Having a good product or providing excellent service is not nearly enough to make your business successful. Without a doubt, it’s crucial, but only as a starting point. With the widespread availability of web access, hundreds, if not thousands, of others offering the same thing, and they’re all, just like you, only a click away.
It’s important to note that “product” doesn’t necessarily mean the proverbial set of knives. Anything that can be monetized is a product, from travel blogging to video game streaming to making commentary videos. This makes content creators a one-person business in their own right, and they need to manage their product, i.e., the content, in the same way a business would go about a product.
Considering all of this, it’s plain to see why marketing, or more precisely, sharing your content, is vital. As with almost everything else in the business world, there are many ways to approach the subject. It’s easiest to throw money at paid promotions and be featured on every feed and other results during Google searches. Also, as with most things, the bigger your budget, the more things are available.
However, when your budget is limited, you’ll need to get creative to get your message across. Therefore, we’ve decided to look at the best places to share your content. While there are other methods to try, these should be the most effective overall when considering reach, accessibility, price, etc. Without further ado, let’s get on with it…
Websites that accept guest posts
Other solutions on this list will probably offer you more exposure and, in doing so, net you a better reach potential. However, if you’re publishing serious content, you’ll probably want to be recognized in a certain way, and using guest posts to do it will offer you just that.
There are a couple of things to consider with guest posting – your content needs to be up to standard, you need to find a suitable partner/site that will host your posts, you need to know what sites to avoid, and finally, you’ll need to know how to approach your potential hosts for the opportunity (assuming they’re not actively looking for guest posts).
When you guest post on someone else’s site, you’re putting their reputation on the line as much as yours. Your content needs to be good enough not to reflect badly on anyone involved – check your spelling and facts, stay on topic, etc. You don’t want to submit articles that resemble middle school homework assignments.
After you’ve got the content down, find yourself a host. Some of the things to look for:
- A site in your field/niche (can’t write about football on a cooking site).
- You’ll want to build as many connections as possible with a reputable site with loads of healthy backlinks both to your site and others.
- Good SEO rating – you’ll want a host more established than you – no sense in guest posting “down”.
- Good domain authority – an advanced metric that considers multiple statistics about a site and boils them down to a number – search for sites with a rank of 30 or more (0-100 range is used).
On the other hand, it’s equally important to know what types of sites to avoid. These are some of the more obvious red flags:
- Bad reputation – some sites generate traffic but have an overall bad reputation. They can get flagged by browsers because they lack certificates or are known to trigger malware/spyware/virus detectors.
- Spam score – just like SEO rank or domain authority, but in reverse, sites with a high spam score will yield low-quality links, and you don’t want any of those.
- New sites – it’s perfectly okay to help out a friend that’s just starting once in a while, but guest posting on new sites will mean very little for your site since their rankings across the board are probably lower than yours.
All that’s left to do is approach a site or sites and see if they’ll accept your submissions. This could very well be the most grueling task of all. If you’re lucky, the site you’re interested in might regularly offer up guest posting opportunities, but that’s not the case.
Other methods include directly contacting the site through email or social media, searching Google for opportunities, using specialized software that finds sites for you, or paying for it if there’s nothing else out there. While you’ll want to avoid sponsored content, it’s always an option if you choose to go that route.
To get a running start, we’ve compiled a list of sites that are happy to accept guest posts. These are all vetted sites, so there are no worries about that. Just be sure to check which one is best suited for your type of content to maximize exposure to the right crowd.
- WP Newsify
- WP Sauce
- UnderConstructionPage
- My WP Tips
- Theme Circle
- WP Reset
- WebFactory Ltd
- Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode
- Google Maps Widget PRO
- NavThemes
- Simple Author Box
- ResizeMyImage
- Tidy Repo
- WP Pluginsify
- Enstine Muki
- BlogWolf
- WP 301 Redirects
- The Better Web Movement
- Save The Video
- Unit Conversion
- ThumbTube
- Blogger Walk
- TechyEyes
- PCStacks
- 85Ideas
- Tech Billow
- PythonBlog
- ReviewsLion
- Code Carbon
- WoahTech
- Websiteseostats
- Techie Event
- Yehiweb
- WP Radar
- JEM Products
- Dream Deals
- blogjoker
- Medium Talk
- Safe Box Guide
- webdevssupply
- PACE Business
- TechyIce
- Techsive
- WP Force SSL
- WP Sticky
- Feedbeater
- WindowsCape
- com
- Tips Mafia
- Hi-Tech Weirdo
- Esme Patterson
- Techy Popat
- EVR Mag
- Betmok
- GadgetsFarms
- Tech Stormy
- Tech Stromy
- Boost Up Blogging
- EmojiFaces
- Future Tech Trends
- WP Links
- WP Maintenance
You’ve always known that Facebook would be on this list. It’s such an obvious choice. Still the king of social media platforms, you know it’s gotten mainstream the moment your grandparents started making profiles. The reach you get with Facebook is amazing. With around 2 billion daily users, there’s always someone to target.
