• Tweet
• Buffer
• 

Note: There are still spots open for my “Pay What It’s Worth” Blog/Site Audit. If you want to be the proud owner of a blog that drives business don’t miss this risk-free opportunity. 

In one of my previous posts I talked about creating a content mix that will help you increase exposure (and, in turn, your bottom line).

The idea is that you want to have a good mix of informative content that puts your expertise on display, exposure-oriented content that…well…gets you exposure, and persuasive content that actually sells your product or service.

I created this “amazingly artistic” timeline graph that shows exactly how this mix would work:

Sometimes a piece of content can be so informative, that it actually gets you exposure as well.

An example might be something like my content curation guide, which got a decent amount of shares on social networks with very little effort on my part to promote it.

Not All Exposure Is Created Equal

You can’t really say that the content curation post that I wrote went viral, though. In fact, it’s very difficult to make anything that is truly informative go viral. Especially when it it super-targeted like that post was.

But when you are trying to get exposure, targeted is what you want.

It’s easy to throw together a compilation video of cats farting and get plenty of exposure. Is that really going to help you get more leads and increase your bottom line.

I know it wouldn’t help me one bit.

So how do we get exposure while simultaneously getting the attention of your target audience?

the Key Ingredient For Exposure

To really maximize your reach you need to get yourself out in front of a new audience. And in today’s day-and-age that means getting play on social networks.

One way to attract more social activity is to feature experts in your field like I did with my interview series. The people that participate will likely promote the post. They understand that the other will promote it as well, and there will be a lot of inter-promotion going on.

They benefit from it as much as you do.

But…

Social sharing can be a bit fickle. If someone Tweets out your content, chances are that won’t result in hundreds of people Re-Tweeting the message.

The real magic happens when people actually visit your post, consume then content and then share it.

Tweets get washed out quickly in people’s feeds. But blog posts are more stable. Visitors are more likely to see them. So what you really want is to be featured on other blogs.

Another Monkey Wrench in the Equation

One way to get featured on other blogs is to guest post.

This is certainly a popular promotional tactic. You get to tap into the following that other bloggers have already built.

And if you are super-human, like Danny Iny is, you can create the illusion of being everywhere at once by getting featured on a ton of different blogs at once.

Does it work? Sure does.

But you have to create a unique piece of content for every blog you guest post on.

This take a lot of effort. And it an be pretty time consuming. But this tactic provides the perfect message of informative and exposure-oriented content that you are looking for.

It allows you to put your expertise on display to a completely new audience.

And, if you want to use this tactic more efficiently and effectively, Danny actually created a program to teach you how he used the method to quickly grow his business.

It’s called “Write Like Freddy” and you can pick it up by clicking here. 

The real magic in terms of exposure, and getting yourself established as an expert, happens when you get syndicated. But unfortunately that comes with its own set of problems…

The Fear of Syndication

The real magic in terms of getting targeted exposure is syndication.

One way to do get syndicated is to create your own Tribe on Triberr. Dino Dogan created the network to help “small time” bloggers compete with the “big time” ones (which often have inferior content).

The Triberr plugin allows for a Re-Blog feature (much like the option you have with Tumblr).

But building tribes is also time-intensive. And getting your tribe members to agree to syndicate you might be a bit of work as well.

There is still a stigma about sharing written content online.

This partially stems from the historical scare of “plagiarism.” From our first days in English class in school we are ingrained with the idea that plagiarism is evil.

And it sure is. If you are copying someone else’s content and claiming that it is your own then I have a few choice words for you.

But if you are sharing someone’s content and giving them credit for it, then you are really doing them a favor.

Unfortunately some people don’t really see it that way and still get mad about people syndicating their content (weirdos).

The other cause of this “fear of syndication” is penalties from Google for “duplicate content.”

I’ve seen Dino field questions and try to debunk the false beliefs about duplicate content several times. And quite frankly the whole duplicate content penalty from Google is a bunch of B.S.

My SlideShare marketing experiment proves that.

Nevertheless, this fear of syndication is a reality and something that we, as content creators, have to deal with.

Beating the Fear of Syndication

What if there was a way you could create content that people were more than willing to syndicate without fearing “plagiarism” or “duplicate content” issues?

Alas, there is.

We are living in an increasingly visual world. And while I don’t think written content is going anywhere, we now have the ability to create other forms of content with relative ease.

Born out of this digital, visual world…are infographics.

I’ve been sharing them a bit more often lately, and will likely continue to do so.

While I don’t always agree with the statistics they display (and make my feeling explicitly known when sharing these things), they are very effective for attracting a targeted audience and sharing informative content, all the while not really creating any of the content yourself.

After sharing (read: curating) a few infographics here, I’ve notice that people love these things, and love to share them.

And every time I post one, I am not only providing my audience with something they want to consume, but also giving extra exposure to the creator of the infographic (I always give them credit, and smart infographic designers will include the credit in the infographic itself).

For some reason sharing infographics doesn’t come with the same innate fears that sharing content does.

I think it’s probably a matter of them being born in this new digital age (versus written content that has obviously been around for eons).

Whatever the case may be, infographics spread like wildfire. People don’t hesitate to share them. And with new visually-oriented social networks like Pinterest, infographics have more and more viral potential by the day.

What do you think? Is it time to jump on board the infographic trend and start creating some?

Get FREE Updates and Instant Access to

The Marketing Toolbox

*No Spam Ever