Is there anything worse than spending hours and hours on a certain blog post, only to see it crash and burn right in front of your eyes?
Writing for a living is hard. Why? – Well, because it has become insanely difficult to stimulate people to read your content. The competition is insanely high in almost every niche today, and the readers – well, they have evolved into something else.
As I already covered on this blog, latest research has shown that the average internet user has become quite impatient and sceptical about most things he reads online. He knows that he’s the one that runs the show now and that we, as businesses that compete for his valuable time and clicks, are obliged to blow his mind every five seconds. If we fail to do so, he won’t even consider sticking around to read our post from top to bottom.
Yeah, this kinda sucks.
But, before you start to ask yourself questions like “why should I even bother with adapting my business for the Web”, you should probably know that there’s a constant increase in the percentage of people who make a great living from what they do online.
Although the game has changed and the players competing for the same customers have multiplied, the Internet is still a pretty fertile ground for all sorts of different entrepreneurs. All you have to do is play by its rules, and I promise you, you’ll live to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
A lot of great content producers struggle to get their desired reader’s attention because they don’t really have a clear picture in their heads how to amplify their content before they even start writing it.
In my opinion, writing a great blog post that fails to get amplified is the same as finishing a marathon, only to find out that there’s no one waiting for you at the finish line with a bottle of water.
I don’t know about you, but when I write something for my company blog, I tend to invest my whole being into it. I spend hours and hours researching the Web for useful information before I even start to think about typing a single letter into my CMS.
First I gather all the info that I need, I sit down and think about how to combine that newly found data with my hands-on knowledge of that particular subject, and then I make an original and highly interesting blog post for my audience.
In my blog posts, there are no words that just end up there by accident. No. Every single one of them is there for a reason. I slave over them for hours and hours, carefully crafting each phrase.
Knowing how much work I invested into creating such a thing, I would rather commit suicide than see it go to waste.
Although now I have an active following on my blog and a respectable social media presence, when I first started, I struggled to get people to read my content.
There were numerous scenarios in my early blogging career where I would write a 2000+ word article, click “publish”, and see that only a handful of people have scanned it over.
No likes, no shares, no retweets, no comments – nothing. The horror.
That drove me crazy.
Everyone who writes content for a living knows just how depressing that can be. It’s enough to make even the most resilient of writers feel like calling it quits.
I know a lot of people who, even though they were excellent at what they do, completely lost all motivation for producing great content.
Before you get all discouraged and start to reevaluate yourself as a writer, you have to know that writing and publishing a blog post is only the tip of the iceberg.
In order to make your efforts here pay off, you have to get your blog post read by a large number of people, who could eventually be interested in your products and services. You to have to figure out how to promote your content and get people excited about your writing.
Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t really like to play around here. I want to know in advance that my content will be seen by my desired audience. Apart from that, before I even consider clicking “publish”, I want to know what my chances are on achieving real and measurable ROI, and reaching a specific number of potential users/sales/prospects.
That’s why content distribution networks play an important role in my content marketing strategy.
In order to help you speed up your content discovery process and get your writing in front of your desired audience, I have made a list of 3 great content discovery networks that you should start using immediately:
Outbrain
You’ve seen it on thousands of popular sites across the Web. It’s that “Seen Across The Web” and “You Might Also Like” window that appears below most of the content you read online.
Outbrain is probably the most popular content discovery platform on the Web. This content discovery network uses its content marketing modules to help all sorts of different Internet publishers increase their web traffic and discover new audiences.
Often abused and wrongfully used, over the years, Outbrain has been dragged through the mud, but only by people who used it as another ad platform.
How does it work? – Outbrain provides recommendations for several media types, including online, news, video, and mobile. Its sole purpose is to put paid links where readers are looking for something else to read.
Outbrain is definitely the largest of these type of platforms. It’s great for reaching insane numbers of impressions. This platform has great reach, loyal partners and very good relationships with everyone it comes in contact.
However, if you want to partner with it, it’s important to know that Outbrain’s revenue share terms with publishers are basically terrible.
They do a 60/40 revenue share with publishers and also charge publishers 10% of the revenue as a serving fee. Horrible, right?
Taboola
Killer tool for startups! Just like Outbrain, Taboola’s there to help all sorts of different Internet publishers increase their web traffic and discover new audiences. In a nutshell, both of these networks are the same in many ways, expect that Taboola is smaller but growing much faster than Outbrain.
Speaking from a technical point of view, Taboola is a much better platform than Outbrain.
StumbleUpon
This is my favorite from this bunch. I use it all the time to promote my content.
Why? – Well, because it’s insanely cheap, and there’s also a strong, unique community behind it. Today, StumbleUpon has more than 25 million registered users and over 60 million URLs in its index!
Amazing, right?As a content marketer, it would be pretty unwise to ignore these numbers.
As a content marketer who’s looking to quickly amplify his content, it would be pretty unwise for me to ignore these numbers.
For those who are not familiar with this brand name, allow me to explain to you what is StumbleUpon and how it works:
StumbleUpon is a website where people come to find content that they otherwise wouldn’t find on their own. It’s a web-based application that has an REDICUOLUSLY BIG database, filled with all sorts of content, classified by different topics.
How does it work? – When you sign up for StumbleUpon, the site will ask you a couple of definitive questions. It will give you an opportunity to pick a few categories that are of interest to you. Based on the topics you click and save in this phase of setting up your account, the site will direct you to web pages that have content that can be put in those categories.
Once you finish with a certain content that StumbleUpon digested for you, if you want to move on to another website, all you have to do is press the “stumble_upon” button, and a new address will instantly appear in front of your eyes.
Apart from the topics you’ve selected once you first logged onto this site, StumbeUpon will design some sort of a content digest based on the users that are similar to you, as well as things that their friends like, and hopefully deliver a unique, informative, and entertaining experience.
It’s like “channel surfing” for the web. It gives fast, visual recommendations similar to clicking your TV remote continuously to find something you like. It’s a great tool for those who like to research and encounter new things.
It’s a great platform that could easily help you get your content in front of an insanely big audience. Give it a try. I use it all the time. It’s great.
Thank you for reading my latest blog posts. I hope it was helpful. If you have anything to ask or add on this subject, feel free to write your thoughts and questions in the comments section below, and I’ll do everything in my power to reply to them ASAP.
That’s it for now,
See you soon again,
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