The real strength of Facebook, aside from the enormous number of people using it, is its versatility. You could say its very essence is content sharing, but that can be said for any social media platform. However, you must respect that you can share any type of content within any format – photos, videos, text, gifs, etc.
If you decide to use Facebook for content sharing, your aim should be to get into the most feed you can and, secondly, make content that will be shared, liked, and commented on further. Essentially, you want virtual word of mouth to spread and draw attention to you and the things you publish.
Twitter came a little late to the party compared to Facebook, but it really took the social media platform market by storm. A couple of things make Twitter unique, both in a good and a bad way.
It’s easy to recycle content – this sounds bad but implies that you can share the same content multiple times and increase your reach each time you do so, targeting different audiences. Once again, you’re looking for others to do the legwork and spread your message through retweets, likes, and comments.
The format is something you very much need to consider with Twitter. While you can post text, images, and short videos, each has limitations. The text is capped at 280 characters, and both images and videos are limited by size and dimensions (for images) and length (for videos). This means more preparation to work your content within these confines.
In a world where social media platforms are a primary communication method, Reddit feels like a blast from the past, harking back to the forum heyday of the early 2000s. However, there’s a trick to using Reddit, and it’s all about the community. While the potential to hugely raise your traffic numbers is here, you’ll need to work for it. Let’s break down quickly how it works.
You generate so-called “karma” simply by being active and contributing to the community on the various subreddits you can join. You can’t post links the moment you join. Instead, you must accumulate karma (up to a certain bar, determined by each subreddit individually), usually according to your activity and upvotes.
Once you get to post links, you can link your content. Be warned, though, karma can be lost, and others will quickly see through someone looking just for self-promotion. It’s best to keep it on topic and post links only when they’re helpful.
Because Reddit is such a community-based platform, if you’re intentions are deemed as something positive, helpful, insightful, genuine, etc., you can expect that other users will flock to your site or blog, both those that are interested in the content and those that are looking just to help out.
If you’re publishing content with ties to the business world, you should check out LinkedIn. You can easily connect your posts to your profile to promote your content among other users. They can then follow up by going directly to your blog or subscribing to your posts and gaining access to them through the platform. The whole thing works like any other subscription – they’ll be notified once something new is published through alerts.
A big reason why this solution isn’t the most optimal is the nature of the content that works in this environment. You won’t be getting many subscribers on LinkedIn, a platform dedicated to business contacts, by writing about cookie recipes. It’s a niche market with niche topics, so if you’re writing about things like finance, management, economy, marketing, etc., go for it, but other “lighter” topics simply won’t fly here.
Emails
Yes, you’ve read that right – emails. For most of the younger generations, emails are something their parents write for work, but multiple studies have shown that email campaigns do work. Since it’s so easy to unsubscribe from a mailing list, those that stay and receive your emails are one of the most loyal consumers you’ll have.
It’s up to you to decide how you want to share your content using this method. Assuming you’re writing a blog, you could set up a system where your entire posts are forwarded by email to your subscribers or make a newsletter reminding them that new content has been published.
You could do most of the work organizing emailing lists and campaigns by yourself, but there are a bunch of platforms out there that can alleviate much of the work, like MailChimp or Zapier. You would have to pay a little, but it’s negligible compared to what you would be getting.
Mix.com
To put it as bluntly as possible, Mix.com is a place where you can customize how you experience the internet. Within the platform, you’ll be able to save and share everything you find interesting and discover new things through others sharing their favorite content.
After registering for the platform, you’ll need to install the Chrome extension. This is then used to copy content directly through the browser as you’re viewing it. In practice, when you’re reading an article you like, save it to Mix with the extension, save enough, and they’ll have built up a profile for you.
The cool part comes in because the algorithm will suggest content for you based on your preferences other than your saved content. Sprinkled-in is also other people’s favorite content (which can be dialed down). You’ll get your very own curated feed.
Your content opportunity lies in direct contributions to the mix. Outside of content you find interesting, submit things from your blog to be shared. Like with Reddit, however, be sure not to overdo it – this is not your marketing platform, so be smart about it.
Final thoughts
No clear, universally accepted path will exponentially increase your audience in months. If there was, everybody would be doing it, as they say. You should first figure out for yourself what direction you want your blog/site to go.
After that, it gets much easier to determine the method of getting there. In the end, it’s probably becoming in varying degrees because you can’t afford probably best t have too much exposure, emphasizing places where it’ll have the most effect.
