 Hey everybody, Cyrus here. It is an honor to bring on our next speaker because what a lot of people may not realize, he doesn't speak at SEO conferences. But when he heard MozCon was inviting him, he agreed to speak here with us today, which we are honored to have his presence. Brian Dean. Yes, I'm talking about the famous backlinko, runs one of the most popular SEO blogs on the internet where he writes all the content himself. I can't think of another SEO blog like that out there today. He's an excellent SEO, link builder, sells courses, and he is one of the best marketers I've ever met. We're honored to have him today how to promote your content like a boss, something he knows so much about. We're going to kick it over to Brian Dean. Hey, what's up everybody? Brian Dean here, and in this presentation, I'm going to show you how to promote your content in 2020. So, first of context, as you probably know, it's a dark time for people in SEO and content marketing, because it's harder than ever for your content to get seen, even if it's amazing, even if it's world-class. The hard part isn't necessarily creating the content, it's promoting it and getting people to share and link to it. And it's just a numbers game. You know, back in the day, if you published a post, you were one of a couple thousand people. Today, you're one of literally millions. And freedom fighters, SEO and content marketers are wondering, how do you actually get your content in front of people, and then how do you get them to share and link to it? Well, that's what content promotion basically is, but how do you actually do it? Well, the issue really comes down to a quality over quantity issue, because according to WordPress, 70 million blog posts come out every single month. That's like 2 million blog posts every day. And that's just on WordPress. That doesn't count all the posts that come out on Wix and Squarespace and Webflow. Plus, you've got YouTube videos, podcast episodes, tweets, all sorts of content coming out. So when you hit publish on a piece of content, it's kind of easy to forget how huge the content world and how much content is coming out along with that post. I know I make that mistake with my own content. I publish a post and it doesn't do what I'm like, this is so amazing. How come no one cared? And it's because it was just a drop in the ocean really. It was just one of many pieces that were coming out that day. And what's really interesting about the stats on how much content coming is coming out, it's not that that 70 million has been the number that stayed firm for years. It's increasing rapidly. In fact, there's a 47% increase in the number of WordPress posts that have been published since 2016. So in four years, you're competing against 47% more content that comes out every day. And if you have a bad feeling about that, you're not alone. And what's interesting is earlier this year, but Sumo and I teamed up for an industry study and we analyzed about 900 million blog posts to try to figure out, you know, what's the state of a piece of content that comes out and why does some content perform better than others? And we found that 94% of all blog posts get zero links. So basically 94 out of every 100 posts don't get no one links to them. So they're more or less ignored. And what's interesting is that, yeah, you have the occasional posts that might get a link, but there's this rare 2% that gets more than one link. So it's rare to get one link and it's even more hard, even more difficult to get multiple links from multiple websites. And I know the odds are bad for this, but there is hope. And I'm going to show you exactly how to promote your content in this presentation. But I want to give you a quick backstory of something I struggle with, why I failed with content marketing and exactly what I did to turn things around. So a while back, I graduated with a degree in nutrition. Here's me at graduation with my dad. And I was like, you know what, I want to start a weight loss blog because I knew about that topic because it was related to nutrition, but I had no experience doing anything online. Like I never registered a domain name before. I didn't know anything. So when I launched this site, my page views were literally flat because I would publish tons of content, but no one would see it. And this is back in the day. This is before this huge content spike we talked about. This is when it was relatively easy and I still struggled because I didn't know how to execute content marketing and even the content that was good, I didn't know how to promote it. And it was honestly really frustrating to fail in that way. But now that I have the benefit of hindsight in multiple projects, some of which have succeeded, some of which have failed, I can look back and realize why that site failed. And it really wasn't because of the quality of content. In my opinion, the quality of content was pretty good because I was a dietitian, a registered dietitian, and I knew how to write stuff that was based on science and was still approachable. It was kind of like a health line way before health line and obviously not executed as well. But the real reason the site failed wasn't because of the content. It was because I didn't promote it in the right way and I just didn't spend enough time and effort on promotion. So I was doing something which is what I like to call the publish and pray approach, which is just like it sounds, you publish a piece of content and then you kind of pray. People see it and pray, people share and pray, people link to it. So when I launched Backlinko many years later, I decided to flip the script and try a different approach. This time, I would focus 100% on promotion and double my effort that I put into promotion and take some of the time away from content production, which is totally different than how most people approach it and how I approach my first weight loss blog. My idea was if you put out great content, people will see it, people will share it, people will link to it, it'll rank because just great content is the key. And yes, you should put out great content but I was missing that piece about promotion. So when I launched Backlinko, I was going against these huge sites and I realized that just trying to publish content that was really good wasn't going to be good enough because I was already competing against sites like HubSpot and Moz. They were putting out great stuff. So