58 places to promote your visual content for free
This October, I was hired as a consultant to look after the content marketing efforts of Viraltag. I published my first post: 33 apps for creating stunning visual content
And then it was time to promote it. First 3 days I promoted it on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. The performance was dismal. 150 odd reads in first 3 days. Even the places I expected would bring some traffic didn’t fare well. I was worried. After all my job was at stake.
I had made a list of places to promote the post. So, after trying out the promising places mentioned above, I posted it at couple of other places and signed off.
I woke up in the morning to check the stats. I was stunned.
My submission was on top of sub-reddit, Entrepreneur with 191 votes in first 12 hours. It brought 3000 visitors in those 12 hours. Till now just this one source of traffic has brought us close to 10k visitors. The post has garnered 465votes till now.
Here is the post on Entrepreneur Sub-reddit just in case you are curious to check out.
This wasn’t an exception. Same thing happened when the post got featured on fuckinghomepage and brought additional 3k visitors to the blog.
There are probably 10 more sources I can cite which has driven more traffic than Twitter or Facebook did.
As a content marketer, I spent half of my time promoting the content we create. And I am sure you do that as well. I would be wrong if I say Twitter or Facebook has became irrelevant. But there are communities you probably don’t know which can drive meaningful traffic to your content be it blog post or any kind of visual content.
Our instincts tell us to promote on places most of us hang out like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. That’s what every marketer does. This has made bringing any meaningful traffic from such sites even more challenging.
So how could we get some great traffic to our blog?
Most of us are as active on small communities as on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This applies to your potential audience as well. So as a content marketer, we need to find such communities, engage with them and share the content.
To make it easier for you, we set out to find new communities to promote your visual content.
We have listed the communities here. Please make sure to spend sometime to see what community is interested in and whether the content you plan to share is suitable for it or not.
Facebook doesn’t need any introduction. We typically publish every visual content from business page and personal profile. But we tend to forgot that there tons of active groups where your audience hangs out. E.g. the Facebook group ‘Double Your Email List’ has 4700 active users and can be great place for anyone who is in to email marketing.
With a little bit of search you can find out such communities and engage with rest of the members. It will help you to share visual content to targeted audience and get inbound traffic.
For obvious reasons, Google+ offers some serious SEO advantages be it Infographics, product images or gifs. More number of Google +1s to your content directly results in better search ranking. Moz has outlined the advantages of uploading content on Google+.
Just like Facebook, Google+ has pretty active communities for almost anything.
Do you know that Tweets with visual content like images, gifs receive 150% more retweets. You can upload any kind of visual content on Twitter which claims to have more than 284 million active users. To make sure your tweet doesn’t get lost in other tweets, tweet the content multiple times at a different time sets. Also use proper hashtags so that it appears in relevant searches.
Pinterest primarily thrives on visual content.
Lot of bloggers and content marketers have tasted huge success with Pinterest. Here is a post on how to drive massive traffic to your blog from Pinterest.
Pinterest is suitable for product images, visual quotes and Infographics.
Here are few similar sites to Pinterest. Couple of them focussed on particular niches like food, travel.
- Ello
- Flickr
- Reddit-pics
- Wanelo
- Weheartit
- Gentlemint
- Food Gawker
- I Wanna Nom
- VisualizeUs
- Reddit-funny
- Reddit-aww
We all are sucker for videos. That’s why Youtube is second largest search engine after Google which processes 3 billion searches every month.
You don’t have to create exclusive content for Youtube. Instead, you can re-purpose your popular blog in to a video and upload it on Youtube.
Sounds rubbish? This guy makes $36k monthly in affiliate commission from just one video How to create a blog in less than 4 minutes with Bluehost. It could have just been a simple blog post which might have fetched hundred of dollars for him. Peanuts when compared to what he earns from the video.
Few other popular video sites to submit your videos:
Tumblr is 2014’s fastest growing social network with more than 50 million users. It is highly popular blogging platform among youth. You can upload almost any kind of visual content here.
With over 330 millions registered users, Linkedin is a great place to your get your visual content like Infographics, visual quotes and slides in front of large audiences. Also Linkedin boasts active communities for almost every business topic you can think of. So, you can share your content on such communities as well.
Linkedin Publshing
Linkedin has launched a publishing platform where you can publish your content instead of just sharing links. Gregory Ciotti of Helpscout has seen a great success with Linkedin Publishing.
Make sure to request an invite so you can start publishing your visual content on Linkedin.
Great place to upload Slides, Infographics as well as blog posts re-purposed as slides.
Every month, more than 60 million unique visitors flock to the site to find new content. You can even build a following of your potential audience just like Twitter. Every time you upload a new slide, followers get notified via email.
Couple of more popular sites to upload your slides.
It is a home to world’s most viral images which are curated by its community.
Imgur enjoys more than 200 million visits every month. It is perfect place to upload product images, albums, funny pics, gifs and memes.
Visually has a strong community of people who love Infographics. If you Infographic gets featured by it’s staff, you can get anywhere between 1k to 7k views.
Here are other sites where you can submit your Infographics.
We all love memes and we love sharing them. Memes regularly make on the front page of Reddit and can garner thousands of views. Social media marketers for B2C businesses must explore creating memes. Because users are constantly on a lookout for funny and interesting content to share. And what could be better than getting it from the brand they love.
Few more sites to upload your memes.
Gifs has became darling of the Reddit, Tumblr and now Twitter users. Subreddit Gifs alone has more than 4 millions followers.
Few more sites to upload your Gifs.
Sites where you can share almost every type of visual content
Here are few more sites where you can share almost any kind of visual content or blog posts.
- Stumbleupon
- Delicious
- Digg
- Kingged
- The Web Blend
- Zabox
- Slashdot
- Scoopit
- Metafilter
- Newsvine
- Folkd
- Fark
Sites to submit specific type of content
- Playbuzz: One of the best places to submit interactive quizzes which have been made popular by Buzzfeed.
- Listly : Listly lets you create lists with rich content and showcase to its community. You can even embed such lists on your blog or website.
- Storify: You can create a shareable stories from visual content and publish it.
Keep in Mind
While all of the above are great places to share your visual content, you need to absolutely make sure that the content you are sharing is really valuable, entertaining or useful to the community instead of focusing on how to promote your brand as much as possible. In fact, the more you stay away from pushing your brand via content, more will be the chances of your content getting attention. Anybody who finds your content interesting is likely to check what your business does no matter whether the content you create is highly relevant to your brand or not.
Over to you
I am sure they are hundreds of more communities where you can engage and add value through the content. Do let us know in comments if you are aware of such communities.
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