Looking for tools to help you promote your content? You could have the most high-quality content, but it will do nothing for your business without a content promotion strategy. In this ultimate list, we’ll share 41 content promotion tools (many of which are completely free).
Even the most compelling content won’t promote itself. Regardless of whether your content is written, visual or multimedia in format, you’ll need to have a content promotion strategy to get it out there.
A solid content promotion strategy includes both organic and paid methods of promotion. We’ll briefly explain each of the two methods, and then share the best tools to help you with both.
Ready to dive into the tools? Let’s go!
Recommended Resource Need to jumpstart your content marketing results? Get more traffic and conversions with our Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2018.
Organic Content Promotion Tools
Organic content promotion boosts the visibility of your content marketing campaigns without your having to spend money on advertisements. The only downside is that you’ll have to invest some time and effort… that’s where these organic content promotion tools can help.
Feel free to use the navigation below to jump to a particular type of organic content promotion tool.
Influencer Marketing/Earned Media Tools
Want to research influencers in your industry to earn media, build links to your content, and grow social proof? These tools can help.
1. Open Site Explorer
Building inbound links from other sites is one of the most important aspects of promoting your content. With the free version of Open Site Explorer by Moz, you can see how many inbound links you have, which domains are linking to you, and a list of the top pages on your site to maximize link building.
With the Pro version, you’ll also have access to the “Link Opportunities” feature, which allows you to reclaim broken links, find unlinked mentions, and find domains that are linking to your competitors but not to you.
2. Followerwonk
Followerwonk is another tool by Moz that allows you to track and analyze your Twitter following. But that’s not all!
A really handy feature of this tool (which is available in the free version) is the “Search Bios” feature. You can actually search Twitter profiles and/or Twitter bios for specific keywords (such as topics that you write about), and find influencers that are likely to be interested in sharing your content.
3. TweetDeck
Once you have identified specific influencers that you would like to target, you may want to do some “social stalking” to get to know them better. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t allow you to see only specific influencers in your feed. That’s where this free tool comes in.
TweetDeck is a specialized dashboard for Twitter which allows you to organize your Twitter feed into streams. To keep track of influencers, just add a new column and select “User” as the column type. Then enter the Twitter handle for the influencer you want to watch and hit the “Add Column” button to add their Twitter stream to your deck.
Now you can keep a close eye on specific influencers, all in one place!
4. Feedly
Feedly gives you one convenient place to follow specific publishers you want to target and organize them into categories. This is super handy for researching blogs you want to approach for guest posting opportunities or for link building. It’s great for researching influential people too.
5. MozBar
MozBar is a browser extension for Chrome that gives you instant SEO metrics while viewing any webpage or SERP. You can use it while doing a Google search for a specific keyword and see the page authority and domain authority for all the results that come up at a glance. (With the Premium version, you’ll also be able to see the keyword difficulty.)
Once you click into one of these individual websites, you’ll be able to find out whether this site would be a good prospect for link building. A particularly useful feature is the highlight tool: you can highlight all the links on the page by dofollow links, nofollow links, internal or external links. This way, you can quickly and easily discover the linking habits of the site.
6. Hootsuite’s Search Streams
Hootsuite includes a tool called search streams, which allows you to monitor specific content happening on your social platforms. This is a particularly useful tool for monitoring mentions of your brand, so you can see who is already sharing your content (and who would be likely to share more, or link to you).
To add a mentions stream to your Hootsuite dashboard, follow these directions.
7. BuzzSumo
With BuzzSumo, you can discover the top influencers in your industry who are sharing content similar to yours. Then, you can see exactly what content they share, what topics they share the most often, and what domains they share.
You can even set up alerts to monitor specific topics, influencers or competitors, and export all of this data as a CSV or Excel spreadsheet.
8. Inkybee
If you need a high-powered solution for influencer discovery and research, Inkybee has a suite of tools with all the features you could ever possibly need. In fact, they have most of the features that all the above tools have, and then some.
While the features are too many to list here, one of the notable features is their ongoing blog discovery tool, which allows you to immediately find new influencers in your niche. They also have a relationship tracker, which helps you to manage your influencer relationships.
Social Media Marketing Tools
Want to promote your content on social media? These social media marketing tools can help you to publish posts on social media, and encourage blog readers to share your content.
9. Tailwind
Tailwind is a powerful content scheduling app for Pinterest and Instagram. Features like bulk image upload, drag and drop calendar, multi-board pinning and pin looping, hashtag lists will save you tons of time. Plus, you can automatically optimize your Pinterest and Instagram schedules based on when your audience is most likely to be active.
And, Tailwind comes with analytics that will help you stay on top of how your posts are performing.
You can try Tailwind for free, no credit card required.
10. Social Warfare
Social Warfare is our favorite social media plugin for WordPress. It gives you complete control over how your content will look when someone shares it on any major platform.