my great stuff on its own wasn't going to have a chance because they already had an audience and I didn't. I realized that just putting out good stuff or stuff that was a little bit better than theirs even wasn't going to be enough. And after all, you've got to think about it. I was competing against HubSpot, Moz, these huge sites. I was a guy writing articles in his underwear from his apartment and I was competing against these content teams with like 50 people. There was no way I could ever hope to match their level of production but I could beat them on the promotion side and that was my secret weapon was content promotion. So what I did when I started Backlinko is I spent 80% of my time promoting and 20% of my time creating which is the complete opposite of what I did with my first blog in the weight loss space. I spent like 90% of my time writing and like 10% of the time promoting. And with Backlinko, I flipped the script and I spent most of my time getting the word out about my site and about my content. And because of that, you can see here in this traffic, this Google Analytics chart, that I was able to get traction very early on and these spikes that you see aren't really from publishing new stuff. So when I first launched the site, I published something every six to eight weeks. It was really promoting the content that I already had on my site. And to give you some perspective, I launched Backlinko in 2013 and back then, just like with my weight loss blog, things were a lot easier. Today it's even harder because there are fewer people looking at the content that comes out. This is also data from WordPress. Even as more content's coming out, views are actually going down. You think it would go up but what's happening is, people are just kind of overwhelmed with content. They're getting saturated by it, so views are going down. And to make matters worse, most people are promoting their content the exact same way. You've all seen these email outreach templates. I'll cover them a little bit later in detail, but it also makes it harder for people because people are kind of burned out with receiving these outreach messages that are all the same. In fact, in a study we did earlier this year as well, only 8% of outreach emails even get a response, never mind a conversion, which is pretty sad and it's mostly because people are sending out outreach emails that aren't really personalized. But fortunately, there is hope and what you need to do is just like with content, look at your promotion the same way. Just like you put a ton of effort into a piece of content and realize that good content isn't really enough anymore, great content really isn't enough anymore. It has to be amazing. It's the same with content promotion. Like sharing yourself on social media is a good foundation but you need to do a lot more. So without further ado, here are the seven promotional strategies that are working great right now. The first is to create content for what's known as the linkerati which are basically the Jedi in your niche. So most people create content, they create content for the target customer which in theory makes total sense because your customer is searching for something, you want to get in front of them and then they'll buy what you sell. That's kind of the foundation of SEO. But in reality, what happens is if you only publish content for your target audience it ultimately becomes a trap because as I'll explain later your target audience can't really amplify what you put out. So again, the study with Busuma that I did and another finding from this was that we didn't find any correlation between people sharing content and linking to content. So in other words, we had pieces of content that got tons of shares on Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever but they would get zero links and vice versa was true. We'd have content that got lots of links and got lots of shares which seems counterintuitive at first because you always hear that oh, you want to share your stuff on social media get eyeballs on it because when you do people will see it and then link to it but in reality it doesn't seem to play out that way. So the question is how do you publish content that people link to and not necessarily share on social media two different things. The key is something called the linkerati and this is something Rand Fishkin came up with and it had to include him in this presentation especially as a Jedi because he already kind of has a name of a Jedi. He has an awesome Jedi name so I thought I would give him a shout out not just for coming up with the term but for being a Jedi in his own right and if you want to learn more about the Slinkerati concept, Rand has a great post on it which goes in more detail about how the Slinkerati works but I'm going to of course tell you how to do it as well in this presentation. So what is the Slinkerati and why is it important? Well they're basically people that are bloggers and journalists in your industry they're people that run websites in your niche that's basically how it is, it's not that complicated the hard part is that when you don't appeal to the Slinkerati and you publish content for your target audience it's impossible for them to link to you because they don't run websites in your niche versus creating content for the Slinkerati who do run websites in your niche they can link to you, right? So it's kind of like this visual explains a little better than I could is that you have a website when you appeal to the Slinkerati they have the resources websites to link to you but when you appeal to your customers who are random people most random people on the street don't have websites my mom doesn't have a website so if you create a content that they love the best they're going to do is share on Facebook with their 55 friends which is nice it can help you get a little bit of traffic but it's not really going to get links that's why it's important to create content for the Slinkerati so let me give you a little case study of how I use this strategy to get a bunch of links so a couple of years ago I noticed that HubSpot and some other sites were talking about this new approach to content where instead of publishing new stuff you would go back and update and republish your old content and a lot of people are getting results with this strategy so I was like you know what but what I notice is that none of the blog posts about that