You’ve created content that you think is engaging and fun enough to attract a lot of visitors, but how can you make sure it gets to the right audience? To get the most out of your content, you need to distribute it properly. Without the right distribution, your content might not succeed.

Your content gets distributed in three channels– owned, earned and paid. Owned media are the channels owned and controlled by you such as your social media profiles, websites, newsletters and emails. In this article, we will discuss the earned and paid media channels to help you get more visibility for your content in 2016.

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Photo by Ausgarage

Earned Media

Earned media occurs when others share your content with guest posts, social media shares, reviews and feedback. And this could happen through a number of platforms. But to boost your content distribution efforts through earned media, you’ll need to invest in well-designed site and social media pages.

Remember, organization is the key to succeed here. You should ensure that everything—from the content to your logo design —all come together, They should make people want to know more about your brand and contribute to your efforts.

  1. Introduction of Digital Publishing Platforms – Forbes launched their content sharing platform BrandVoice recently that enables marketers to join the conversation (happening on Forbes) with their own narrative. There are many publishers that have joined this bandwagon of creating publishing platforms that will help marketers distribute their content smartly.
  2. Distributing Content through Local Channels – We aren’t talking about radio or newspaper here, but your local chambers of commerce. The chambers of commerce help and promote its members with numerous online and offline channels for content distribution. They create a lot of backlinks to your website that helps with increasing traffic. There are local chambers of commerce that offer free submissions for their events calendars, which can turn out to be a great free resource.
  3. Connect with Digital Influencers – Getting in touch with the people that influence the digital world is a tough job. However once you are able to do it, it can help you drive considerable results. Although it requires a lot of patience, the whole exercise of building a targeted influencer network is worth it. You can use blogging networks such as Triberr or platforms such as Little Bird to find relevant digital influencers.
  4. Make Use of Social News – By using a channel like Reddit, you may get a higher ROI than even your social media marketing. If you have created content that’s unique and educational, you may get quick reactions from your audiences with the downvote feature.

As the name suggests, paid media is a channel that gives you exposure by the way of advertisements such as pay-per-click ads, display ads or social media ads. There are many social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest that offer advertising options.

5. Amplify Content With Contently – Contently offers marketers a smarter way to build target audiences. It gets more engagement and loyal customers. It can turn out to be a game-changer as you can create as well as distribute content on a single platform. It also has a sponsorship feature. You can easily expand your network and amplify your content.

6. Try Sponsored Updates – Let’s review LinkedIn as an example. With such a large professional network, LinkedIn’s sponsored updates are of great help in increasing your traffic. You can target the right audience by filtering based on company, location, industry, job title and more.

7. Other Native Social Options – An average post on Tumblr gets reblogged about 14 times and the average sponsored post on Tumblr gets reblogged 10,000 times. Other social media channels such as Pinterest and Instagram offer paid options that can help Increase your brand’s reach as well.

Keep in mind that your content must be natively created. You can’t get traffic by simply using Pinterest and Instagram ads. It is important that you are equally active on the platform. More than 350 publishers worldwide, such as the New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Guardian and BILD published interactive news articles directly on Facebook to reach their audience.

For the opportunity to increase your reach this year, implement these seven ideas and platforms. Make maximum use of your owned media and connect with social influencers and popular websites that may easily accept your content.

If you want to pay for distribution, there are many sites and services that place your content prominently. There are many marketers who still don’t know how to put their point forward without making people feel targeted, but they can stand out from the rest after they understand the distribution game.