You probably already know that content marketing is all the rage. Creating relevant, timely and useful content is one of the simplest and most inexpensive ways to promote thought leadership and foster relationships with your target audience—but creating great content alone doesn’t necessarily mean website traffic.

Many companies and bloggers allocate much time, resources and attention to developing content, but are left scratching their heads when they look at their analytics. Typically, low page visits are due to the company’s failure to properly promote content in ways that are most relevant for their brand and most importantly: the target audience.

Don’t commit this common content marketing mistake. Use these 13 quick tips for promoting your brand’s content.

1. Pull out five to six interesting and shareable facts from a given piece of content and Tweet them out in waves with a link to your page.
2. If your content has several images, or contains a gallery, pick the most impactful one or make a collage of several, and post it to Instagram or create a board on Pinterest to showcase all of the images and include links to your original content.
3. Ask an expert for a quote on your subject matter and drop his or her name when promoting the piece of content on social media.
4. Send out e-mails in the form of a newsletter to promote recent posts to your subscription list.
5. Start a PPC campaign for your content and test its effectiveness.
6. Link older pieces of content inside new works to keep people clicking around on your blog or website.
7. Use traditional advertising methods such as direct mail, radio or TV to promote content to broad audiences, increase awareness, and build web traffic.
8. Comment on other people’s blogs from similar industries, with links to relevant content.
9. Check-up on the back links of your site by using Google Analytics or another web analytics tool. If they’re weak, start a link building campaign to build credibility.
10. Make sure your content is fueled by a healthy diet of keywords and phrases you want to rank for.
11. Create an annual list of the top companies in you industry and let them know they made the list. They may have a positive response on social media or comment on your site.
12. Repurpose the content from a book or ebook you’ve written into shorter forms of content such as blog posts or articles. This helps generate more content and promotes your book or ebook.
13. Use earned media and public relations to promote popular pieces of content.

Some of the methods will work well for some brands, but not others. Ideally, no two brands should be exactly alike. It’s important to do you research. Take a look at where your target audience goes for information when building content promotion tactics in to your strategy. 

When generating a content strategy, always remember: writing and publishing content is only half the battle. Promoting your content is the only way to ensure that your content will be seen and generate traffic to your website. To learn more about each component of building a solid content marketing strategy, read the white paper How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy.