Steal my content promotion checklist (89 ways to promote content)

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Okay, you little thieves. Here’s something you can steal. It’s my content promotion checklist + a bunch of notes on how to get the most out of it. Is it the only way to do content promotion? Definitely not. But hopefully it gives you some new ideas & a framework to promote 100x more efficiently.

• Appetizers: Links from SEM Rush, Hubspot, Sprout Social & more…

• Main Course: Steal my content promotion checklist

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: Content about content 🤯

• Is TikTok Becoming the Next QVC? All About TikTok Live Shopping (link)

• Predict Your Traffic Volumes with Keyword Traffic Estimator (link)

• Podcast Marketing: How to Effectively Market a Podcast (link)

• How to Create a No-Cost B2B Influencer Marketing Program (link)

• Top 5 Visual Trends Shaping Marketing Strategies (link)

Main Course: Steal my content promotion checklist (89 ways to promote content)

(Here’s a link to the checklist if you want it before/while you read)

“Publishing and praying” is the death knell of most content marketing campaigns.

If we want content marketing to work, we have to promote our content. 

And that is a blessing and a curse – a curse because it can take a hell of a lot of work to properly promote content, but a blessing because often, if we’re just willing to lean into promotion, we can win because our competitors likely will not. 

It’s usually not the fun part, but it’s where all of the power comes from. 

…and that’s great and all. 

But how do you actually do it? How do you actually go out into the world and actively promote content? 

Well, there are lots of ways. But that’s exactly the problem. 

It’s difficult to know (1) what’s even possible, (2) what works, and (3) where to start. 

Now, I’m okay at it, but I’m not the best in the world at content promotion; I’m sure other folks are out there doing wild, ingenious things I’ve never thought to do before. 

But I have done a lot of content promotion.

So today, I want to share my content promotion checklist with you. 

I’m going to give you the checklist, and then we can talk a bit about content promotion in general, so you can have just a couple more tools in the ol’ tackle box. 

Here’s the checklist (it’s got like 89 ways to promote content)

Here’s a link to my content promotion checklist. 

It’s set to view only, so to make a copy for yourself, go to File > Make a copy.

Please feel free to add, subtract, or revise as needed. 

We’re all marketers here, and I’ve never met a marketer who hadn’t figured out cool, unique ways to do things. So please treat this as a jumping off point that you can build on. 

That said, let’s talk about what’s actually on this checklist. 

There are lots of content promotion tactics you’re NOT going to find on here – stuff like:

• Creating flipbooks

• Creating slide decks & posting to SlideShare

• Press releases

• Paid guest blogging

• Infographics

In general, if it’s popular and it’s not on here, it’s probably because I’ve tried it and found it to be ineffective at worst and silly at best (looking at you, flipbooks). 

Everything on this checklist is either (1) a fundamental/table stakes or (2) something you can do to get real, engaged eyeballs actively. 

The fundamentals almost all involve posting to your owned media. Stuff like SEO, emailing your list, etc. This is about a third of the checklist.

Everything else in the bucket of get-out-and-go-get-it. 

Because that’s what content promotion is all about.

How to use to use the checklist. 

Quick and wildly simple primer on how to use this checklist. 

Here’s how to do it: just do as much as you can.

Apologies if that’s a bit anticlimactic. 

But it’s true, and it’s important. 

Because there 100% will be things on this checklist that you cannot do (or things that just won’t make sense).

If you’re selling $20 sticks of deodorant – if that’s your product – it probably doesn’t make sense to promote a content manifesto 1:1 with FedEx envelopes. 

Or, for another example, if you don’t have a YouTube channel and don’t know how to do it, then don’t worry about it. 

Instead, just do MORE of the stuff on that list that you can do. If your biggest audience lives on LinkedIn, but you have no TikTok, just do way more LinkedIn. 

There are also plenty of things on this list that you do whether you have an existing audience or not – stuff like promoting your content in Reddit comments, cold emailing, answering Quora questions. 

So even if you have zero audience, you can still just allocate most of your resources to the stuff that requires no audience at all.

And then, just do as much as you can. 

BONUS: the best way to use this checklist is to build a dedicated promotion team. 

For whatever reason, it’s rare for content teams to have dedicated content promoters, but it’s vastly more powerful than asking your creators or marketers to do it. 

It’s kind of a grind. It takes creativity. And it takes critical thinking.

In other words, it’s its own skill entirely. 

Even a part-time freelance content promoter with a checklist like this in hand (or something like it) will be able to cause some waves.

And if you have a team of 2+ dedicated content promoters, you can really create lots of visibility. 

The best team member profile for this is:

• A great, natural writer

• Someone who can come up with unique, value-driven posts on social quickly and easily

• Someone who doesn’t mind a bit of a grind

• Someone instinctively & natively comfortable on social media

• Someone motivated by numbers going up

Perhaps most importantly, incentivize them well, and encourage them to build relationships with influencers as they work. You want someone comfortable owning the promotion. 

