channel your video is featured on to subscribe to your channel. Make sure you place a link for it in the description.

To find these channels, search for big keywords in your niche on YouTube, and check out the number of subscribers the users on the first page have.

For example, I could take a look at Josh Bachynski’s channel as he ranks highly for “advanced SEO”:

Clicking his name under the video will take you to his profile, where you can see his subscriber count in red:

Obviously, the bigger the number, the better.

Try to target at least 20-30 users with a solid base of subscribers. Find their email addresses, and send them a pitch offering to create a video for them.

Ideally, you’ll get at least a few guest opportunities.

Option #2 – Promote your videos to your email subscribers: If you’re producing high quality videos, why wouldn’t you share them with your audience?

Better yet, why don’t you create a blog post to accompany each and embed the corresponding video into the post? This is exactly what Derek Halpern often does:

Then, readers can choose whether they want to read your post, watch your video, or do both.

When they watch the video while it’s embedded on your site, it still counts as a view.

If you have a couple of thousand email subscribers already, you can get your YouTube channel going really fast if a good portion of those subscribers watch your videos as well.

Option #3 – Email outreach: Videos on YouTube are just like any other type of content. One of the most effective ways to promote them is with email outreach.

Make a list of top bloggers in your niche, and send them an email about the video.

Ask them to share it with their audience if they think their audience would enjoy it, but also explain why you think the audience would.

Option #4 – Advertising: YouTube also allows businesses to buy ads on the site to promote their videos:

The average cost is about $10-$30 per thousand views. With practice, I think you could get the price down even further.

If you’re spending a few hundred dollars (at the minimum) to make a video, doesn’t it make sense to spend $50 to promote it initially?

I think it does, particularly when you don’t have many subscribers.

Here is my complete guide to using YouTube ads for businesses.

Don’t waste those views! Here’s how to make them count

At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of how you’re going to make videos and get those initial views.

Assuming your videos are solid, you should be getting a stream of organic traffic from YouTube itself.

But remember what the whole point of creating a YouTube channel is.

It isn’t to get views. It’s to increase your business’ sales.

To do this, let’s take a step back and consider where YouTube would fit within your sales funnel:

It’d be right at the top.

It’s the marketing channel where you get the attention of your potential customers.

But the next step has to be to get them onto your website and onto an email list.

Part #1 – include a call to action to get subscribers on YouTube: When you want to get someone to do something, you need to ask them to do it.

In this case, you want your viewers to subscribe to your channel.

Subscribers will get notified of your latest videos, and a decent portion of them will watch all your videos as you release them.

Not only does this help you rank better, but it also gives you another opportunity to get these people to your website.

And sure, some viewers will subscribe to you without any prompting, but most won’t. A call to action will significantly impact your viewer-to-subscriber conversion rate, which is why all top YouTubers do it.

You have a few different options for a call to action; I recommend testing them all with your audience.

The first option is to create a nice big “Subscribe” button at the end of your videos.

You can see why that’d be effective.

To add the button, you’ll need to modify your Google Adwords settings to allow you to have access to the CTA (call to action) panel in YouTube itself.

Here’s a great video that shows you the entire process:

Your next option is to simply use annotations on your videos, which you can configure when you upload your videos.

For example, look at the way “BBALLBREAKDOWN” uses annotations to prompt viewers to either subscribe or watch another video hosted on the channel:

They compared the conversion rate of this approach with not having any CTAs and found that CTAs converted an impressive 31 times better.

Finally, you can also take a few seconds at the end of the video to ask viewers to subscribe. This can work better because most viewers won’t shut off the video while you’re (or your narrator is) still talking.

Part #2 – put a link to a landing page in the description to capture email addresses: In order to get people to your website, you’ll need a link somewhere.

You can test adding it to your videos, but the best place is your description.

You should add a link to a landing page for a relevant newsletter to all your video descriptions:

Don’t just link to a blog post because those won’t convert nearly as high as landing pages will.

3 Simple but crucial tips about YouTube marketing

By now, you know just about everything you need to know about building a successful YouTube channel.

However, there are a few final tips that I’d like to give you that can make a big difference in your success.

The first is that building a successful YouTube can take time.

If you have a large email list or existing relationships with influencers to leverage, you can get thousands of views in no time.

But if you don’t, like most businesses, expect to create great videos for at least a few months before you start getting thousands of organic views. Don’t give up if a few videos fall flat—keep going.

The second tip is that you will get negative comments from time to time.

There are two types of negative comments, and you should handle them differently:

• troll comments - these are not serious comments; they are made just to get a reaction out of you. There’s nothing you can do about them except ignore them.

• honest comments - when you first start out, you have a lot of room to improve. If someone says something legitimately negative about your video, take it as an opportunity to learn and improve your future videos.

My final tip is to remember YouTube is a marketing channel. Like with any other marketing channel, you should not build your business on it.

Instead, always look to drive those YouTube users back to your website so that you can grow your email list. This way, even if YouTube bans your account for some reason, your business will still be fine.

Conclusion

YouTube is a fantastic marketing opportunity for businesses interested in content marketing.

