Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Justin Belmont – Enjoy! 

So you’ve read about content marketing and why it matters. You’ve written and rewritten everything so that it sounds better. You felt you’ve done a lot, and nothing’s more disheartening than spending ages writing a masterpiece, only for it to have three likes on Facebook (worst case scenario: you, best friend, and your mom).

Good content sells. But does good content sell itself? Not necessarily. If nobody even has the chance to read it, good content is as good as wasted. That’s why exposure matters – it makes people know about your company’s existence and all the good writing in it. Here are 3 basics showing you how it can be done:

#1 WRITE SHAREABLE CONTENT

Writing shareable content means publishing content that can be shared, retweeted, or reblogged (with link to your official page or website) among people in social networks. It can be something really simple, like daily exercising tips for a sports company, or the different ways you can tie a scarf for a fashion brand. Whatever it is, it must be related to people’s lives so that they will share it with their peers. Add a pinch of humor for better results – we tend to circulate jokes.

Once you publish something shareable, your words spread. If people are impressed with your content, they may even do the advertising for you and become constant followers.

#2 SPOT THE KEYWORDS

Keywords are the main ideas to your post. By identifying them, you can classify your content under categories searchable by targeted customers. This improves your SEO (“Search Engine Optimization” – more on that here), and assists customer navigation.

Take hashtags on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr for example. It helps categorize posts, and what’s more – if people search under a certain hashtag (#yum for instance), they can see posts of people or firms they aren’t even following. That makes keywords another network apart from the people you know. Given the right utilization, spotting keywords can help you grab customers who happen to be searching for what you’re writing about.

#3 WRITE REGULARLY AND CONSISTENTLY

People love to be up-to-date, so you’re more likely to get new readers by appearing on newsfeeds than hoping somebody skims through pages of search results for your posts from 6 months ago. This means writing regularly and consistently pays off – it increases the chance of people noticing your posts, and if your content is as good as you think it is, more readers.

When readers choose to follow something, they want to be given new content on a regular basis. Every time you leave your readers with no updates is a disappointment to them. Consistent updates tell your readers you’re active. It’s like a serial – once a serial goes on hiatus, most readers will be lost by the time the next update appears.

And one final thing: be persistent! It’s perfectly normal to have less-than-satisfactory readership at the start. Keep writing, make sure your writing gets noticed, and you’ll go from there, the way it does for many of the popular blogs and websites.

Justin Belmont is the founder and editor-in-chief of Prose Media (prosemedia.com), a writing service that creates high-quality content for brands. Solutions include blog posts, social media updates, website  copy, newsletters, white papers, and emails. Belmont has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, and was formerly an editor-in-chief at Google.  Prose Media (@prose) supplies custom content by top professional writers, with expertise in a variety of industries. Our agency handles the whole production process—from pitching ideas and researching to writing, editing, and proofreading. Get a free quote today.