According to research, blog content creation is the topmost inbound marketing priority for 55% of marketers. This is because the quality and relevant content help in attracting and engaging more audiences.
Content marketing helps in generating up to three times more leads compared to paid search advertising, such as Facebook ads.
The world of digital marketing is undergoing a revolution. Over the past few years, marketers’ ability to content sharing directly with audiences has increased tremendously. Platforms that help marketers buy media programmatically, deliver targeted messages, and automate distribution change the marketing landscape to a great extent.
Web content development is a flourishing business where various content marketing platforms are used to distribute content for better reach and link building.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently developing and creating valuable content to change or augment consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process integrated into your marketing strategy, which focuses on owning media, and not renting it.
Prominent brands and marketers utilize content marketing to gain better exposure and build trust and credibility among their audience. 90% of brands promote their content on various channels to reach a diverse and wider range of audiences.
Content marketing encourages potential customers towards making a favorable decision of purchasing your product or service.
So what are these content marketing platforms (CMPs)?
While different Content Marketing Platforms have different audiences and formats, their main aim is to increase your outreach and help in creating brand awareness and authority in your niche.
CMPs help marketers ensure that their web content development efforts get targeted, optimized, and reap full benefits of engagement from readers.
In this blog, we will share 15 most useful and popular content marketing platforms with you. If you have not yet leveraged your content marketing strategies towards these platforms, it’s high time you chose the most relevant ones and started sharing!
1) Medium:
It is the most powerful and popular free online publishing site with over 100 million visitors per month. That makes it the number one choice for marketers and bloggers to share exclusive and useful content for their readers.
Features:
- The Medium allows you to explore new ideas and stories shared by different users.
- You can read, write and share articles on various topics such as business trends, technology, politics, sports, social media, and so on.
- Add links to original posts to drive more traffic to your website.
- It shows traffic and visitor stats for every story you publish.
- Cross-promote content without harming SEO and write original quality content in long-form.
2) Pocket:
Also known as, Get Pocket, this is a well-known social bookmarking site where you save your content in any form, including blogs, web pages, images, and videos.
Features:
- Great recommendations curated for you as Pocket combs the internet to select the best articles with a new perspective and timeless classics to be worthy of your time.
- Let’s tailor text sizes, font styles, or viewing modes for focused reading.
- Categorizes with saved tags, and keeps track of key passages with highlights.
- Listen to articles on the Pocket app with the audio playback option.
3) Pinterest:
With over 442 million active users this platform lets you promote your content in any form and drives traffic by attaching live links.
Features:
- Use relevant keywords and hashtags to make your content more discoverable.
- Pinterest Lens is a key feature released in 2017 which allows the users to have the most control over their searching.
- Promoted Video brings the brand’s personality to life to effectively set any brand apart from others.
- Pinterest helps marketers to produce and maintain a creative platform. Pin Collective helps brands get what they need to produce Pinterest’s visual optimized content for Pinners.
4) Instagram:
It is another popular content-sharing platform with over 1 billion monthly users.
Features:
- It offers a unique ‘Swipe Up’ feature in its stories to redirect users to your website.
- Let’s you post content in any format as videos, carousels, content, etc.
- Insta Reels are extremely popular among audiences of all ages and create tremendous engagement.
There are other features such as Filters, Video posts, Instagram Stories, Stories Highlights, Instagram Stories videos, Instagram Live, AR filters, IGTV, Stickers, and quizzes that can be used as content creation platforms by marketers.
5) Facebook:
This is one of the oldest social media platforms which is most popular among businesses these days.
Features:
- Facebook Groups and Communities are the best way to promote content for free. There are a whopping 620 million groups on Facebook. Find and join related groups to your niche to drive quality traffic to your site.
- Live streaming to multiple pages is a feature to live stream to multiple pages, called cross-promoting.
- The benefit of this feature is that the views will be calculated across all shared postings giving a greater insight into the video.
facebook community – Bing images
6) LinkedIn:
It is considered the most professional and authentic platform to hire or find a job. Freelancers get authentic clients by networking on LinkedIn.
Features :
- Various opportunities to showcase your content for free.
- Join the LinkedIn community to share your content and thoughts.
- Add your content link to the feed post, bio, and featured sections.
- LinkedIn offers Articles features, which allows you to create blogs on LinkedIn for free.
- Embed your original content links in it to reach professional readers to drive traffic.
7) EzineArticles:
It is considered an established and popular content marketing platform for fresh writers.
Features:
- Provides useful backlinks for your website, which helps boost organic SEO efforts.
- Categorizes writers into diamond and platinum to showcase niche authority.
- Getting your article featured here means gaining some good DA for your site.
- com is a community of 360,000+ Expert Authors sharing their original articles with their 30 million+ monthly visitors.
- The authors get exposure and traffic back to their websites in exchange for submitting high-quality, original articles.
8) YouTube:
this is unlike any traditional content marketing platform because it is a social media platform mainly for video creation and promotion. You can consistently create useful content for your followers and keep them warm and engaged till they make favorable decisions about buying your services or products.