Almost all audiences use YouTube, and there really isn’t too much competition yet.

I’ve shown you everything you need to know, including the type of videos you should be making, how you can get consistent, how to get free views to them, and how to turn viewers into customers.

Now, you need to take action.

If you’ve been considering YouTube marketing, pull the trigger. Create a plan based on this post, and create your first video as soon as possible.

If you have any questions about how to determine whether YouTube is right for your business or how to make the most of it, let me know in a comment below.

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The 6 Ways Your Content Marketing Might Be Broken (And How to Fix That)

I understand your frustration.

I see it every day.

I’m talking about marketers, or aspiring marketers, who put a lot of effort into their content marketing but just don’t get the results they need.

The truth is that effort does not equal results.

Working hard doing the wrong things won’t produce any significant results.

And that’s what most marketers do. They have a broken content marketing system.

While a lot of the pieces are right, they’re making a few big mistakes that are making their efforts fruitless.

I realize that it can be disheartening to hear that, but let me assure you that you are not alone.

According to a recent survey, only 30% of marketers rate their use of content marketing effective.

Very few (6%) say that their content marketing is “very effective.”

Everyone seems to realize the potential of content marketing, but very few are getting the most out of it.

So, instead of showing you a new tactic today, I’m going to show you 6 symptoms of a broken content marketing plan.

If you recognize a symptom, that’s actually a good thing because I’m also going to show you how to fix these flaws and get back on track to success.

I realize that no one likes making mistakes, but try to keep an open mind and honestly evaluate whether you have any of the problems I am about to describe in detail here.

There’s no shame, everyone (especially me) has made many of these mistakes at one time or another. Every marketer needs to find their own path to success. 

1. You’re not getting as many backlinks as you’d like (i.e., stagnant search engine traffic)

If you know me at all, you know that I love organic search engine traffic.

It’s very consistent and typically grows over time if you’re doing content marketing right.

You can see what I mean in the 100k case study.

As you might know, search engine rankings and traffic are tied to backlinks, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

The more high quality backlinks you have pointing to your content, the more traffic you will get.

I’ve written about how to get these backlinks and how to optimize your content for search engines many times in the past:

• The Advanced Guide to Link Building
• The Advanced Guide to SEO
• The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO

In this post, however, I want to focus on determining whether something is wrong with your content marketing.

If all is well, your organic search traffic should increase fairly steadily. Otherwise, we have a problem.

Symptom: Organic search traffic has plateaued or is slowly declining.

Step #1 – Check the numbers: Just as doctors turn to machines to provide them with data about their patients’ health, marketers have analytics to turn to.

Start by going to Google Analytics.

Using the left sidebar, navigate to “Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels,” and then select the “Organic Search” grouping.

The important part is to look over a long enough time period.

I’ve often had a span of 1-3 months during which traffic remained relatively constant, but if you have a plateau for longer than that, there’s probably an issue (with the exception of a highly seasonal niche):

Here’s an example that shows that there is something wrong:

There was a really nice increase of search traffic over a few months, but since then, it has either stayed the same or declined.

That indicates that there is something really wrong with this site’s content marketing.

Step #2 – Find the cure: This is a bit tougher but doable with a little bit of effort.

I’m going to assume that you know how to detect a Google penalty and that you’ve already done some basic technical SEO (like having a decent page speed).

Aside from those potential issues, the most common problem by far is not getting enough backlinks to new content.

Let me clarify – high quality backlinks. A link on a forum isn’t going to do much for your search rankings (although it won’t hurt either).

To confirm this, you need to use a link database tool. Ahrefs and Majestic are the best options.

First, input your domain into either tool:

Once the page loads, you’ll see a graph of the growth of all the links to your site.

Hopefully, it will look something like this:

As long as your backlink count (and total referring domains) are both steadily increasing, you’re doing something right, and search traffic will almost always go up.

But what if you see a downward trend or a plateau?

That tells you that your site as a whole isn’t attracting any new backlinks.

Uh oh.

That needs fixing.

It’s a clear sign that your content promotion isn’t up to par.

You should be spending at least as much time promoting your content as you do creating it. If your blog is relatively new, you should spend even more time.

Aim to get at least 20 high quality links from your promotion efforts. This takes a lot of time and persistence. You might have to send out 500+ emails per article. Do it.

You won’t see the results immediately, but after a few months, your search traffic will increase and keep rising if you keep up the work.

If you’re not really sure how to promote your content, I’ve got you covered. Read through these guides I’ve written in the past:

• The Day After: 11 Things to Do After You Publish a Post
• How to Use Advanced Content Promotion Strategies
• The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing: Content Promotion

2. Your current audience is not finding your content useful

Think about the basic principles of content marketing.

Your content needs to have value in order to accomplish anything. If your audience isn’t finding your content useful, they’re not going to continue to read it.

This is something you want to catch as quickly as possible, or it can become tremendously hard to reverse.

Here’s what happens with most somewhat loyal readers:

• they generally like your content, maybe even love it
• but then they read a post that isn’t very useful. That post alone won’t deter them from coming back.
• if they come across more posts that aren’t useful within a short time period, they will not come back.