For freelancers, I usually recommend offering a base rate + incentivizing them for the traffic they drive.

ANOTHER BONUS TIP: If you’re delegating content promotion, please do at least one campaign with your promoter side-by-side.

It’s a hard job, and the first go-round will require some higher-level problem solving, and they’ll be happy to have you. 

I usually do 2-3 rounds. 

Is it fun? No (it’s not my personal jam, at least). Is it hard work? Yes. But will it encourage your promoter and help them work 100x more effectively in the future? Absolutely. 

Now, a few other bits of info that will help you get the most out of this checklist…

Note #1: You’re going to need “origin” content.

When you set out to do a bunch of content promotion, when you’re out there spending all that elbow grease to get eyeballs…

…you have to send it somewhere. 

Usually, you’re going to send it to what I call origin content. 

Origin content is the main content. It’s the thing that is produced first when the topic shows up on the content calendar. 

Origin content can be anything.

For a great deal of the time, that content is going to be a page on a website – and that’s usually because the website is where conversions happen, especially for businesses that are not built around creators. 

But, for example, businesses that found success on the back of the popularity of a social account – or creator driven businesses – might be producing content entirely for a single platform. 

Whatever it is, it’s okay. 

Just understand that to go DO content promotion, you’re going to need one thing to promote. 

Every email, every social doo dad, every video – whatever it is – has to point somewhere. 

That’s your origin content. 

And for that reason, it’s important that your origin content is built to connect with the people who consume it. 

Your origin content should either (1) convert people somehow or (2) facilitate ways to talk to them again. A couple of related resources:

• My post about “conversation stacking”

• My post about selling stuff with blog posts

The only other possible benefit of content promotion is brand awareness. 

Which is fine, of course. It’s valuable. But content promotion for brand awareness is usually reserved large companies with big budgets and mature marketing operations. 

The vast majority of businesses should be thinking about conversion and being able to talk to people again. 

So, in the checklist, when you see “origin content,” that’s what it’s referring to. 

NOW… just because we have origin content does not mean we’re going to be able to get away with ONLY promoting that exact thing. 

Which leads me to another dirty little secret…

Note #2 : repurposing is a crucial part of promotion.

Promotion is powerful.

But it is much more difficult if you’re just dropping links to your content all over the place in a “look at me please!” kind of way. 

When was the last time you clicked on any link anywhere because a stranger asked you to?

I don’t think I’ve done that since the ass-end of the 20th century. No one else has either.

Just dropping links and asking people to read your content does not work. 

Everywhere we’re promoting content, we’re doing it on some platform: social media, or forums, or whatever. 

Every platform has its own culture and its own user base. And those users aren’t there to hand over their time. They’re there to get some kind of value. 

What’s that mean for us? 

It means that in order to promote content on any platform, we must provide value.

And to provide value, almost always have to repurpose our origin content. 

Easy example: If we write a blog post and want to promote it on YouTube, it’s gonna need a video. 

But that goes for any platform. If we want to promote on Twitter, we should distill our content into a great, long-form thread and then link to our origin content as a full resource if people want more information. 

If we’re going to promote on Reddit, we should create a unique, value-driven post that works natively on whatever subreddit we’re promoting on and then link to our origin content as a full resource if people want more information.

Even when promoting content 1:1 in DMs (something the checklist recommends), we should lead with value and rapport if we want to have even a prayer. 

So whoever is promoting your content will NEED to be able to produce their OWN content, because an absolutely mission-critical part of that job is going to be creating content on the fly. 

That also means you should step back and let them work, by the way. 

Don’t worry about what they’re doing. 

Let them live in the communities, and trust their judgment on how they engage.

Note # 3: Promotion can snowball.

Final one here. 

Remember that promotion can snowball. 

If you’re doing good promotion in lots of different social ecosystems, that usually means you’re also building trust in communities, gaining followers for your owned media, building relationships, befriending key influencers, and generating brand awareness. 

It’s difficult to see in campaign #2. 

But trust me: it’ll be gloriously obvious in campaign #100. 

And that means that consistency is super important. 

You don’t necessarily need to run a full promotion campaign for every piece of content you produce (although it’s certainly powerful if you manage to build a large, dedicated team of promoters). 

But you should aim to always be promoting something – even if it’s a rotating roster of your top 10 pieces of content or something. 

Consistency is the only way to get the snowball rolling. 

Summary of how to use the checklist

• Make a copy of the checklist for yourself here (File > Make a copy)

• Secure a dedicated content promoter (hire a freelancer if needed)

• Do the first couple rounds of content promotion with them

• Rotate your best content through a promotion schedule

That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin