You’ve heard it before. A great online presence starts with great content. But your website shouldn’t be a “field of dreams”. Building it isn’t enough. You have to shout it on the highest mountain, by promoting your content through various means:

Backlinks

Having an aggressive backlink strategy is vital to brand awareness. And proactively soliciting links is only half the story. You need to have great content to attract those back links.

Promotion Mechanisms

Guest posting is currently a controversial subject, depending on who you talk to. No one can disagree with the argument that your main intention for guest posts should be providing great content to the site in which you are posting, but heck, why not throw a relevant, thoughtful and conversation lengthening bacllink into the post?

Social Media Engagement

Social Media Engagement is another great mechanism to attract new people to your brand. By creating content and “advertising” it through promotional tweets, posts, videos and LinkedIn discussion topics, you are creating brand exposure in ways your content alone cannot accomplish.

SEO

Lest we get ahead of ourselves, how your business will be found, and your great content visited in through optimizing your content for SEO best practices. The very foundation of your content should be entrenched in those targeted phrases that drive qualified, action-oriented visitors to your website. And a higher click through rate can be a positive signal to Google to rank you higher in the search engine results pages.

PPC

We cannot speak of SEO without delving into PPC, be it AdWords, AdCenter, or even LinkedIn ads. Promoting your content through well-written ads can provide significant traffic to your content, especially highly-valued content, if you are willing to pay for the eyeballs on your site.

Website

Let’s not forget your own website as a means of promotion. Subscribing to your email newsletter or connecting to your social media accounts allows you to push promotions directly to your visitors, even when they aren’t on your website.

All these promotional outlets should follow these guidelines:

  • Simple, compelling calls to action
  • Promotion through relevant markets and outlets
  • Easily identifiable accounts for social media channels

It isn’t enough to rely strictly on PR or SEO to push your brand anymore. You need to have an integrated approach to self promote in order to create awareness for your brand.