Take a second to understand that sequence.

It’s easy to produce a less than stellar post and let it slip by because your numbers won’t take a hit. In the short term, most of your readers will still be loyal to you.

But if you let 2, 3, or 4 posts that aren’t very valuable slip by, you’ll start seeing your readership decline exponentially.

It happens all the time to even popular sites. They lose a large percentage of longtime loyal readers in just a few months because they start to cut corners.

You can’t afford to do this…ever.

Diagnosing ‘weak’ content: In order to evaluate how your audience perceives your content, you need a few different metrics to get a full picture.

There are a few different symptoms that you’ll need to keep an eye out for.

Symptom #1: Your email open rate goes down…down…and down

I suggest keeping a close eye on your email subscribers at all times. These are typically your most loyal readers, which means they provide reliable, accurate information.

Here, you need to examine your email open rate. All major email marketing service providers offer some sort of report in your account that should show you your overall email open rates over time.

Something like this:

If it’s staying steady or even going up, great. You’re doing something right.

But if it’s steadily going down, that’s a sign that people are losing interest in your content. If it’s only a slight downward trend, you may be doing okay, but you’ll want to keep an eye on it.

The reason why this is a good metric to look at is because these loyal readers will open most of your emails if they expect there is valuable content in them (why wouldn’t they if your content will improve their lives?)

If your numbers are dropping, it means that more and more of your readers aren’t expecting to find useful content in your emails.

Symptom #2: The number of “actionable comments” goes down dramatically

Truth be told, I don’t really worry about the sheer number of comments I get on posts.

Sometimes I get 20 comments; other times I get 300. A lot of that depends on whether what I am writing about is interesting to all or only certain parts of my audience.

What I do care about is how many actionable comments I get.

For me, an “actionable comment” is a comment that demonstrates that the reader not only liked the content but actually took action to apply it.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you want to see whether your readers find your content useful, see if they actually use it.

Cranking up the value and winning back your readers: The reason behind either (or both) of these symptoms is usually the same.

Some time in the recent past you started publishing content that wasn’t up to the standard you set before.

It’s really easy to do, and there are many things that can cause it:

• distractions in your personal life
• falling into a content creation “grind”—feeling burnt out
• getting overwhelmed by other parts of your work or business

First of all, know that it’s okay. Everyone (including myself) has dips in the quality of their content once in awhile.

But the best marketers spot it really quickly and fix it.

The solution is actually quite simple: start putting more effort into creating more valuable content.

If you can’t do that for some reason, it might be time to at least temporarily hire a writer or editor to help you.

If you’re just feeling a bit lost with your content creation, it may be time to learn some new ways to add value to your content. Here are a few posts I’ve written that will help you inject some new life into your work:

• How To Create Better Content For Your Customers
• Transform Your Blog Posts: 6 Open-Ended Questions That’ll Help You Create Better Content
• 12 Content Writing Secrets of Professional Writers
• No More Tricks: 5 Ways to Create Content That Google Wants to Rank

3. Your traffic is barely growing

I think every content marketer has experienced it near the beginning of their career.

They create content on a regular basis, but the traffic never amounts to anything more than a few hundred views a month.

But there are many possible reasons for that, including publishing boring content in the first place.

I’m going to assume that you know better than that and that you’re already producing some good content.

If this is your situation, the problem likely lies with your current content promotion systems.

Here’s how you diagnose it:

Symptom: You get great engagement metrics, but your traffic barely grows.

Engagement metrics tell you how much your users enjoy and interact with your content. They include:

• average time on page
• bounce rate
• average pages per session

To find these, open Google Analytics, and navigate to “Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.”

In this report, you’ll be able to see the average time on page and bounce rate of each piece of content on your site.

Two metrics will help you diagnose this problem.

In general, your content is pretty darn good if you can achieve the following numbers:

• average time on page over 2 minutes
• bounce rate under 60%

However, if you’re producing really long content (like I do), you should aim for even better numbers.

The point of checking these numbers is to make sure your readers enjoy reading your content, which is a signal of its quality.

If you see that you’ve met these standards for almost all your posts, it’s a sign you have the problem of poor content promotion.

The solution to getting the traffic you deserve: If you have good content but poor traffic, you need to re-evaluate your promotion strategy.

You might be faltering in two ways:

1. You’re not promoting your content enough.
2. Your promotional tactics aren’t effective.

For the first one, it comes down to priorities.

If you’ve found a way to get traffic to your content, spend more time and effort on it whether it’s forum posting, advertising, email outreach, or whatever other tactic that has worked for you on a small scale.

If you have a low level of traffic, any tactic that brings in a bit of traffic will work if you devote enough time to it.

You should spend at least as much time promoting your content as you do creating it. In most cases, you should spend more.

If that means you need to create less content, so be it. Put quality over quantity.

Now, if your promotional tactics aren’t effective, that’s a completely different problem.

That means you need to spend time learning new tactics and testing them out until you find some that are effective for your business.

