Understanding Online Distribution

Some brands will pay millions for the kind of exposure a few individuals have gathered with absolutely zero investment. The key to online distribution is understanding that you either use what you have, what you can borrow, or what you can buy. Owned, earned, paid distribution, or a combination of them. It all boils down to those three.

Grumpy Cat was lucky enough that her initial followers spread her story through an incredible number of online channels outside her control (earned) at a very fast pace. A few years (and licensing deals) later, Grumpy Cat is now resorting to paid online and offline distribution to spread her story even further. The team behind the brand has also begun creating owned channels (within their control) like a blog, website, and online store. Check out grumpycats.com to follow this story as it unfolds.

As you think about your own content, consider how these three types of distribution come into play. Table 14-1 presents a synopsis.

To secure maximum reach for your content pieces, you will want to consider how each of these types of distribution could play a role. Imagine you just finished producing an infographic about wedding planning:

Infographic

20 Hacks for a Budget-Friendly Wedding

Owned distribution

Share on our social media channels, blog, and site banner

Earned distribution

Reach out to bloggers and influencers in the wedding space to let them know that this could be valuable for their audiences

Paid distribution

Launch a paid boost campaign in Facebook and a sponsored pin on Pinterest

Granted, you might not use all three types for every single piece of content you share. It is a helpful exercise, however, to understand the kinds of channels at your disposal.

How Can I Improve My Chances of Achieving Massive Distribution?

Table 14-2 lists some strategies and systems that you can put in place to secure an increasingly large distribution platform for your content. Specifically, it is going to take thinking about those three types of channels and investing in growing them.

The problem with many brands is that they expect all of these building blocks to take care of themselves. You can’t just expect the world to be equally excited about your incredible new launch—at least not out of the blue. Instead, you should be actively seeking and building relationships that make earned distribution not only possible but impactful. Similarly, try to maintain a plan (either paid or PR) to permanently grow your social audiences. Every new follower who joins your online communities is making your owned channels slightly larger. Don’t just create profiles and expect everyone to come. Always assume that they are busy, it is noisy, or they have no idea who you are. Those three assumptions can go a long way.

Lastly, don’t underestimate the impact of smart paid distribution. Even with the rise of ad-blocking technology, online advertising continues to evolve and provide more relevant placement opportunities. When considering advertising, go beyond the concept of display ads and understand that there is a wide spectrum of opportunities that look nothing like an annoying badge, such as the following:

• Influencer marketing can help spread your message naturally among a fitting audience.

• Sponsorships can provide unique opportunities for audience expansion when designed strategically.

• Paid search can help serve your content where it is most needed and appreciated.

I Just Published New Content—What Now?

You hit publish. Tumbleweeds. Emptiness. Nada.

It’s the ultimate struggle of every content manager: the views are not coming in. More often than not, the silence around our pieces is entirely our fault. We have not made a conscious effort to integrate distribution in the early stages of our content planning, laying the grounds for pieces that actually are seen and shared. In other words: if you have not planned for distribution, don’t expect it.

Content pieces that are ideally suited for massive distribution are often designed for such exposure. Their structure reflects ideal patterns for shareability, headlines are carefully crafted for viral lift, and supporting media is attached to boost engagement. Everything is put in place to improve reach. Chapter 8 goes over some of the key factors for high shareability, including how content actually must be prepared for distribution rather than bulldozed into it. At this point, we will review different tactics to make the best use of owned, earned, and paid channels.

Owned Channels: Building a Powerful Platform

The unifying thread behind all owned channels is the fact that you have control over what is shared, when, and how. You get to shape the narrative and select how it is visually represented in an ocean of similar content. Many social channels are even allowing you to target subsets of your audience, opening the door for even more relevant messaging. Needless to say, growing your owned channels is perhaps the most worthwhile investment you can make in the long term: they are yours to use and optimize.

As outlined earlier, these are some of the most common content distribution channels owned by brands:

• Email lists

• Blog

• Website space

• Owned social media

Let us look at each of these in more detail, analyzing some of the tactics to secure even greater distribution. I will also share inspiring prompts to help you begin with these channels.

Optimizing Your Blog for Distribution

There is so much more you can do besides hitting publish. When strategically designed, blog pages can contribute greatly to your distribution platform. When you begin seeing the blog section (or whatever you call the content area of your site) as a distribution channel, these needs will become apparent:

• Your pages should be optimized for users who consume content from RSS readers like Feedly. RSS stands for rich site summary, a popular format to syndicate web content that is frequently updated. Think blog entries, news headlines, audio, video—RSS readers compile new content pieces generated by different online outlets. Many content creators use them to stay up to date with what other brands are publishing. Ensure that your content pages’ code is properly set up for those experiences.

• Properly structured content pages can secure strong positions in search. Revisit Chapter 13 for a reminder of how on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works. After you have improved the pages’ actual content, mark up your articles’ code with structured data, providing details such as headline, images, publish date, and description. Search engines use this structured data to gather vital information about the content page.

• Your content pages’ code should be prepared to send valuable information to social platforms. This information is summarized in visually appealing snippets that improve your reach, click-through, and engagement in those channels. Optimizing for this type of distribution also will require special code. Some popular schemes for social markup include Open Graph (compatible with Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and many others), Twitter Cards, and Rich Pins.

• Make social sharing remarkably easy. Test the location of your sharing button, prominence, and size. When we discuss earned distribution channels further along in this chapter, you will understand how this affects referrals.

Seeing Website Spaces as Content Real Estate

Your website is a destination for users in their journey of satisfying wants and needs. High-quality content is uniquely positioned to provide value. Why, then, do we often hide content, restricting it to a particular section of our site? Serving content across the entire user experience can prove advantageous both for your pieces’ performance and your conversion funnel as a whole—and sometimes those two are one and the same. As we have seen repeatedly, content can also be the product.

Here are some website spaces where you could consider offering relevant content pieces:

Product page sidebars

Can you connect instructional content pieces with the products for which they are most pertinent?

Footers

When users navigate to the bottom of the page, is there an option to link to a valuable piece of content?

Top banners

Can you invite users to visit your content in prominent rotating or static banners throughout the page?

Home page section

How are you letting visitors to your home page know that there is a content hub they can look at?

Checkout flow

Can content be integrated in the purchase process to close the sale?

Shopping cart

Would a buyer be interested in reading information around the product he just purchased?

Owned Social Media

The reason I am adding the word owned here is that there are many kinds of social exposure. You could pay for social reach, earn it via word of mouth, push for it from your own profiles, or use a combination of the three. The mechanisms behind online social activity make it very difficult to detach the exposure you are paying for from the one you end up getting: there are thousands of interactions taking place in between. Many brands report a rise in organic (follower-led) activity whenever they ramp up their paid content boosts. Our goal in this section, however, is to focus on improving the exposure that comes as a result of your own, unpaid social pushes. How can you better use owned social media to distribute content?

The social space can get awfully overwhelming awfully quickly. If we are to take advantage of the power of social distribution, it is crucial to have a structured approach that facilitates decision making. The sections that follow lay out a 10-step approach that I have seen work time and again.

Earned Channels: Borrowing a Powerful Platform

Earned channels are a type of distribution that you will never be able to buy or fully control. And those two factors in and of themselves make it the most credible type of diffusion your stories can get online. Earned distribution hinges on your ability to create top-quality content and nurture strategic relationships. It will take hard work and patience as well as short-term proactivity and long-term vision. After they’re secured, however, earned channels will appeal to your audience like your controlled or bought channels never could.

Channels that can’t be controlled are inherently trustworthy. One expects to find impartial, natural conversations around topics that have not been imposed from the outside. The fact that these topics have not been imposed, however, does not mean that they can’t be suggested. And that, dear reader, is key. Earned channels might be outside of your control, but pitching their owners is not.

Put simply, one brand’s owned channel is another brand’s earned channel. Your partner’s social media profiles are owned by them and earned by you whenever they agree to share your content. Public forums, discussion boards, and review sections operate differently in the sense that they are shared spaces with little or no supervision. Nonetheless, you can pitch influential users who have reached a level of authority within those spaces. They own that position. Again, it is about earning your way into someone else’s owned spaces. As long as you remember this, there are no limits to what you can accomplish with a thorough outreach strategy.

This section will review a few common types of earned content distribution and how you can take advantage of them:

• Brand and influencer outreach

• Organic social sharing

• Reviews and ratings

• Public relations

Exercise: The Content Partnership Challenge

Enough reading for now. Let’s jump into action and seal an incredible content partnership. This exercise is an outreach challenge. In the next hour, you will send out five emails to propose content collaborations, and here is how you’ll go about it:

10 minutes

Fill out the following chart with five brands you would be ideally positioned to partner with to produce a content piece:

Prompt	Name of the brand
A brand that sells a complementary service to your audience
A brand that sells a complementary product to your audience
A brand that is part of your client base that has a large audience
An event that your audience is likely to attend
A nonprofit brand that supports members of your audience

20 minutes

Spend four minutes designing a title for an article that each of the five brands would be incredibly excited to coproduce. Answer these questions as you brainstorm:

• How does this brand win? Can we find a way to help them win while winning too?

