CHAPTER 12
Electrify Your Content: Promotion and Link Building
One of the guiding principles behind an “optimize and socialize” approach to content marketing is the impact of content discovery: If it can be searched, it can be optimized. If it can be found, it can be shared. Part of our understanding about customers comes from the topics that are of interest to them, which we synthesize into social topics and search keywords. Content plans incorporate those topics and keywords into information and media that will guide prospects through the sales funnel to purchase, share, and refer. The missing link with great content is that it isn’t great unless people can find it. That’s where content promotion, outreach, and link building come into play.
In the world of search engine optimization, links from relevant websites to your content have traditionally been one of the most significant external influences on how web pages were sorted in search results. The incorporation of social signals, such as content and links shared within social channels, has augmented web-page-to-web-page links in a significant way. For example, Google has made a number of changes, including the tighter integration of Google+, into search results through its social search initiatives and the addition of its new Personal Search option, “Search plus Your World,” which draws content from your network on Google as well as content from the web at large.1 Promoting content to your network on Google+ can result in ...
