As a content marketer, what do you think are the most important aspects of your job? Content creation, of course, but what else?

An oft forgotten but equally important part of a content marketers job is distributing and promoting content the right way.

While I’m sure that none of you truly believe in the, “If I write it, they will come” ideology, are you really doing enough to promote your content and generate traffic for your blog?

If you think you aren’t (or if you need some new tips), here are 10 things you should be doing to promote your blog posts and other content. This checklist will ensure you can concentrate on your content creation and breeze through the promotion of you content.

The Essential Blog Post Promotion Checklist — 10 things you absolutely must do!

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Social media sharing -

• This one actually goes without saying but you’d be surprised at the number of people who don’t get this right. Simply sharing your latest blog post on all your social media channels with a boring one-line description won’t cut it. You have to tailor updates based on the social network to get the best results. So what do you need to do?
• Create unique updates for each social network. For eg. I’ve seen that longer descriptions along with an image work best for Facebook while using the right hashtags on Twitter can get you a lot of shares.
• Make sure to mention the people, companies, tools etc. that you may have included in your post. These people will be more likely to share your updates to their followers thus increasing your reach.
• Not all of your followers will see each update you make so ensure that you schedule 2–3 updates for each blog post you publish (at different times) to get more views.

Email newsletter - Adding your popular blog posts to your email newsletters is a tried and tested technique but one that gives great results.

• Your newsletter subscribers are people that voluntarily love to hear from you so why not make it worth their while?
• Include the link as well as any extra tips, resources or tools that weren’t mentioned in your post. Make your subscribers feel extra special and they’ll keep coming back for more.

Signature - Adding the link to your signature is an easy step too but is also easily ignored. Judging by the average amount of emails everyone sends, this alone can get you a decent number of views from clients, vendors etc.

• Don’t stop at yourself though. Ask everyone in your organization to include the latest blog post in their signatures.
• There are some great apps that automatically add your latest blog post to your signature. Wisestamp is one such tool (for Gmail) and is something I personally use as well.

Content syndication - Content syndication is also a great way to get some eyeballs on your content. If you have a relatively regular blog, you can syndicate your content on sites like alltop.com or afbuzz.com.

Social bookmarking sites & communities to submit your content to - While social bookmarking may not be as popular a tactic anymore, it can still get you a steady stream of visitors. You can submit your content to Digg, Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites.

• Scoop.it is another site you should spend some serious time promoting your blog on. Scoop.it is a content curation site which allows users to ‘scoop’ posts and articles they like. There are a ton of marketing boards that can you suggest you post to.
• My recommendation is to shortlist 25–30 boards based on your area of expertise, build a relationship with these curators (by following them, tweeting about them and providing valuable scoops i.e. not just your own) and suggest your blog posts to each of them.
• A few other communities to consider are inbound.org and serpd.com.
• A word of advice, though — nobody likes peddlers. Even in such content aggregating communities, providing value should be your first goal. Once you’ve established some authority and trust, you can go ahead and submit your content (within reason, of course).

Commenting on blogs, Q&A sites and forums - This can be a huge traffic source and can also help you build some meaningful relationships.

• BlogsYou can start off by finding other blog posts with a similar or complimentary theme to yours and add some kind of value in your comment. It could be a resource, a tool you’ve used, a correction or even criticism! By leaving an authentic and valuable comment along with a link to your blog post you should be able to get qualified visits from people looking for related content.
• Q&A SitesQ&A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers are also a fantastic place to promote content. You can begin by finding questions your post can answer sufficiently well. Do keep in mind, though that the Quora audience prefers long, detailed and factual answers so just sharing your link won’t do.
• Forums - Sometimes, going back to the basics helps. Forum marketing still works in many cases so find the right forums for your kind of content and join the discussion.

Submitting to daily/weekly link roundups - Link roundups are essentially posts where bloggers list their favourite articles from the week. Finding weekly roundups in your niche isn’t difficult — simply use one of the following search queries and you should have a nice little list of roundups.

• “Niche+Weekly Roundup”“Niche+Daily Roundup”“Niche+Weekend Reading”
• Once you do have a list, you can set out to build a relationship with these bloggers and regularly submit your posts to them.

Reaching out to influencers - Another remarkable strategy is to proactively reach out to the influencers in your list and let them know about a post that you think their audience will appreciate.

• To find the influencers in your space you can use either Topsy or Wefollow. Then shortlist & categorize them based on their audience and style of writing so you know which posts to pitch to whom.
• Proceed with caution here. There’s nothing more annoying than a spammy, pitchy, email/tweet/DM asking for an irrelevant post to be shared. Instead, do your homework and only target the influencers whose audience you think will benefit with your post.

Paid advertising - Paid advertising, though not part of everyone’s marketing plan, is a surefire way to get more traffic to your blog.

• You should particularly look at Facebook promoted posts as these have a high success rate for good, useful content.
• If your budget permits, you can also look at Adwords to supplement other activities.
• Your strategy will depend on the kind of posts and the niche you’re targeting,but remember, trial and error is the only way to learn in this case.

Re-purposing content as a slide deck or infographic - This is actually one of my favourite ways to get traffic for an older piece of content. Simply re-purposing your evergreen content into a swanky new slide deck or infographic and sharing these can give you a huge boost.

• You can share slide decks on sites like Slideshare.com and Sliderocket.com. There are also a large number of infographic aggregating sites like Visual.ly where you can submit infographics.
• Remember to link back to your original post to make sure you get some traffic back to your blog.

So there you have it, some great tips to promote your blog content.