As always, I have a few resources that will teach you just about everything you need to know to do this:

• The Day After: 11 Things to Do After You Publish a Post
• How to Use Advanced Content Promotion Strategies
• The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing: Content Promotion

4. You’re doing everything on your own

There is no sustainable way to do everything by yourself once your business reaches a certain size.

If you do try to, three things can happen:

• you get burnt out
• you can’t keep up, and your business suffers large setbacks
• you have to limit your growth

All these cases are obviously bad. And if your current content marketing system relies on you doing everything, it’s broken.

It is not set up for long term success, no matter how passionate, persistent, and intelligent you are.

If this sounds like you, and you feel that one of those three scenarios is happening (or has already happened), you need to take a step back.

Know when it’s better to get help: You wear a lot of different hats as a content marketer.

Content marketing requires a lot of different skills:

• research
• design
• copywriting
• editing
• promotion
• PR
• link building

And more…

Unless you’re an extremely rare exception, you’re not amazing at all those things.

Like most marketers, you’re probably good to great at a few of them and mediocre at the rest.

By all means, you can improve those weaknesses, or you can get help.

When I tell business owners and marketers to spend more on freelancers (or additional employees), they always resist, saying something along the lines of:

I can’t afford to do that.

They’re right and wrong at the same time.

With their current content marketing system, they can’t afford it. Their growth and results can’t justify increased spending.

But what they don’t realize is that by doing everything themselves, they are costing themselves a huge amount of money.

Hiring good freelancers almost always makes you more money than it costs for a few main reasons:

• they’re better than you - instead of struggling with one of your weak skills, like design, you can hire a professional graphic designer who spends all their time improving that one skill.
• it frees up your time - with help, you have more time to spend on the parts of content marketing you excel at. For example, I love creating content, so I do that. Getting help with other things allows me to write several posts a week, and you can’t do that if you’re doing everything else too.
• it minimizes catastrophes - if you get sick and you’re doing everything on your own, everything shuts down, which is extremely costly. When you have help, others can fill in to keep everything running smoothly.

I really hope that makes sense.

When you hire intelligently, you make even more money, AND you’ll get to do the work you enjoy the most.

How do you hire intelligently? I’ll be honest, hiring the right people isn’t easy. If you hire people who aren’t professional, they might leave you hanging unexpectedly, which can mess up your content strategy.

My first big advice is to know exactly what you want.

Hire for a very specific position (e.g., copywriter, funnel expert, designer, etc.), and make your requirements very clear.

As an example, take a look at 3 job postings I posted on Quick Sprout in 2015:

You’ll notice that the main thing I look for, besides knowledge, is passion.

I like working with people who love their work and spend a large part of their lives doing it. These are the most likely people to act like professionals and always deliver on their promises.

As long as you return the favor by paying promptly and treating them like professionals, they will make your life a lot easier.

One more thing that you absolutely must do when making hiring decisions is to talk to the person you are considering to hire (phone, Skype, or whatever you prefer).

Get a sense of their expectations so you can determine if they’re a good fit for what you can offer.

Sometimes, you’ll get a gut feeling telling you that you should hire a particular person; other times your gut will tell you to pass. More often than not, that gut feeling is right, so trust your instincts.

Finally, don’t hire all at once.

Once those marketers and business owners see how hiring could actually help them, they often hire too many people too fast.

When you’re planning on working with someone long-term, rushing is the biggest mistake you can make.

Start with one position.

Even if you find a great person to hire, chances are you’ll still do a few things wrong. When you start with just one position, it gives you a chance to learn from your mistakes and then apply those lessons to the next person.

Slowly transition to the business structure you want instead of trying to make it happen overnight.

5. You’re getting views and subscribers but no sales

One of the biggest reasons why business owners think that content marketing isn’t very effective is that they don’t know how to turn it into sales.

They do a good job when it comes to creating high quality content, but then they expect that their readers would spontaneously start buying their products.

Or they don’t want to upset their audience by selling something to them.

If you relate to either of these types of people, you need to understand that the whole point of content marketing, like most other types of marketing, is to increase profits (sales).

Without any return from content marketing, how are you supposed to justify the investment in more content? You can’t.

Additionally, why would you feel bad about selling a product that will genuinely help your customers?

If you’ve been having success with your content, you understand your reader very well. No one else is in as good a position to create a useful product for them as you are.

So if you don’t have a product to sell, get one.

The more interesting problem to diagnose is when you have poor sales of an actual product despite getting a good amount of traffic.

Possible diagnosis #1 – Your conversion funnel needs work: All products have conversion funnels; some just aren’t very well defined.

A conversion funnel simply describes the path that a customer takes to become an actual customer from being a first time visitor:

Yes, there are many different paths in each step, but you should be able to define the main channels they pass through.

For example, “visitor > email subscriber > sales pages > customer.”

Once you have your funnel defined, you can use analytics to see where they are dropping off in this funnel.

You can create a sales funnel in Google Analytics or use some more advanced sales analytics software like Kissmetrics.

If you’re not sure how to build an effective conversion funnel, I have an in-depth guide that will show you how to.