strategy share numbers they never shared any like hook that people could use to link to it they never gave a name that people could link to when they refer to it so when I published a post about it I called it the content upgrade and gave it a name a reference things that Linkerati could link to I also tied a number to it to give them a specific stat that they could use when they link to it and talked about the strategy and as you can see here I got a bunch of links from using that approach and they all site that specific strategy in terms of the stat and some of them also refer the name the content upgrade so that was really good so the question is how do you find content that appeals to a Linkerati so what you want to do is reverse engineer a site in your niche and look at the pages and the pieces of content that has the most links so look at the content that has the most referring domains is what I usually do and then think about what is it about this content that makes people want to link to it and what can we do that emulates that it totally depends on your niche which is why it's important to go through the exercise there are a couple of things I've noticed that work across industries like I mentioned naming things tends to work really well and specific stats but still it's important to reverse engineer your competitor's best content and in hrefs they have something called best by incoming links you can also use best by links growth and this shows you content that's getting links recently so what happens is sometimes you'll put it into mods or hrefs or whatever tool you use and you'll see a page that has like a billion links but it's from 2009 it won't necessarily work today so I like this best by links growth because you can see content that's getting links right now over the last 30 days or so so another example is a few years actually two years ago I noticed that voice search was getting big everyone's talking about voice search in the search engine marketing community and I was like man everyone's talking about this all the websites all the linker Roddy love this topic so when I dug a little deeper I also noticed that they tended to cite specific stats around that and they link to other pieces of content about voice search so my linker Roddy was basically telling me if you publish something great about voice search we're going to link to it so I decided to team up with our CTO and do this huge Google home ranking factor study which was really hard to pull off we had to manually ask Google home 10,000 questions record their responses get them transcribed it was a huge project but it was ultimately worth it because we're creating something that yeah my target audience probably would like it a little bit but this was really designed for the linker Roddy and you can see that it has over a thousand referring domains which is not bad in about two years. Now not to get cocky or anything but that did go well I wanted to throw in a Han Solo reference. The second strategy is the expanded social post so you probably know that social media algorithms the organic reach on social media algorithms are really low especially for posts that link out because social media sites want you on the site they don't want to send people away so when you share something with a link they're going to bury that post and Buffer has found that Facebook prefers native content and other social media algorithms work pretty much the same way and this is a mistake I made for years when I published on some shared something on social media it would look like this it was literally like here's a new post here's a link and I put any effort into it there was no native content it was just a link it was the exact type of post that social media algorithms want to bury then I decided to change things up and give social media algorithms what they want which is native content so to give an example this is a study published a while back and instead of just saying here's the post I actually pulled out some data and mentioned it in the tweet that way there's some native content there not only for the algorithms just for people to share they don't even have to read the post to retweet it or comment or whatever and that native content made a huge difference in the performance of that tweet it got 953 retweets and that single tweet burned thousands of visitors I usually don't get that much traffic from twitter but this one did really well and I think native content was sort of the secret to the success you can see how much traffic twitter brought in that week which is crazy I usually get like you know 500 visitors a week so it was a really huge win now that said I wouldn't necessarily copy this exact format because it won't necessarily work you want to pull out what's unique for your post to give an example I saw Taylor Swift tweet this out a while ago I was like that's a really good tweet and it did really well 5000 retweets that's amazing but when I tried it it didn't really get the same results that said I do have a template that I recommend trying for LinkedIn so every you know network has its own nuances and culture whatever this post formula for LinkedIn works on anywhere you can post long-form content so I also use the same formula on Facebook and it works pretty well first you want a hook which grabs people's attention as they're going through their feed then you want to outline what's in your post then include a link and then a call to action so let me show you a real-life example this is a post that I published on LinkedIn a while back and the hook is my first website was a complete failure like that's going to grab people's attention because it's very personal especially on LinkedIn where things aren't generally that personal and because I followed that format the hook the bulleted list of all the things and then a link and a call to action it got a ton of views and obviously a lot of traffic as well as you can see in the Google Analytics chart so the third strategy is to avoid jar jar outreach and I'll show you what works instead so we've all received these annoying outreach emails I get them even all the time and they frankly don't work anymore and I don't even know why people are doing that because they really don't work not to say email outreach doesn't work that specific style doesn't work the thing is it used to work and that's why everyone's doing it because they would look at these results that even I would publish and people would say oh I just need to copy that but just like the Taylor Swift quote you don't want to sort of just copy what other people are doing it's important to add your own twist so when I teamed up with Pitchbox to do an email outreach study one of the interesting findings was that not only do most outreach emails get ignored but just adding a little bit of personalization can make a huge difference as you can see in this chart so let me walk you through an example of how to not just avoid jar jar outreach it's pretty easy and how to actually create outreach emails that people want to apply to and convert so this is a campaign that we launched a couple months ago for broken link building campaign that did really well so earlier this year my co-founder and I of Exploring Topics noticed that Google Correlate was shut down Google made an announcement about it and then eventually they did shut it down and I realized that Exploring Topics was brand new, we had no links and it wasn't really like a one to one replacement for Google Correlate but we knew that we could use the broken link for Google Correlate to kind of get our foot in the door for the linkerati that tends to link out to stuff and then offer this as a replacement link so the battle plan was basically that find places that link to Google Correlate to replace that link with ours or just add our link to the page so we reverse engineered all the places that link to Google Correlate and then found their email addresses using haunter.io which is my favorite resource for finding email addresses for people and then we send them a legit personalized email now yes we used a script but it wasn't a type of script that has those fields like high name or you know website it was legit like personalized you can see in the first line that when Josh sent these out you can see that he says I love your landing page graphics and then do not click this button that's something that you couldn't just add in a field and have it automatically populate he looked at the site and actually pulled something out that was unique and you can see that it's a pretty gentle call to action as well we're just saying like I was thinking that exploding topics might make a nice replacement we're not being pushy and we're not burning bridges we're just kind of offering that suggestion they can take it or leave it and in this little campaign we had almost a 10% conversion rate as I showed you before most outreach emails get an 8% reply rate so not only were we getting replies we're getting people actually to log into WordPress and then change the link which is the ultimate win so the fourth strategy is the Jedi mind trick so Fractal did some research a while ago and they asked journalists how do you want to be pitched like how do you want people to reach out to you if they're going to pitch you something and surprisingly 81% of journalists wanted to get pitched via email so what you do with this Jedi mind trick is you use email which is what journalists prefer but instead of sending an email after your post comes out which is what most people do you give them a heads up before your post goes live so what you want to do step by step is first go to a site like BuzzSumo and type in a keyword that describes the article that's about to come out and then look at people that shared it they have a tool in there called View Shares and it shows you everyone that shared that post on Twitter then reach out to those people and let them know you have a post coming out this can be really short and sweet yes you want to personalize it but it doesn't need to be that long because your ass isn't that big you're not asking them to share you're not asking them to link you're just asking them do you want to see it and that one heads up when it goes live is the line that's worked best for me but you can always experiment and try your own but you can see that people are generally receptive to this because you're not really pushing anything in fact that's the Jedi mind trick part they can't even share it so you're not there it doesn't seem like you're asking for a share because you're not they can't even share it in the first place and even when you send it I don't recommend saying something like and you know if you think your audience would like it share it you know they're not done if they like the post they know what to do they know how to how to share things on Twitter so you don't even need to call it action I literally just send it out to people and it works really well and you can see that people are happy to tweet it out and link to it and sometimes if I reach out to a really influential person and I really want to emphasize the fact that look this is not a game for me to get you to share it I just want you to see it and then hopefully the idea is that if they see it and like it they'll either share it that day just keep an eye on your stuff and share something in the future it's more about building a relationship and just starting a conversation than trying to get a share or a link right off the bat and you can see that a lot of the responses that I get are positive which if you do a lot of outreach these types of responses are kind of rare usually you get some bad words going at you and you can also notice that people don't just say okay share a lot of times people say oh you want to do a guest post I've gone on podcasts from people I send them this outreach email they like my post and they say hey do you want to call my podcast so it's really a great way to sort of build relationships without sending out emails just ask something right away and if you like the Mandalorian as you know in my opinion this is the way for outreach moving forward this strategy is to hyperdrive boost your Facebook post so as you know Zuckerberg is like a jowl right now Facebook ads are getting super expensive they've gone up 90% compared to two years ago which is just crazy and if you're struggling with Facebook ads like I was it can be frustrating you don't know what's going on do you have a bad motivator what's the problem so what I realize is that if you use this strategy you can get much cheaper clicks which is basically you get your post in front of people you get a lot of engagement which then lowers your CPCs but even then the issue is you get in front of new people which sounds good but it's also very expensive for example I ran this campaign a while ago to promote a post that I put out and it cost me 260 using this exact strategy which used to work really well the problem is I was focused on getting in front of new people and it was super expensive I was paying a lot 260 per click on a blog post is really expensive because most of those people aren't going to convert so it's really hard to get an ROI on that versus when I did retargeting I was able to get a cost per click of $.67 so I did the same exact strategy here but instead of just getting in front of new people with my ad targeting I focused on retargeting people that are already visited my site but were on my email list and that was obviously a lot cheaper so the sixth strategy is to use Reddit promote your content on Reddit so it's no secret that Reddit is potential traffic goldmine the problem is for most people it's a potential traffic goldmine so it's usually getting people to go to your site from Reddit it's really hard because Reddit hates marketing and they hate promotion in fact this is what I used to do when I promoted on Reddit and it never worked not only did it not work but people would call me bad names I had to blur some stuff out so when we launched Exploring Topics one of the things I wanted to do to promote it was try Reddit again and instead of just posting links like a spammy marketer I wanted the content to Reddit so earlier this year we did something called the top 2020 presidential candidates we looked at Google search growth over the last year to see which candidates were growing and which ones were shrinking and this is a while ago obviously this has changed a lot since then we noticed that Andrew Yang at the time had the biggest growth so what do we do we went in subreddits like Yang Gang and we posted all the presidential candidates and showed that Andrew Yang was at the top and they were obviously freaking out they were super happy about it they upvoted, they commented they cross posted another Yang related subreddits we did the same thing with the opposite presidential candidates that were doing poorly and posted it there and then they would have a conversation because they were like oh this is not right because it only measures search growth it doesn't relate to how many absolute searches they get it was creating conversation and getting people to talk about our site and visit our site from reddit and actually brought in a decent amount of visitors considering our site was brand new so the last strategy is what I call hack the howl in it with click to tweet links so click to tweet links are something that I've been using for a while and they're basically links that instead of clicking on them and then asking them to tweet you can actually populate a tweet within a link so I'll show you exactly how it works here's an example from one of my posts I have this quote that I've used for years and I decided one time to add a click to tweet link next to it when I publish a post and I noticed that people would click on this link and then it would tweet out you can use a site called click to tweet to set these up it's very easy and when you do you basically have a little link that you put there and when people click on it it populates a tweet and I noticed that more and more people were tweeting out my quote because I have these click to tweet links and actually I published this post like a long time ago and I still notice people sharing it using that click to tweet link I think just because it's easier if you read an article online there's no real incentive for you to share it at that moment right you got to share the entire article versus this little quote which is kind of made for a tweet people are more likely to share it out so let me give you a quick bonus strategy before we close out this presentation and that's newsletters now I know you probably like newsletters this presentation from the 90s no it's seriously one of the best ways to promote content and way better than Twitter and social media in my experience let me show you a quick case study of this in action I published this post in January and decided to run a little test so I sent out a newsletter and now it's the post on my email subscribers I also tweeted out the same post so exactly the same in as many ways as I could make them obviously the copy was a little bit different and the tweet got very few clicks compared to the newsletter like the newsletter got 1500 clicks or 15,000 clicks the tweet got almost barely anything and that included a tweet that had native content so it was actually one that had the potential to do well just the nature of the beast that just social media can be an okay place to promote content but in my opinion it's overrated compared to email newsletters so over the years I've tested countless email newsletter formats, subject lines I've tried adding a link I've tried adding a button I've tried images, I've tried stories and basically what I've discovered from all this is that the simplest newsletters do the best you want a newsletter that's plain text so it doesn't even need any images or any graphics or logo or anything like that and you want to make the CTR just a click the rate you want to use a plain text link so that people will click on it works better than a button so a buddy of mine who had been struggling with this I encouraged him to try a plain text email approach and he said he got 50% more clicks which may sound crazy but it's actually pretty normal from when you switch to a complicated fancy HTML newsletter to a plain text version and actually here's the exact format that I recommend which is the lead which is just like your social media native content post which is just something to grab people's attention the big reveal which goes into why the topic is important and what's in your post very briefly and then a link to the post so here's a real life example here's the lead, very simple and then go into a couple things and do what's in the post and then there's a simple text-based link that's really all there is to it so needless to say in the SEO world right now in the content world in some ways it's a dark time there's more content coming out it's harder to get your content in front of people and you're competing against people that are using Jar Jar Outreach but if you use the right strategies and spend more time on content promotion and a little bit less time on content creation then you'll have a force for good in the galaxy thank you