"Like a brick-and-mortar business that supplies physical products, content also needs to be distributed."
Now, you have a good content. How to increase your content visibility? This is where the content distribution comes into the play. There are several distribution strategies for your content:
1. Organic Search: People will find your content from searching through search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. On-Page SEO like keyword placement in your content will automatically affect this. Although many online business owner want this number to grow big, they can't forget other channel to maximize their traffic.
2. Social Media: Social media helps tremendously for bringing good quality traffic and loyal readers. The problem with social media is actually how to choose the best social media for your niche. In the basic WA training, you are directed to create Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest account.
Along the time, you may find that not all social media is worth to maintain. E.g.: in one of my website, I find that Pinterest doesn't contribute to the traffic, let alone quality visitor. My Twitter account give me small traffic (after FB and Google+), but most of them stay in my website long enough with lower bounce rate compared to FB and G+ (I call them loyal readers). So, I ditched Pinterest but still maintaining the other 3 accounts.
What social media you need to choose can be affected by your niche too! You need to find whether there are potential audience in that particular social media channel. e.g.: In my gaming niche website, I found that people in Google+ rarely talks about my niche, so I didn't bother with adding G+ account. Instead, FB is a very great social media to use because there are many FB Groups (a collective audience) that exactly the right audience for me.
Choosing the right social media will make your shared post go viral easily :)
3. Email Marketing: When an audience give their contact to you, they have a good chance to be your loyal reader. Loyal readers have a high engagement rate, and in my company's case, the highest conversion rate among all channels. If you target the right audience, more people will be willing to give their contact to you because they find that your content is relevant to their problem/interest.
4. Referral Channel: Usually come from link building strategy. The most basic of linkbuilding strategy is guestposting. So, you post an article in other people's website that contain a backlink to your website. There are websites that offer free (or even pay you) for guestposting in their website.
When finding a website for guestposting opportunity, you can either search for 'Guestpost + your niche', or find any website that have similar category with your website and contact the owner directly. Finding this website can also be an opportunity to get better insight about your audience.
5. Paid Channel : This is done by PPC. My company use an agency to do this, and I haven't done it on my own website so I can't give much information. However, I know 2 things here: Paid channel has the second highest conversion rate after email marketing in my company, and you can use PPC easily if you know your audience.
When you use paid advertising in social media, it will be counted as Social Channel in the Google Analytic report. Social Media paid advertising is also worth when you know your audience, because you can fill their demographic and key interest.
6. Direct traffic: It is usually not the main focus in the beginning of online business. In my company's case, direct traffic can be increased by branding your product and doing offline campaign. This can be successful when you know your audience. When your audience aware for your website, they will either bookmark it or typing your website URL directly in the URL bar.
That concludes the content marketing strategies. Now for additional tips, click next page :)
Thank you so much for sharing your 'real world' corporate experience with us!
You have taken the time to outline some very worthy tips here.
I also appreciate you directing us to the great training Classrooms at WA:)
I need to ask you for guidance on which social media would be best for my niche: Safety at home for seniors.
Do you have an idea for me, please?
I wish you all the BEST!
Terry