Features:
- It has over 2.1 billion active users giving a huge marketing platform to its content creators.
- Choose to create dedicated content for YouTube or repurpose traditional content by making it more audio-visually appealing for this platform.
- VidIQ is a YouTube-certified tool to help brands maximize their video marketing strategy’s potential. It emphasizes metrics like watch-time, tags, and social media shares.
- Gain more followers and subscribers through professional video marketing with paid promotion options or organic distribution.
9) Blogger:
Also known as Blogspot, this is a blog publishing platform managed by Google that makes bloggers compatible with other Google products. It is considered one of the most promising CMS platforms.
Features:
- Create blogs with ease with the simple user interphase of this platform. Whether you are a beginner or a professional it does not matter.
- Blogger lets you create posts, pages, widgets, and other multiple functions in simple steps, it has a drag and drop layout builder, to create and customize the blogs.
- It is an easy-to-maintain platform.
- Create 100 blogs from a single account, and host 100 different blogs or publish an article, without switching to any other account or dashboard.
- It offers many features from the dashboard, such as creating a post, pages, traffic stats, managing comments, etc.
- Layout to adjust and customize gadgets, it has a theme editor to choose/upload theme and edit codes, and settings to manage various things in the blog.
10) Hubpages:
This is an online community of writers, editors, artists, and everyday enthusiasts sharing expertise and information.
Features:
- Employs experts in artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop and refine computer algorithms to identify and rate the content quality.
- The algorithms monitor their success and adjust to a multitude of variables to optimize their performance.
11) TubeBuddy:
this is a useful tool for managing a YouTube channel where you can integrate this free browser extension and mobile app into any YouTube channel.
Features:
- Advanced Keyword Research
- Time-saving Tools and Templates
- A/B testing
- Comment filters
- Post Schedulers
- It Supports Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer
- Can use this tool to automate repetitive tasks.
12) Elink :
Elink is a marketing tool that curates and publishes electronic web pages and newsletters, allowing you to share documents, videos, articles, websites, etc. with ease. It allocates everything to save bookmarks and build webpages, RSS website widgets, email newsletters, social bio links, social walls, automated content, etc.
Image source: elink.io | Newsletter Creator, Web Page Builder, Bookmarker
Features:
- Helps organize, code, and display with the help of a template. You need to select the resources you want to share.
- Save Anything by downloading Elink’s super-fast Browser Extension. Save as a visual bookmark or organize visual bookmarks with folders, tags, and filters.
- Responsive Design with a Beautiful Layout. It lets you choose from 50+ templates that are interchangeable. You can update these layouts anytime.
- Choose from a single column, double or triple columns, full-width, carousel, masonry, grid, and more. Proves to be a very useful tip for bloggers who want a resource for creating email newsletters quickly.
- Elink helps track usage statistics to track engagement levels and view the location of your customers.
13) Quora:
This is the biggest platform to get and write answers to questions related to any topic you can think of. It is a great platform for link building for your business and helps to create a personal brand.
Features:
- Allows you to search for any questions, answers, or topics where answers are written by industry experts.
- Monitor Questions to stay in the loop when you wish to learn more about a specific topic.
- Manage Topics to add aliases, merge similar topics or delete them.
- Quora keeps a log of all changes to answers. It provides transparency and openness to the system.
- User Endorsements Page where you can endorse other users on Quora.
14) HubSpot:
This is an inbound marketing tool. It is both, a marketing hub and a tool for sales and customer service management. It helps marketers create quality content, and the sales hub lets you target customers and manage your contact lists.
Features:
- Hubspot’s marketing hub gives tools to blog and guides you with SEO, SM, email, landing pages, marketing automation, and web analytics.
- Integrate the software into your website, or build your entire website on HubSpot as it acts as a CMS as well.
- The sales platform generates leads and gets in touch with probable clients.
- Offers options like emails, calls, scheduling meetings, appointments, and creating to-do lists. Keeps track of emails and calls for the future.
- Offers a full-funnel marketing system helping marketers build, distribute, and administer emails with the help of marketing tools and applications.
15) Contently:
This medium combines an end-to-end platform, with a curated talent network into a holistic solution. It helps clients achieve strategically segregated content to drive business results.
Features:
- Freelancers get opportunities through this platform to create content with the world’s top brands
- They provide talent for clients and top-notch freelance experiences to contributors.
Summing Up
There are numerous content marketing platforms available freely for web content development and distribution. As a business owner, you have to decide which platform works best for you. If you have the resources available to cater to various content marketing platforms, then it becomes easier to choose multiple options and maintain consistency on all of them.
We advise you to choose 3 to 4 best options and stick to them for your link building and outreach. Once you are well established on those with a decent number of followers, you can then think about moving on to more options.
Content marketing platforms are the best tools to build your brand and showcase your niche authority. There are various free as well as premium options available to help you with your brand awareness campaigns and social media marketing. But that is a topic for another article. For now, you can use these 15 content marketing platforms for your content marketing needs.
Do let us know if you found this article useful.
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