4 Free Content Promotion Strategies for Attracting Organic Traffic (in 2021)

After finding a useful blog post idea, the next step is researching and writing the content. Once you publish the blog post, you’ve only done half the job. Your post needs to get before your audience. There are many paid content promotion strategies. But in this post, I’ll highlight free content promotion tactics that won’t cost you a dollar provided you can do the work.

So, let’s dive in.

1. Broken Link Building

Broken links are dead hyperlinks on a website that display a 404 error message. For instance, if a user clicks on a broken link on my website, they will be lead to my 404 error page below.

404 error pages do not deliver value to your audience. Hence, they are bad for SEO. You can use broken links for promoting your content by finding them on other websites. Broken link building tools like screaming frog can help you find dead links. After detecting a broken link, the next step is contacting the owner of the target website and pitching your relevant content as a replacement.

Here’s a sample email you can modify.

Hi (first name of the website owner/editor)

I was writing a blog post on (topic – example “project management”) and I found your post on project management basics to be comprehensive and well written.

But I discovered that the link in paragraph 4, under the heading, project management cycle displays an error message.

If you like to remove the error message, my post on project management benefits will be a good replacement.

I’ll love to hear your thoughts.

Talk to you soon.

Precious.

2. Guest Posts

Guest posting is a famed content promotion strategy because of the following:

• It proves your expertise to your audience
• It sends quality backlinks to your website

Whenever you publish on a guest blog, you leverage the authority of that website.

Here’s a scenario.

	Your website	A website accepting guest posts
Domain authority	18	50
Number of monthly website traffic	51	4,893
Total number of social media followers	152	10,895

Posting content on the guest blog exposes your content, website and services to followers you never had. Some of these followers could join your email list, and others could connect with you on social media. Who knows, a customer might show up after reading your guest post.

Now, let me spill the beans – you might not be successful with all your guest post submissions. But before you go wailing, here are some tips that can increase your success rate with guest posting.

• Subscribe to the guest blog

Subscribing to the guest blog keeps you updated on what they are doing. This enables you to leave insightful comments on their post. As you do this often, the website owner or editor might recollect your name when you want to pitch.

Tip: Don’t engage in blog spam by talking about your website in blog comments. This puts your brand on the dark side and shows you are not interested in the target blog.

• Share the target website content on social media

Everyone likes publicity, especially those that lead to revenue from their website. Promoting the content of the target website increases their reach. When you share their content on social media, the owner of the blog might notice. This enables you to build a relationship and improves your chances of getting your guest post published.

Tip: Subscribe to the guest blog and share their content many weeks before pitching your guest post. They will smell your intent from far if you share their content today and pitch tomorrow.

• Research

It is essential to research before pitching a guest post. After finding a suitable guest post topic, adding keyword data shows the target website owner that they need your content. You can do this with your favorite keyword research tool. Be sure to include the target keyword and the monthly search volume data.

3. Content Syndication

Content syndication is the re-publishing of existing website content like infographics, blog posts, videos, etc. Re-publishing content on other platforms provides similar benefits to guest posts. It increases your organic reach, boosts your traffic, and sends backlinks to your content.

However, syndicated content is duplicate content and it can hurt your SEO.

One way of preventing this is ensuring that the website links back to your content as the original source, which is what Business 2 Community does on all syndicated articles (example below).

4. Content Repurposing

Content repurposing is the reuse of existing posts to create other content formats. Typically, this starts with one piece of written long-form SEO content. You can repurpose content into formats like infographics, videos, ebooks, and presentations.

Here’s how to identify content you can repurpose.

• Go to Google Analytics
• Click Behavior >> Site Content >> Landing Pages

• Select the Date Range from the top right and click Apply

• This will display the content that gets you the most traffic

With this data, you can find useful content to repurpose. After repurposing any content, you can promote it through any of these means:

• Send your infographics to websites accepting infographics
• Put your designed presentation in Slideshare
• Send your repurposed content to your email list
• Pin your repurposed content on your Twitter profile and Feature it on LinkedIn
• Share your repurposed content on other social media platforms and forums like Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora