How much time do you spend creating vs promoting your content? And how much time should you spend? 

I'm guessing most marketing teams focus on the creation. After all, that's the skilled part, right? But unless people read your content, what good is it?

Alan O'Rourke VP of Growth at OnePageCRM realised that content is only valuable when it's seen by the right people. So he re-balanced his team's efforts away from creation and more to promotion. 

But did it work? Here is an extract from his blog post explaining what he did.

Write once, publish EVERYWHERE and EVERYWAY.

The approach I tried is based on the premise of write once, publish EVERYWHERE and EVERYWAY. I produce one detailed, great piece of content. Preferably evergreen, i.e. the content is not time sensitive and will always be useful. Then I break up and reformat that content for release on different channels over a period of one month or longer.

Over a 30 day period I will do the following:

1. Publish one piece of anchor content a month  e.g. an ebook on a single topic.
   It can be small,  about 6-7 pages. Big text and lots of pictures. But it must cover the topic well. An example of one I produced is this guide on how to set an employee performance goal..
2. Split the ebook into weekly blog posts.
3. Tweet excerpts from the ebook. Not just the book title but tweet quotes from the text.
4. Repost the blog posts to linkedin pulse,  groups and other forums. Put a week delay on these to let the blog get indexed by search engines first. Post the full content. People will appreciate it and still click through to download the ebook.
5. Use the content to answer questions on Quora.com. 
   If you find it hard to find people asking questions that your content answers, then you may not be writing the right content.
6. Set up alerts on social media for people asking questions around the topic so you can share the content.
7. Take the images from the ebook and post to Flickr under creative commons so people can use (if they link to you). This is a slow burner but works great. I have got links from Forbes, Inc, Mashable and others using this.
8. Do a press release.
9. Do a webinar for the content and invite people from outside your existing subscribers as well.
10. Post the webinar slides on Slideshare.
11. Post the video recording of the webinar on Youtube.
12. Promote any of the above content with Pay Per Click ads.

EVERYTHING must end with a call to action back to your site, where you try and capture an email address and grow your audience and leads.

Promotion

I time all this promotion around the blog posts going live. The timing of tweets etc is based on research done by Neil Patel over at QuickSprout.com. In the below spreadsheet I put in the date of the blog post at the top and it gives back the day and times every tweet, facebook post and linkedin update must go out. After every blog post I spend about an hour in a tool called CoSchedule putting in all these dates and then everything is automated for the rest of the month.
(Tip, install the Coschedule google analytics custom report for great insights.)

 Overall I split my time 30% content production and 70% promotion.
At the end of every month I can measure how the content performed and compare it month on month.

Changing the focus from more content to more content promotion increased our leads each month by 300%.

Below is an infographic describing the process from start to finish.  Feel free to share this or embed it on your own website using this code.

The Micro Content Marketing and Promotion Plan from AudienceStack.com

Do check out his full post. You can find it here on audiencestack.