For instance, you can upload separate thumbnail images and descriptions that are optimized to each individual social platform. It also allows you to completely customize where and how your social sharing buttons are displayed.
11. OptinMonster’s Success View
With OptinMonster, you can create a success view like the one above that allows you to easily customize the message that users see immediately after they successfully optin to your email list. This is the perfect time to invite them to follow you on your other platforms or to share your content on social.
Here’s another example of a success view that asks users to like your Facebook page.
12. Click to Tweet
Click to Tweet is a tool that helps you to encourage readers to share your content on Twitter. It works by generating an embed code which you can place inside the body of your blog posts and give readers an easy way to tweet out a quote from your post right as they are consuming it.
A nice feature of this content promotion tool is the analytics inside the dashboard. This makes it easy to track how well your “click to tweet” campaigns are doing.
13. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a bit of a hybrid social publishing tool and a social listening tool. In other words, you can use it to find the social conversations that you want to be a part of, and then it helps you to publish your content across all those social platforms. It also has analytics, so you can see how well your social media campaigns are doing to promote your content.
14. Buffer
Buffer helps you to save time publishing on social media by giving you a central location to manage all of your various platforms.
You can schedule posts to be shared at optimal times throughout the day, and look at your analytics to see which posts got the most engagement. A great feature is the browser extension, which allows you to add posts to your queue as you are browsing the web.
15. IFTTT
IFTTT allows you to combine other tools together to create powerful automation, or “recipes”. The possibilities for this tool are virtually limitless.
For example, you can use IFTTT to integrate WordPress with your various social platforms and automatically share blog posts to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. after they go live. You can also use it to automatically share to one social media account when you post to another social media account. You can discover lots of useful recipes here.
16. Kred
Kred is a tool that analyzes your social influence and gives it a score. Use it to see areas where you can improve your social following, as well as to find other influencers to share your content.
17. Canva
Canva is a powerful free tool to create images for your social media posts and ads. The drag-and-drop interface is super easy to use and includes lots of pre-designed templates that you can use to make attractive images, even if you have no design experience.
The best part about Canva is that their templates are optimized for various social platforms, so your images will come out at the perfect size, without having to think about it.
18. Smart Podcast Player
If you have a podcast, the Smart Podcast Player is a great tool to help you promote it. As you might have guessed, this tool allows you to embed a player into a blog post for each of your podcast episodes.
However, it also does much more. For example, the full player also displays an archive of your past episodes along with a search function, so that listeners can easily browse through your entire show.
Top ToolsStart your own podcast today with one of the best WordPress podcasting plugins from our list!
19. EMV Headline Analyzer
EMV Headline Analyzer is a neat free tool that helps you write better headlines for social media posts, blog posts, and ads.
Simply type in your headline, and it will give you a score based on the emotions which your headline most impacts.
20. LikeAlyzer
LikeAlyzer is a free tool that analyzes your Facebook page and gives it a score.
To get a better score, LikeAlyzer will give you recommendations for what you can do to increase the engagement and overall performance of your page. You’ll also be able to see how well your page is doing compared with your competition.
Email Marketing Tools
Don’t forget to promote your content to your own email list! These tools can help make it easier for your email subscribers to consume and share your content.
21. MailChimp’s Subject Line Researcher
To promote any kind of content to your email list, you’ll first need to get them to open the email.
If you are a MailChimp user, they have a Subject Line Researcher tool within their campaign builder that helps you to refine your subject line and get higher open rates.
All you have to do is click “Research subject lines”, and a window will pop up allowing you to try out different words and phrases. The tool will look at MailChimp’s data of over 10 billion emails per month and show you the highest performing subject lines that include your keywords.
22. Zurb’s TestSubject
Don’t have MailChimp? Here’s another great tool you can use to increase your open rates. Zurb’s TestSubject is a free tool that shows you exactly what your subject line will look like on various mobile devices.
This is important because as much as 70% of all email opens happen on mobile!
23. Social Media Share Link Generator
Want to make it easier for your email subscribers to share your content on social media? Ryan Solutions Social Media Share Link Generator is a free tool that generates social media sharing links that you can insert into your email campaigns.
All you have to do is paste the URL for the page or post you want to share, enter the description text (for Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn), and enter the URL for your thumbnail image (for Pinterest), and then you’ll get sharing links for all the major social networks.
24. Hemingway App
Hemingway App is a tool that helps you to write better emails. Just type in your email body copy, and it will give you lots of great suggestions for how to make your email more clear and easy to understand.
25. FeedPress
FeedPress is a tool that allows you to automatically send an email newsletter whenever a new blog post comes out.
This is particularly useful if you have a segment of your email list who has opted-in to receive blog post updates. You can even segment by category if you have multiple RSS feeds for each category on your blog, and then use FeedPress to automatically send the emails.
26. OptinMonster
Don’t have an email list yet, or need a bigger one? OptinMonster helps you to grow your email list with powerful, high-converting optin forms on your website.
