In the vast world that is the internet, it may sometimes be difficult to stand out from the crowd and separate yourself from the rest of the competition. Your content may be buried under an avalanche of similar pieces which may go unnoticed by consumers. In addition, today’s consumers have extremely short attention spans and don’t usually want to take the time to sift through mountains of similar content pieces to find yours.

Even if your content is superior to its counterparts, it may still be difficult for it to actually be seen by consumers and can still be crowded out by a large quantity of similar content. This can be detrimental to a business, as you can spend a lot of time and money creating quality content just to have it flop because it goes unrecognized. Thankfully you may be able to take the necessary steps to avoid this from happening by promoting your content. However, what exactly is paid promotion on the internet? How does it work, and is it really cost effective?

What Is Paid Content Promotion?

Paid content promotion can be defined as the act of paying a platform to have your content placed higher on a search results page. The idea behind this tactic is that nothing ever markets itself. If you’re having trouble organically increasing your content’s search rankings then perhaps you can turn to paying to promote it.

A variety of platforms offer paid promotion, making it a versatile and potentially very effective tool. For example, if you just released a YouTube video containing tips for employee wellness and it is struggling to stand out from similar content, then you can pay for the video to be one of the first results to appear when a certain keyword is searched. Many different platforms offer paid content promotion from major search engines like Google and Bing to social media platforms like Youtube, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook.

How Do You Do It?

The first step to paid promotion is choosing a list of keywords that you would like your content to appear high on search rankings for. These keywords or phrases are typically closely associated with your content and the topic that it covers. You then need to set a budget for how much you can spend to promote your content. Larger budgets allow your paid promotions to appear more often and also offer more flexibility. You also need to decide whether or not your paid promotion will run only when the exact keyword or phrase is searched, or if it will appear when similar words and phrases are searched. Typically if you have a larger budget you can afford this luxury and potentially rein in even more customers. Finally, you need to decide what content you want to promote. Try to promote your best content to hook viewers, or you can try to promote content that you feel is underappreciated and could benefit from a boost in audience.

Is It Worth It?

Although the extra boost in the audience may sound tempting, paying to promote your content is always beneficial. Paid promotion is typically most effective when trying to convince a consumer to take an action such as signing up a free trial, not for promoting specific content. In addition, online paid promotion can be expensive and can eat through a marketing budget very quickly.

Paid promotion requires a lot of effort and careful planning for it to truly be cost-effective, and sometimes businesses simply don’t have the financial luxury to have qualified marketing experts and still run various ad campaigns.  That being said, if you have the resources and play your cards right paid content promotion can be a great way to increase your audience. You simply need to asses the situation your business is currently in and see if it could benefit from paid content promotion.