Possible diagnosis #2 – You don’t have product-market fit: Now, if you actually have a good funnel but you can’t figure out why barely anyone is buying your products, you likely have a poor product-market fit.

Your product-market fit is basically a measure of how well your product meets the needs of your audience.

If no one is buying, it means one of two things:

• your product sucks
• you’re targeting it to the wrong audience

Be honest with yourself about your product: is it really good enough to sell? I rarely see this problem with content marketers, however, since they tend to give as much value as possible.

The more common problem is creating the wrong product for your audience.

For example, if you had a blog catered to SEO beginners, would it make sense to try to sell an advanced technical SEO crawler to them?

No, it wouldn’t. Instead, a basic rank tracking tool or email outreach tool would be much more useful for them at the moment.

It’s not that your product isn’t good—it’s that your audience doesn’t have a need for it.

Instead, you should have been writing content that attracts experienced SEOs rather than beginners. Then, you’d be selling the right product to the right audience.

To fix this problem, you either need to create a different product or pivot your content marketing strategy to target the right audience for your product.

6. No other bloggers are willing to help you out

The final big symptom of broken content marketing is that everything seems to be an uphill battle.

Then, you see guys like Brian Dean who start a blog from nothing and turn it into a leading blog in their niche within just a few years.

A big reason for Brian’s success was that other influencers in the marketing and SEO niche loved his work and shared it with their audiences.

Symptom: No influencers are willing to mention you or any of your content, no matter how many of them you interact with and send emails to.

In this scenario, a few different areas of your content marketing might be broken.

Possible diagnosis #1 – Your content isn’t unique enough: You have to understand things from the perspective of a blogger with an audience.

They receive dozens of requests from other bloggers every day asking them to look at their content.

Almost all of it looks exactly the same.

It’s not bad, but it’s not unique.

When Brian started publishing his content, people took a look at it and said, “Wow.”

He created new SEO tactics and presented them better than almost everyone else in the niche.

Your takeaway: your content needs to be exceptional if you want other influencers to share your work.

The best incentive to share your work in particular is if you’re the only one who has written about something, so be unique.

Possible diagnosis #2 – You need a better outreach approach: This ties in with your promotional efforts, which we went over earlier.

One of the biggest challenges for you is to get an influencer to take a look at your content in the first place.

Your content may actually be excellent, but if you’re coming off as another blogger who just wants something, your email will be deleted.

How do you solve this?

It’s a complex subject, but the first thing you want to do is stop approaching these bloggers as people you want to do something for you.

Instead, approach them to try to build a relationship. Let them know that you enjoy learning from them and would like to become their peer in the future.

Don’t just shove a link in their faces the first time you email them. Try to research a mutual connection and send a few emails over a few weeks with no objective other than to develop a deeper relationship.

You’ll be surprised how much of an effect that little change can have.

Conclusion

It’s no secret that content marketing can produce great results. But at the same time, the majority of marketers are not having success with it.

It’s because their content marketing approach is broken.

I’ve shown you the 6 most common symptoms of broken content marketing as well as what you need to do to fix them.

Now, it’s your turn to honestly evaluate your results and determine if there’s a weakness that you can fix.

As always, if you have any questions at all, ask me in a comment below, giving me as much detail as you can.

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The 8 Most Important Skills for Content Promotion (and How to Learn Them)

The bar has been raised.

Creating great content isn’t enough anymore if you want your content marketing to be successful.

Today, you need to not only create that content but also promote it.

Many marketers have started to wake up to this fact, which is a good thing.

However, just because they recognize that promotion is important doesn’t mean they know how to do it effectively.

In my experience, only a small percentage of marketers possess the skills that make them effective promoters as well.

The big problem is that if you don’t have these skills, you’ll struggle to learn how to promote effectively.

The reason for this is that there isn’t much help out there.

When it comes to creating great content, you can study the content your favorite blogs publish and attempt to replicate it.

But it’s next to impossible to understand all the work that goes on behind the scenes to promote that content unless the creators are generous enough to share it with you.

It takes a special kind of marketer—the cream of the crop—to learn both from resources (like blog posts) and experience.

These are the complete content marketers that get the results everyone else wants.

Honestly, I don’t know if you’re one of them—maybe not yet.

The good news is that you can become one of them if you’re willing to learn new skills.

In this post, I’ll explain in detail the eight most important skills needed for effective content promotion.

If you recognize all these skills in your own work, you’re probably doing pretty well.

If you see you’re lacking a few of these skills, I’m going to show you exactly how to acquire and develop them.

Are you ready to put your skills to the test?

If so, let’s dive in. 

1. The best content marketers all have this skill…

This first skill might be the most important.

Critical thinking.

As a marketer who is still finding your way, you’ll be spending a lot of time learning about different tactics you can use to promote your content.

These might be email outreach tactics, link building tactics, or social media tactics…you get the picture.

But not all marketers who try a specific tactic will succeed with it. You probably know that already from firsthand experience.

It’s not because of luck or skill. Although these factors may play a role, the main factor that determines how successful you are with a tactic is fit.

Some tactics work in some niches and situations better than in others.

If you blindly try different tactics, you’ll have some success but not as much as you’d like.

The really good marketers, or the ones who seem to “get it” really quickly, are the ones who can critically think about a tactic.

They don’t just read a blog post and think, “This is pretty cool; I’d better try it!”

Instead, they think about questions like these:

• Why does this tactic work?
• What niches would it work best in? why?
• Will this work for my content?
• Can I can tweak it in any way to make it even more effective?
• How can I test this?

Understanding a tactic before using it is different from just applying it blindly. I hope the reason behind those questions is clear.

Once you truly understand the tactics you learn, all of a sudden you are able to see where they fit together in an overall strategy.

The good news is that no one is born with critical thinking skills—these skills are developed.

And even better news is that you probably already have some, but maybe just need to consciously use them more often.

Regardless of where you are, let’s go through a complete example of how you would approach a tactic in real life.

Examining infographics with critical thinking: Here’s the situation: you come across an article I wrote about creating and promoting infographics.

Of course, your first reaction is excitement when I explain how infographics can be used to get thousands of visits.

And they can, for sure. But not in all situations.

After you read the post, you want to ask yourself the same questions I listed above.

Q: Why does this tactic work?

Infographics work because they are attractive, easy to consume, and can convey complex information quickly.

On top of that, really good ones stand out and get extra attention.

Because infographics are so shareable, you’ll get a ton of traffic if you can get the initial views to them. Providing an embed code underneath the infographic makes it easy to share (and gets you extra links).

Q: What niches would it work best in? Why?

Infographics are an image-based type of content. Therefore, they probably work best in image dominated niches. Think clothing, design, food, and even marketing to a degree.

The most important factor mentioned was that the topic needs to be interesting, which means that viewers need to care about it.

In “boring” niches like heating or bug removal, which are not that interesting to people (in general), it’s going to be tough to get the infographic to spread.

Q: Can I tweak it in any way to make it even more effective?

The reason why the effectiveness of infographics seems to be declining is that they’re becoming more commonplace.

So, if I can come up with a way to make mine more unique, I should be able to get better results. Perhaps, I can make a gifographic instead.

Q: How can I test this?

To test this tactic fairly, I would need to produce at least 5-10 professionally designed infographics.

This means I’ll likely need a budget of around $2,000-4,000.

I will then determine its effectiveness by looking at a few key metrics:

• cost per subscriber
• cost per link
• cost per visit

Then, I will compare those metrics to the metrics of other tactics I’ve used to determine if I should produce more infographics.

End questions. In reality, you’d probably want to ask yourself even more questions.

How many readers of this blog or any other marketing blog honestly do this after reading about a tactic?

While I have some of the most active readers I’ve ever seen, which is great, I would guess far fewer than half of the readers who read a post do this.

If you want to develop critical thinking skills, you simply need to practice thinking. Ask yourself hard questions and try to get the best answers you can.

It’s okay if they’re not perfect; you’ll get better over time.

2. How far can you dig?

One question that I get all the time is: “How long does it take you to write your posts?”

Truthfully, it doesn’t take that long. Typically, I can do the actual writing in about 3 hours plus some time for editing.

But creating a post takes longer than that. It also takes a lot of research. Some posts, of course, will require more research than others.

Research is one of the most undervalued skills in a content marketer. Research is definitely important when it comes to creating content, but it is probably even more important when it comes to content promotion.

A lot of modern day promotion is based on email outreach, and it’s important you understand some basic numbers.

Most effective tactics will have a conversion rate of 5-10%. That means that for every 100 emails you send, 5 to 10 will end up in links. The actual percentage will depend on a lot of factors, e.g., your niche, copywriting skills, and quality of content.

Keep in mind that the conversion rate I quoted above is for the best tactics. Most tactics will have a lower conversion rate.

What does this mean in terms of research?

It means that you’ll have to send a ton of emails as part of your promotional campaigns. You’ll want to get at least 20-30 links to the content you’ve spent a few hundred dollars on creating.

In most cases, that means you’re sending 400+ emails, sometimes thousands.

Over time, that number won’t seem that big, but at first, I understand why that would seem like a ton.

In reality, there are two big components to this:

• sending the actual emails and
• researching hundreds or thousands of good prospects

The research usually takes more time than sending the emails, at least until you establish key relationships in your niche.

Since you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of data points, it’s crucial that you work efficiently.

This usually means working with tools and knowing how to use them effectively.

For example, you could manually search for resource pages to target for a link. You could probably create a list of 100 in an hour or so.

Or you could simply find a similar type of content, plug it in a tool such as Ahrefs or Majestic, and have a list of hundreds or thousands of targets in seconds.

Work smarter, not harder (when possible).

3. Are you able to determine what is and isn’t important?

By now, you understand pretty well what promoting consists of.

And to be honest, it’s an insane amount of work.

You could easily hire someone (or multiple marketers) just to do promotion for your content.

In most cases, you can’t do that.

Instead, you need to find a way to balance content creation with content promotion while running other parts of your business as well.