Capture the email address of visitors before they abandon your site using exit-intent technology. You can also increase conversions with well-timed popups, polite slide-ins, in-line forms, highly visible floating bars, and more.
Paid Content Promotion Tools
Organic promotion is an important part of any content marketing strategy. However, it can take some time and patience to get going. That’s where paid promotion comes in.
With these paid content promotion tools, you can get more traffic to your content, immediately.
Ready to dive into the paid promotion tools? Feel free to use the navigation below to jump to a particular type of paid content promotion tool.
Social Media Advertising Tools
Want to run social media ads to promote your content? Here are some tools that can help.
27. Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights is one of the most powerful tools for targeting your ads.
Because Facebook has so much data, you can target your ads based on a huge number of demographics, interests, and behaviors. With the free Audience Insights tool, you can learn a ton of information about your target audience, whether you plan to run Facebook ads or not. Just enter in some basic information that you know about your audience (e.g. what page they like), and you’ll get a whole slew of other information.
28. YouTube Ads
Browsing the web is becoming more and more of a visual and interactive experience, and YouTube Ads are a really great way to take advantage of that (particularly if you have video content).
Use them to catch the attention of your ideal audience with your content, and even retarget your existing visitors with YouTube ads that move them further along your sales funnel.
29. Pinterest Ads
Pinterest Ads are perfect for promoting your blog posts and your lead magnets.
Plus, the Analytics section of the tool gives you insights into how many people you are reaching with your pins, how your profile is growing, the top pins that are working for you, and what people are saving from your domain.
30. Twitter Website Cards
Twitter Ads have a variety of campaign types which allow you to promote your content and grow your website traffic, promote your lead magnets from a landing page, build your Twitter audience, increase your engagement, and more.
The main campaign type you’ll want to focus on for promoting your content is the Website Card. This is a powerful ad format that allows people to preview an image, some context for your content, and a call to action to read more on your blog.
31. LinkedIn Sponsored Content
If your audience contains professionals, you should look into LinkedIn Ads. The cool thing about LinkedIn ads is that you can target people by industry, company size, job title, function, and even seniority.
The main campaign type you’ll want to focus on for promoting your content is Sponsored Content.
32. Instagram Ads
Have an eCommerce business or visual content? Instagram Ads may be the perfect solution for you to promote your content.
The Instagram ads tool is located inside Facebook’s Ad Manager or Power Editor. Simply create a regular Facebook ad, and then select Instagram from the placement options.
Search Ad/Display Ad Tools
Want to advertise your content in Google search or display network? Here are the tools you’ll need.
33. Google Adwords Search Ads
Google AdWords Search Ads allow you to promote your content next to Google search results when people are looking for content related to yours. You only have to pay when people click through to your blog.
34. Google AdWords Display Ads
Use Google AdWords Display Ads to promote your content on other websites and apps. You can use plain text or images, and you can even show your ads in Gmail.
35. Google Display Planner
Google Display Planner is a free tool that helps you find your target audience. All you have to do is type in a keyword related to your content, and it will give you lots of valuable information about the audience who is interested in that keyword.
36. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is another free tool that helps you find the keywords that your audience is searching for. Just type in a keyword related to your content, and it will show you a list of related search terms along with search volume and competition for those keywords.
You can use this tool for your search ads of course, but you can also use it to help you find keywords for getting organic traffic to your content as well.
Content Syndication Tools
Looking for places to syndicate your content? Content syndication is when you push your content to third-party sites, either as a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail. Here are some content syndication tools to get you started.
37. Outbrain
Outbrain is a content promotion tool that recommends your content on large, respected media properties such as CNN, People, and ESPN. Last year, Outbrain reached approx. 557 million people each month with their promoted content.
38. Taboola
With Taboola, you can promote your content on MSN, NBC, USA Today, Tribune and more. This year, Taboola reached approx. 1 billion people each month.
39. Zemanta
Zemanta is a content promotion tool that allows you to access 25+ social, native, mobile and discovery networks, all in one place. They partner with Outbrain, so you get access to their content discovery network as well.
40. SimpleReach
SimpleReach allows you to promote your content on Forbes, TIME, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, PBS, and more.
A neat feature is their predictive analytics tool, which gives your content a “Predictive Score” so you know which content will drive the most social traffic.
41. StumbleUpon Ads
StumbleUpon Ads is a tool that allows you to promote your content on the StumbleUpon content discovery platform. When users sign up for the platform, they select which topics they are interested in, so that your content can be delivered to the right people.
Here’s an interesting case study on how BuzzFeed used StumbleUpon to promote their branded content.
That’s it! The ultimate list of content promotion tools.
Now it’s your turn. Go ahead and try one of the above tools to start driving organic and paid traffic to your content. You may also want to check out 25 Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic by 1064% and see our list of the best content marketing tools and best WordPress plugins.
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