• What kind of information does this brand need to share in order to win? Are there any topics that we both need to share?

• How does this brand become a thought leader in its space? Are there any spaces, events, or campaigns that we could cohost to expand our thought leadership?

20 minutes

Find one contact email for each of the five brands. Look out for roles like “content editor,” “content manager,” “partnerships manager,” “head of partnerships,” and “head of content.”

10 minutes

Time to send out those emails! Here is a handy template that you can adapt to your needs—Mad Libs style:

How to Stimulate Organic Social Sharing

The owned social distribution we analyzed a few paragraphs ago is just one part of the story. The other part is what happens when individual sharers, under no one’s direct control, decide that your content is worth a share. Social networks like Facebook have said openly that they will be rewarding those kinds of shares significantly moving forward. To improve feed relevance, Facebook will begin de-prioritizing messages that are more commercial in nature (like those coming from business pages) and displaying stories from family and friends more prominently. This isn’t something brands like to hear, but it is something we all need to adapt to quickly. So, how can you encourage that type of organic sharing?

It all comes down to your content’s design. And by design, I am not only referring to visuals. Consider your entire content piece’s structure as you optimize for social sharing:

• Insert clear calls to action inviting people to share this piece in their channels

• Highlight specific takeaway messages (e.g., Tweetables) that are easily shareable

• Make your social sharing buttons prominent and user-friendly

• Set up the markup in your content pages in a way that social sites can pull rich snippets when users try to share on their own

Answer these questions as honestly as you can and proceed to make any necessary fixes.

How to Encourage Reviews and Referrals

Another way to earn credible spaces for your content is securing more reviews and referrals in third-party sites. Because these external content hubs are perceived as impartial and outside of your control, they are ideally positioned to assist discovery. Imagine someone is looking at a series of answers to their question in Quora and suddenly runs into another user suggesting your blog or a piece of your content. Picture the same situation taking place in a platform like ProductHunt. Perhaps someone heard your podcast or read your ebook and decided to alert others about it. Yes, we would all love for these things to happen naturally—and they often do. But there are also actions you can take to improve your chances:

• Reach out to influential commenters, reviewers, or thought leaders. Offer up the content piece you would like them to talk about.

• If your content is the product, offer it for free to a select group of ideal reviewers.

• Embed a gated-content piece within an article that unlocks only with a social share (e.g., Pay with a Tweet).

• If your content lives next to products, launch an affiliate program where partners can also earn if the users they drive to your content end up purchasing something.

Public Relations

All of the aforementioned activities were public relations moves. In this section, however, I want to bring your attention to more media-focused distribution efforts. Getting your content featured or mentioned in media outlets is also a matter of outreach. After all, many reporters need your message as much as you need their medium. The world of publishing never stops, and I have not met the first reporter who isn’t open to learning about new stories. Fortunately, there are now many online reporter networks where you can pitch content ideas to relevant outlets. Examples of such networks include HARO (Help a Reporter Out), Media Kitty, and Muck Rack. Direct email is also a common way to contact reporters.

Paid Channels: Buying into a Powerful Platform

If you are a big fan of tight control, immediacy, and traceable ROI, paid channels are for you. Because you are essentially buying into another brand’s powerful platform, there is less uncertainty with regard to the final outcome of your efforts. They control the channel, but you control what is shown—your payment has allowed you that much. Let us examine some of the most common ways to distribute content via paid channels.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

Whenever you can’t negotiate a win–win partnership that involves no cash, ask your desired influencer what her fee structure looks like. She will usually be able to send a media kit, together with all the information you need to make your decision. You want to confirm that the promised exposure or engagement corresponds with the size of their platform. Again, with paid distribution you are buying into another brand’s owned channels.

Aside from the tentative impact in terms of content metrics, you want to verify that this influencer does not represent a departure from your brand’s values, voice, or vision. It is very easy to be swayed by numbers and later disappointed by lack of alignment. Any successful brand partnership involves two entities that agree on a set of essential principles.