Introducing the 80/20 rule: The skill I’m focusing on in this section is your ability to identify which of your actions produce the most results.

There’s a fairly established rule called the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle).

It states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. And it applies to just about everything.

One of the things it applies to is content promotion:

• 80% of your traffic will come from 20% of the links
• 80% of your links and traffic will come from 20% of your promotion tactics

In almost all cases, if a sample size is large enough, these numbers will be fairly accurate. They may differ by 5-10% in each direction, but the effect remains the same.

Using the 80/20 rule to eliminate fluff: The reason why I showed you this rule is because it’s possibly the most effective way to save a lot of time without losing much in the way of results.

In fact, you can often get better results in less time once you understand how the rule works in your case.

By breaking down your efforts and results, you can determine which of your efforts are contributing the most to your results.

Then, you can cut out all the rest. Why spend 80% of your efforts on only 20% of the returns you want?

Instead, use that extra time you freed up to double or triple down on that 20% of activity that actually produces results.

Here’s what it might look like in practice…

Track all your efforts and results, then eliminate waste: You never want to guess what is and isn’t effective.

Instead, start by tracking what you do to promote content, how much time you spend on it, and what you get in return for that effort.

Tracking time is pretty straightforward, but you’ll have to track your other metrics using tools such as Google Analytics (for traffic) and Ahrefs (for links).

Here are some hypothetical results:

The traffic per hour value is calculated by dividing the traffic from that activity by the time spent on the activity.

I used traffic as the main goal for this promotional campaign, but yours could be links, social shares, or whatever else you’re looking for.

Finally, you can calculate the percentage of results value by dividing the traffic per hour value by the total “traffic per hour” amount (e.g., 300/1466 for email outreach). This is a fair comparison since they are all based on a “per hour” basis.

What we see is that almost all of the results come from email outreach and emailing subscribers (about 88%). Those two activities take up 5.5 out of 11.5 hours of effort, or a little under 50% of the total effort.

This also illustrates that it doesn’t matter if there’s a perfect 80/20 ratio. You just want to see which activities are producing the least from your efforts.

In this case, you could cut out over half of your effort and lose only about 12% of the results, a great trade off.

Even if this time was spent just on more email outreach, you could take your total traffic from 2,500 to about 3,500 (a 40% increase).

If you wanted to spend more time emailing your subscribers, you could do it indirectly by spending the extra time trying to get more subscribers. This could be done by creating lead magnets or by employing other tactics to try to improve your conversion rate.

The bottom line is that you need to be efficient.

Find any effort that isn’t producing results (like screwing around on social media), and cut it out. You don’t have time to waste if you want to be a good content promoter.

4. Social skills on the Internet?

Marketers come from all sorts of backgrounds.

A large portion of the new generation of Internet marketers was attracted to the profession because it offered a chance to make money without truly interacting with people.

Or at least that’s what they thought.

If you want to be a legitimate and successful marketer, you need to have at least basic social skills.

You need to know how to communicate with co-workers, influencers, and your readers in a way that doesn’t seem awkward or manipulative.

This comes down to basic human interaction, especially in emails.

A lot of promotional success comes down to building relationships with people, and if you can’t hold a conversation, in any medium, it’s going to be tough to succeed.

Most people have these basic social skills, but if you think yours can be improved, read Ramit Sethi’s The Ultimate Guide to Social Skills, which is by far the most useful guide on the subject I’ve come across.

5. The ability to care about others will take you far

It’s a harsh truth.

No other website owner truly cares about your content.

So, when you email them asking them to take a look at it and give you a link of some sort, it’s tough to get a positive response.

That’s why good marketers never just ask for things.

Instead, they provide value upfront.

They do something nice for an influencer, and most people return the favor. It’s called the rule of reciprocity.

That’s a very simple concept that every marketer should know.

What really sets good marketers apart, however, is empathy.

Empathy just means that you’re good at viewing things from the perspective of others and understanding how they feel.

It’s an important skill in all parts of marketing, but especially promotion.

It’s another one of those skills that help you understand when certain tactics should be used.

For example, consider broken link building.

The idea is that you find broken links on someone’s website and then you let them know about the broken links and suggest yours as a replacement.

It’s a completely valid tactic in some cases…

Empathy allows you to understand what people care about.

The guy managing a resource page in your niche? He probably cares about keeping the page as up-to-date and useful as possible.

Why? Because the whole page is dedicated to links that help the visitor. If those links are dead, it has a big impact on the usefulness of the page.

Here’s an example of what one might look like.

What about the guy running a small blog? He also probably cares about broken links.

What about me? If someone emailed me telling me that I have broken links on Quick Sprout, how much would I care?

To be honest, not very much. I have hundreds of articles on Quick Sprout, so it’s inevitable that I’ll have a few dead links here and there.

I realize that dead links aren’t good for readers, but it’s honestly a small concern compared to all the other work I currently have to do for the site (and my other sites).

So, when people email me about dead links (they do quite often), they are not going to get my attention.

They’ve failed to understand the value I place on the broken links.

The reciprocity principle can work on just about anyone, but first, you need to give the other person something they value.

Can you develop empathy? I’m of the opinion that you can develop empathy just like any other skill.

However, it’s probably the most difficult skill to teach because I can’t just give you a guide or offer a course on it.

Instead, the only way to get better at it is to consciously put yourself in someone else’s shoes as often as you can.

Try to guess what they care about, and if possible, confirm it by having a conversation with them.

My best advice would be to pick five people you know every day, and answer questions like these for all of them:

• “What are the things I value most in my life?”
• “How much do I care about my professional life?”
• “How often do I try to do something nice just to try to be a good person?”
• “How loyal am I to my friends?”

You’ll probably have to do a little bit of Internet snooping for each person to answer these questions. Hopefully, you’ll begin to notice that you start thinking from another person’s perspective automatically when you’re trying to contact someone to promote your content.

6. A sloppy marketer is an unproductive one

Even though this article isn’t directly about promotion strategies and tactics, you’ve still gotten a good glimpse at what effective promotion looks like.

One of those things was the scale that you need to achieve.

A single piece of content may often have an entire campaign created around it, consisting of hundreds or thousands of emails.

Mix in a few different tactics, and there is a ton of data you need to keep track of.

This skill is a basic one: organization.

If someone asks you why they should hire you, they won’t be impressed if you tell them you have amazing organization skills. That’s because it’s expected.

If you can’t keep track of what you’ve done and what you have to do, there’s no way you’ll be able to run an efficient promotional campaign.

I’ve gone into it in great detail in the past, but for now, understand that there are three main components to organization as a marketer:

1. Attitude - You need to want to be as productive as possible for yourself, your boss (if you have one), and your readers. This means you understand the importance of organization and put in the effort required.
2. Technology - I write a lot about different tools you can use to be a more effective marketer. There’s a reason for this. Tools are a key part of working efficiently and staying organized. Even basic tools such as Google Docs and Trello go a long way when it comes to keeping track of things.

3. Adapting - Staying organized is a commitment. You need to commit to staying up-to-date with relevant tools. You have to commit to keeping track of all your work, even on days when you feel a bit lazy. When something new is added to the promotional campaign, you need to find a way to fit it into your organizational structure.

When you have thousands of emails to send and keep track of, you need to have an organizational system in place.

I realize it’s not fun, but it ensures that you reach all your targets and that you don’t do anything stupid like email the same person twice asking for links.

7. Will your content promotion be effective in the future?

A sign of a good content marketer isn’t how much they know.

That’s because in a field such as marketing, knowledge goes stale quickly.

What worked even a few years ago doesn’t work now.

What’s more important is that you are continuously learning.

One part of that is reading other marketers’ blogs. Since you’re here, I’m guessing you have that covered.

Even just reading one post a day adds up quickly.

I suggest using a tool such as Feedly so that you don’t waste time monitoring when posts come out (or just become an email subscriber of your favorite blogs).

A good portion of marketers do that first part.

What they don’t do is experiment.

Marketing may not be a field of science, but you constantly need to test different tactics and strategies.

You need to be able to quantify what does and what does not work effectively.

For the most part, this involves split-testing.

For example, you might want to determine the effectiveness of sending an initial email to someone without asking for a link in that first email.

To do this, you would send some emails that did ask for a link right away and some that didn’t.

Then, once you had a valid sample size, you could compare the results.

From there, you could continue to test different approaches.

It’s crucial to test on a regular basis because all tactics will become less effective over time. It’s up to you to try to find more effective tactics before they become “ruined” by all the other marketers out there.

If you’re new to testing, it can seem intimidating, but it gets simple once you know what to do. Here are some guides to testing that will walk you through the entire process:

• How To Run Your First A/B Test To Find A Winning Variation
• A/B Testing For Beginners: 70 Resources to Get You Started
• 50 Split Testing Ideas (You Can Run Today!)

8. Can you lead AND follow?

Content promotion campaigns can take many different forms.

One component that often changes is the role you have to take.

Sometimes, you’ll do all the work yourself. That’s pretty straightforward—you just do things the way you like.

But you might be part of a marketing team and will likely need to follow instructions.

Even more common, you might find yourself having to lead. I say it’s more common because even if you do all your marketing yourself, you can start hiring freelancers to help you with certain parts of promotion.

Or you might want to hire content creators so that you can spend more time on promotion.

Here are a few good guides on managing help effectively:

• How to Manage Your Freelancers into 2016 and Beyond
• 10 Simple Tips for Managing Freelancers
• How to Manage Your Freelance Content Providers

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, content creation is incredibly important.

However, as far as the overall content marketing effectiveness goes, content promotion is often more important.

Furthermore, there’s a smaller percentage of marketers who know how to effectively promote content, so it really separates them from the rest.

If you want to be the best content promoter you can be, you need to develop all of the skills I went over in this article.

Take a minute to honestly assess your skill level in each area. Then, come up with a plan to improve it, but focus on your biggest weaknesses first.

If you’d like to share your results or you have any questions about the skills, I’d love to hear from you in a comment below.

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