Maybe your #content promotion budget’s been slashed. Maybe you never had one. Maybe you just want to give every #content piece – blog, article, e-book, or video – the best chance to perform before deciding which ones to invest any of your paid promotion budget in.

Whatever the reason, use this resource to help your audience find your content without spending much more than time.

Remember, you’ll likely revisit many of these items throughout the #content’s life cycle because the publishing process is a cycle of planning, creating, promoting, measuring, and optimizing.

Plan for #traffic

In the planning stage, decide where and how you’ll get people to the #content. At this point, most of the work involves SEO, though your overall plan likely will use some combination of SEO, social promotion, email alerts and newsletters, personal outreach, and channels.

#Content successful for search engines (at least in theory) meets the information needs of people conducting the searches. Sure, not every piece is designed to be a search magnet. But figuring out how your #content can meet your audience’s information needs will likely help in email and social promotion too.

Consider search intent

One of the most important steps in the planning stage is to put yourself in your reader’s shoes. What questions do they have about the topic you’re planning to cover? How would they phrase the questions? What kind of content are they looking for (informational, transactional, or navigational)?

Structure content and build relationships for backlinks and social promotion

Backlinks to your #content are an important ranking factor. Of course, you can’t earn backlinks until the piece is live, but you can plan the content to be a backlink magnet.

One of the best ways we’ve found to do this is to conduct and plan content around original research. CMI blogs about original research can be top link earners.

Another way to create #content for backlink success is to feature interviews with experts in your field. This helps make your post authoritative and almost guarantees that the post will be shared.

People who know and think favorably about you are more likely to link to your work. Interact organically with writers, editors, influencers, and industry figures to develop a relationship before you want them to link to your #content.

During creation

Incorporate the work from the planning stage into your #content brief (if you’re assigning) or the content itself (if you’re the creator). Then, make sure to do the following as you create, edit, and prepare the content for publishing.

Optimize your #content for search

Apply the research you did during the planning stage to your #content. You’ve probably read dozens of articles on how to do this. Incorporate the key terms, phrases, and questions into each of these elements:

URL

Page title

Meta description

Headlines

Heading (H1, H2, H3) tags

Image metadata

Remember to optimize titles and descriptions for videos too.

Add links to related and best performing posts

Make sure to spread the traffic love from one post to another on your site through internal linking.

The simplest way to do this is to link text phrases within a post to an article (or video) that helps the reader learn more.

TIP: Keep the reader’s interest in mind. Include links that help a reader explore a topic more thoroughly. Don’t link to articles just to meet some guideline for the optimal number of internal links within an article. If it’s not related, leave it out.

Add links to your new post from older, high-#traffic blog posts

Look for high-traffic articles or pages on your site related to the content you’re creating. Write a reminder to yourself or instructions for your production team to add a link to the new #content (once it’s live) from that high-traffic page.

Add Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet makes it easy for your readers to quickly tweet about your #content – you’ve essentially done the work for them (they can edit or customize th