Hi Reader,

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I had a win at work last week, and it’s all thanks to content distribution. I talk about distribution pretty often on this newsletter. And that’s because it’s a huge part of achieving success with content marketing.

“If you create great content, it’ll distribute itself”

If you think that I’m about to share another tried and tested distribution strategy with you, you’re right. Let’s get to it.
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In today’s edition:

• Forums for content distribution
• How to handle content requests from colleagues
• Ebook: Building a high-performing content team

Estimated read time: 5 minutes 20 seconds

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Forums are a content distribution hack 👌

I’ve been reading a book by Ross Simmonds lately - Create Once, Distribute Forever. It’s taught me many lessons. Of all of them, the most valuable is learning what great distribution is. Great distribution is when you can consistently drive results from a channel that your competitor has overlooked or can’t access.

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So how do you get those channels? By carrying out audience research. I know—that’s the answer to a lot of content marketing questions, but for good reason. I started with finding out what channels my ICP is most active on. Next, I used Ross’ channel distribution framework to determine my mix.

Reddit & Quora were my rocket channels—channels that are popular with my target audience but not with competitors. I noted this down and decided to try an experiment to confirm my strategy.
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We released our first YouTube video on a brand new channel, and shared the link to the video on a subreddit we knew our ICP audience was active on. The results? Over 100 subscribers and almost 2k views for that video in less than 24 hours. 43.7% of our total YouTube video views came from external channels and 58.5% came from Reddit. I call that a success!

Now I’m not saying that you need to hop on Reddit and distribute your content there too. At least not without some audience research first. The lesson here is that you should explore channels that you may have dismissed as irrelevant. For me, that's forums like Reddit, Quora and Hacker News.

If you end up exploring content distribution on Reddit, here are a few guidelines to remember:

• Leverage multiple subreddits your target audience are active on.
• Make sure to follow all community guidelines in the subreddits you choose.
• Engage with other users. Answer their questions. Don’t just plug in your own content.
• Most subreddits don’t allow self-promotion, so make your content distributions as organic as possible.
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Action points for you?

1. Speak to your ICP audience
2. Conduct a competitive analysis

These two tasks will lead you to identify your rocket channels and level up your content distribution 🚀
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Handling content requests from colleagues 🤨

Every content marketer has likely fielded off multiple requests from other departments. Can you create a blog post about this feature? Can you write a help center article about this workflow? We need copy for a landing page!
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Okay, stand in line please.

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Marketers often complain that their colleagues don’t understand how difficult their job can be. And this leads to unrealistic expectations when they send in their requests. Sales expects you to create a pitch deck in a few hours. Product expects you to write copy for a product landing page in a day. All this can be overwhelming. So you need a way to handle requests efficiently.
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Here’s the playbook I learned at Vendease:

1. Create a request form: At Vendease, we used Airtable for this. But if you use Notion more often at your company, a simple integration between Fillout and a Notion database works too.
2. Prioritize: Your form must include these fields.
   1. Type of request, i.e. landing page, pitch deck, blog post, etc.
   2. Priority, i.e. high, low, medium, ASAP.
   3. Target audience - anyone of your audience segments

Depending on what your company looks like, there are other fields you can include. The ones above are the most important. These should help you prioritize which requests to start with and prioritize.

3. Create a request guideline: These guidelines must include turnaround times for each request type, and how to fill the form appropriately. This will help you manage expectations.

4. Communicate clearly: The best way to do this is create a Slack channel specifically for content requests. In this channel, you can discuss the status of requests and share deliverables when they’re done.

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A must-read for content leaders 📕

I’m in my first content leadership role. Of course, this means that I don’t have leadership experience. Basically, I need all the help I can get with building and managing a high-performing content team.

I’ve been reading an ebook that’s taught me valuable lessons, so I thought to share it with you too. It’s a must-read for every content leader.
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If you haven’t noticed, you’re receiving this newsletter on a Sunday and not a Friday. I’d like to switch it up a bit to fit my new schedule. But your input is super important to me, so what day would you really like to receive this newsletter? Reply to this email to let me know!

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Until next time,

Olohireme

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