When it comes to content promotion, there’s a fine line between purely promotion and spam.

Back to three months ago when I was still unfamiliar with content marketing, I thought the only way to increase my traffic is to do content promotion. Well, it’s not entirely wrong to think that way. But, I have overlooked it.

There are actually many other ways to get your content out there. For example, if you produced a quality content that readers like to read, your readers will share it for you even before you promote it by yourself.

But in my case, I’ve been promoting all of my blog posts for almost everyday. I promoted my content in the morning and afternoon to every social media that I have – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. However, my traffic wasn’t increasing, and I didn’t received as much feedback compared to my teammates. I wondered why…

Then, my teammates told me that I’ve been posting my content on social media platforms all day long, which is unnecessary because too much promotion isn’t promotion anymore – it’s spamming.

Spamming your content promotion is bad because most readers will just ignore your blog post.

After that, I stopped promoting my content with the spamming method. I realized my mistake. Not only spamming my content annoys the readers, there are other reasons as well. Here are the reasons why spamming is a big NO for your content promotion:

1. You Will Leave A Bad Impression

It is important to have a plan – just like writing your content. Every time before writing a content, I’m sure you will carefully plan on what to include and what is the message you would like to deliver to your readers. The same goes to content promotion.

You have to plan what to write when you are promoting your content so that it will attract the mass audiences to become your readers. It wouldn’t be very effective if you write only the title because readers can get the same thing when they click into your blog post.

For example, instead of stating what readers can read from the link, why not describe what your blog post is about?

Writing different descriptions can avoid being too spammy. If you’re writing the same description, readers will see you as a lazy writer.

Other than that, you have to track where you’ve promoted your content so that you wouldn’t post at the same community on Google+ again.

There are several ways to track where and when you have promoted your content so that you wouldn’t get confused. To track in which Google+ community that you have posted in, you can check the comment section of your blog post.

You can also keep track of your shares to Google Plus Communities on the comment section below your blog post.

Another option is that you can do it like Azfar, where he tracked his content promotion on Google Sheets.

Creating your own Google Sheets is also another easier way to keep track of your content promotion as it is more organized and saves a lot of your time.

Keeping track on where you have promoted your content is very important to avoid spamming. In addition, readers will also feel that you’re sincerely providing valuable information to them. You can’t trick the readers. They can easily tell if you are putting an effort in writing for them.

Therefore, you should always keep the readers happy and leave them a good impression, not the other way round.

2. Traffic Will Be Affected Negatively

Do you know that there’s a best and worst time to promote your content on social media?

In my case, I thought that as long as I’ve posted, people will eventually notice my post. But that is not entirely true. Imagine if you’re only promoting your content when people are sleeping, it’s no surprise that there won’t be any traffic.

This also means that no matter how much time I’ve spent in spamming my content, it’s pointless because the timing wasn’t right.

People surf the Net the most when they are taking a break during working hours. Every social media has its best and worst time to promote your content, depending on your target audiences. To find out the best and worst time to post on social media, you can refer to Zhi Yuan’s post.

It is important to know when is the best time your audiences will be on social media so that you will get maximum exposure when you do content promotion.

Another way to figure out which are the best time to reach to your audiences is to do an experiment. Promote your blog posts on different days and time, then take note of which days or time that you have more likes, retweets, or +1.

With this method, you will be able to learn what works the best with your audiences and you will gain more traffic to your blog posts.

3. Pushing Your Audiences Away

Do you think any audiences would want to click into your blog post when you spammed like this?

When there isn’t any likes, retweets, or +1 at your content, you should be worried. It’s probably not because that your content isn’t interesting, but could it be that you’ve promoted it before?

Not many people will read a content more than twice, unless they are taking your content as a reference. But the majority wouldn’t do that. So when people notice that you’re posting the same content over and over again, they will get fed up. This way, you’re not only pushing your audiences away, but your action can affect your traffic negatively.

If you have stopped spamming, but there isn’t any feedback yet, then you should interact with your readers by asking them a question at the end of the blog post. Questions like “What do you think of today’s topic?“, “Have you ever experienced the same thing?“, and even a “Leave a comment down below and we can discuss it together” will do.

By asking some questions at the end of your blog post, you’re communicating with the readers. For example:

Interaction with your readers can increase engagement, which can help to increase your traffic.

Like I mentioned before in my previous post – when you’re writing content, make sure to treat your readers like friends. Then, you will be able to connect with them, and vice versa. As inbound marketers, we should focus on attracting our readers rather than pushing them away.

4. The Communities Will Remove You

Many marketers prefer using Google+ to promote their content because there are many different communities that they can share their content to. People who share the same interests gather in Google+ communities to share and exchange all the latest information, which makes it a great place for your content promotion.

In every Google+ community, there are rules and regulations that you should follow. If you are ignoring the guidelines, the group will either remove you from the community or they will delete your post, which makes your content promotion useless.

You should firstly read the rules and regulations of every community before sharing your content on Google+.

Not only Google+ communities, the groups on LinkedIn has its own rules as well.

To prevent from being removed, you should double check before posting. Check the guidelines – have you written your content promotion according to the community’s rules? Are you repeating the same sentences?

If you’re certain that you have not violated any of the rules and regulations, then you’re good to go! Start to interact with the other members in the Google+ communities and LinkedIn groups to get to know more people from the same industry as you.

5. Lower Conversion Rate

Do you still remember how much time you’ve spent on converting the audiences to your readers, and from readers to your subscribers?

Spamming your content promotion on social media doesn’t only make the users to unfollow you, but the readers who have subscribed to your e-mail subscriptions will get annoyed and unsubscribe too. When this happens, your conversion rate will decrease.

Before this in SEOPressor, we have been sending e-mails every day to our subscribers to update on our latest blog post, but then we noticed that we were losing more subscribers each day. When that happened, we realized that we have to do something about it. That’s when we came out with a solution – instead of sending it everyday, we send it once a month.

This is how SEOPressor’s weekly digest format looks like – we compiled all the blog posts in a week so that readers can read it at once.

And so, we compiled all of our blog posts into a weekly digest format so that readers can easily read all the articles in just one e-mail. Not only it will not bother the subscribers that much, the risk of losing subscribers have minimized too.

Therefore, every time before you click that ‘post’ button, ask yourself:

• How many times have I promoted my content today? Is it too much?
• Is my description telling the readers what is my content about?
• Did I keep track on which groups I have promoted my content in?
• Am I posting at the right time, or the worst time?
• Did I interact with my readers in the content?
• Have I read the rules and regulations in the Google+ community and LinkedIn groups?

Conclusion

We all know that one of the famous black hat tactics involved spamming because spamming not only annoys your audiences, even the search engines hate it. So why do the same in content promotion? People wouldn’t be convinced to read your blog post.

From my experience, I realized that I didn’t plan my content promotion well, which is why it leads to spamming. We must always have a plan no matter what we’re doing, or else our effort will be wasted.

As the saying goes by, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. This explains why it is vital to plan your content promotion. You have to target the right audiences, map your content, and remember to optimize it. If you just promote it non-stop without having the audiences in mind, you can’t expect the audiences to read every single blog post of yours.

Have you ever spammed your content promotion like I did? If so, how did you stop? Do share your experience with me in the comment section down below.

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Updated: 19 April 2024

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknowns.