Why is online content promotion so … challenging?

When I was in school in Houston, I learned that the 4 P’s of marketing are

• Product
• Place
• Price
• Promotion

Don’t get bored yet.

Online content promotion is the crucial part of internet marketing. You already have your first 3 Ps. Your website contains pages that get your business and products found, along with all the other advertising things you do.

To tell the truth, having a website is not enough. You must promote your website’s content to attract visitors.

Internet advertising is not easy. It is more than a skillfully optimized website and flashy graphics. It takes promotion and time to receive attention. Some of the more common ways that internet advertisers use are:

1. Social Media. Hawk new content and latest blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, G+, and Pinterest, (or whatever other platform where your target market hangs out so you aren’t listening to yourself talk), focusing on reader benefit. It’s social, so you can’t be overtly promotional.
2. Emailing a recap of all your new content to the addresses you’ve been aggressively collecting from your opt-in signup.
3. Blogging all your how-to’s, troubleshooting solutions, and additional relevant information you think your audience will like.
4. Spending money developing freebies to get visitors to your website.
5. Spending again on paid advertising, carefully choosing keywords to target your traffic.

If only online content promotion was that simple!

You’d have plenty of traffic in no time. The problem is, common is not good enough. Everyone uses the tried and true tactics to attract visitors. You must have vision.

Do you remember when your mama told you to always put your best foot forward?

You only have brief seconds to shine (uh, make an impression). This is where imagination comes in for online promotion.

When someone visits your website, they spend less than 25% of their time looking at all the pictures and other graphics you spent a fortune to create. What they’re doing is reading.

Now take a look at all the common forms of promotion.  Your potential visitor is reading … again and again.  But first you have to pique the reader’s interest, and that is what takes imagination.

When you think of social media, emails and/or newsletters, blogs, and pay per click (PPC) advertising, you need a lot of ingenuity to create vivid mental pictures with words. It’s not enough just to post links or copy verbatim the latest and greatest on your website.

If they’ve already read all your great new content on your blog or site, are they going to re-read it?

Twitter gives you about 140 characters and Facebook recommends about 225 characters to motivate readers enough to check you out.  Just how are you going to say what you mean, shortly, sweetly, and with ingenuity?

Internet content promotion takes double, triple, or even the quadruple the cleverness that you put into your original content.  You just can’t rehash the same old same old in your online promotional efforts, copy/pasting from the original to social media, emails, and PPC.

That’s boring, not to mention duplicate copy, which search engines don’t like at all.

It’s hard work being creative.

As one of Houston’s leading search engine marketing companies, Directory One has the online content promotional imagination it takes to make your internet advertising campaign a success.  Not only are they experts at all the tried and true advertising methods, they have additional advertising ideas up their sleeve.

Why be common?