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A Simple and Indispensable Template for Content Marketing Distribution

One of our recent posts, 3 Tips for Increasing Your Content Productivity, had a lot of interest and comments. As the author, Roger Parker, aptly states, “Under the right circumstances, many professionals are capable of preparing great content for blogs, books, and online sign-up incentives. But only a few can consistently produce quality marketing content on a daily basis. Those who do, usually have a system or process in place to help them meet the daily deadline challenge.” So this week, we will be bringing you more productivity tips and ideas each afternoon. 

As content marketers, we often spend our time cranking out as much useful content as we can. In our zest to produce, it’s easy to overlook the very important next step: distributing our content. (In fact, two of our most popular posts on CMI have been about distribution: 12 things to do after you have published a blog post with the updated 7 additional tips.)

To help me stay organized, I developed this simple template that walks me through the key channels we use and helps me remember the specific details for each. I don’t necessarily fill out this template for each project, but I walk through it so I don’t forget anything.

A snapshot of some of the template is below, and you can download the Word doc that you can customize.


The template provides the following information:

  • Name of the piece of content
  • Registration page: If the piece requires registration, I record this URL for easy reference.
  • Blog post URL: We often use blog posts to announce our new content. Of course, you can also use this template to help you plan how to distribute any piece of content — including blog posts.
  • Customized shortened link: If we are directing people to a specific shortened link, I include it here.
  • Key distribution channels: This template includes the key channels I use, but you can customize it based on what is important for your business.
  • Date to start promoting content on each channel: Instead of promoting the content on every channel on the first day, consider a scattered release to keep the momentum going.
  • Specific details on each channel: There are different things to remember for each social network. For instance, the section on Twitter includes sample tweets as well as user IDs of people you want to mention.
  • Reminders about various channels: When applicable, I include details on the best uses of various channels. For instance, in Facebook you can only tag company pages from company pages; people can tag a company or a person.
  • Repurposing suggestions: Do you have content you may want to release in different forms? For instance, we have our Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples for which we require registration. We posted a subset of this on Slidehshare with a call to action that leads someone to your landing page for full registration.
By following the steps in this template, I am much more confident that I am getting the word out about our key content while also reducing the time I spend. What other things do you do to keep your distribution strategy on track? 
Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.
Image credit: Bigstock