Content Distribution for SaaS: How to Earn Links and Interest for Freshly Published Pieces

Author

Pratik Dholakiya

Arguably, your content’s real value lies in the eyeballs it attracts and the sign-ups it helps for your SaaS — rather than just its quality. Because ultimately, if you’re spending thousands of dollars on content creation, you want to get your money’s worth.

So if your SaaS marketing strategy involves consistently publishing content on your website and waiting for prospects to find it, you’re likely burning time and money before you see results.

Content distribution is how you extract all the value from your content while making it work faster for your SaaS. A strong content distribution strategy ensures your hard work doesn’t go unnoticed. Partnering with a content marketing agency can help amplify your reach, drive traffic, and generate high-quality leads—ensuring your content delivers real business value. It’s how you kick start driving traffic, gain backlinks, and send a freshly published piece on its way to ranking on the top of the SERP.

In this guide, you’ll learn why you must have a content distribution strategy in place, the different types of distribution, and how we, as an agency, approach content distribution for freshly published content so it quickly starts delivering business value.

TL;DR

Content distribution is the process of promoting your content to reach the right audiences on the right channels to maximize its ROI.

There are three types of distribution channels: owned, earned, and paid.

Guest posts and other forms of link-building are crucial to effective content distribution and performance.

The Importance of Effective Content Distribution

Get this: around 7.5 million new blog posts are published every single day. And 91% of content gets zero search traffic from Google.

Each piece you publish is competing with at least a dozen others already established on the SERP. Making yours stand out thus requires you to give it a manual promotional boost, ideally as soon as it goes live. Content distribution in the form of social media posts, newsletters, and guest blogging can be the difference between an effective and an ineffective piece for your SaaS.

Here are a few concrete benefits of content distribution:

Drive initial traffic: Any piece you publish won’t immediately get inbound traffic unless you spread the word. Once visitors start rolling in, the page becomes increasingly important in the eyes of Google as more traffic indicates more authority.
Build links: A sound distribution strategy focuses on acquiring backlinks to your best content pieces via tactics like guest blogging and blurb insertions. The sooner your content gains links from relevant domains, the sooner it will start to appear higher in the SERP.
Start ranking faster: The cumulative effect of the above two is that your content will reach the first page of Google faster, and potentially climb to the top spots.

Put simply, without proper distribution, even the best-written content may never reach the intended audience, resulting in unimpressive traffic and little-to-no business impact. And so, you must consider…

Developing a SaaS Content Distribution Strategy

Your content distribution strategy depends on your industry, content asset format (blog, case study, webinar, etc.), audience preferences, and availability of resources to reach them there.

Broadly speaking, there are three main types of content distribution channels: Owned, Earned, and Paid. Let’s explore the three channels in a bit more detail.

1. Owned media

As the name suggests, these are channels your SaaS company owns and has full control over in terms of the what, when, and how. Here, you don’t pay a penny to post and promote content.

They include:

Your website and blog
Your social media profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
Your podcast and email newsletter (if you have them)

Note that distributing content through business profiles isn’t your only option. For example, Dock often leverages their founder’s personal Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, essentially maximizing their content’s visibility.

Cross-promoting your content across your owned media channels — such as turning key takeaways of your blog post into a LinkedIn post or Twitter thread, or sending out the intro as a blurb with a CTA in your email newsletter — is a great way to get started with your distribution.

2. Earned media

Again, as the name suggests, these channels are organically earned (you don’t pay for them) and not directly in your control. Also known as shared media, it comprises other people promoting your content for free, perhaps because they like it and/or your SaaS company.

These people can include users, bloggers, influencers, journalists, and others who share your content for free.

Earned media content distribution may look like:

Social shares and mentions
Guest posts that naturally mention your content
Forum answers on sites like Quora and Reddit
Digital PR outreach for media coverage

Successfully distributing your content this way typically requires strategic additional efforts, relationships with publishers, and hands-on experience with outreach — something that’s our forte. In the next section, we’ll share what our process for guest blogging and link building looks like, along with outreach examples and a template you can use.

3. Paid media

Yet again, as the name implies, paid media channels are the ones you pay to distribute or promote your content on.

These channels include:

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engines like Google
Paid social media ads
Native and display ads
Influencer sponsorships

Here’s an example of a search ad that promotes content:

Such an ad can help drive traffic for fresh pieces that are yet to climb the ranks. Having said that, paid ads and sponsored content is typically seen more skeptically by audiences than organic mentions. So, your SaaS content distribution strategy should not rely on paid media and instead, use it to set things in motion and support the other two media channels.

For the purpose of this article, let’s keep our focus on owned and earned media promotion i.e. organic content distribution.

How We Gain Backlinks and Eyeballs for Freshly Published Blog Posts

Now, let’s look at content distribution in action. In this section, we’ll briefly outline our process of distributing content for SaaS companies via earned media tactics such as guest posts and blurbs-based link building outreach.

Gaurav Belani, Senior SEO & Content Marketing Analyst at Growfusely, shares our tried-and-tested approach to both these tactics.

1. Guest Posts

Guest posting is like being invited to a party at someone else’s house. As a guest, you bring something of value to the host and their guests, in the form of your knowledge and expertise. Similarly, when you guest post on someone else’s website, you share your content with their audience and provide valuable insights, while also getting exposure to a new audience and building backlinks to content on your own website. It’s a win-win situation for both the host and the guest, and it can help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry while also driving eyeballs and links to your own content.

Here’s an outline of the process our outreach team follows:

We conduct research to identify the top publishers in the client’s niche and create a list to reach out to.
We develop unique ideas that align with the publisher’s guidelines or blog theme while ensuring topical relevance.
We create an email outreach template that is personalized and includes the most suitable topic ideas for review and approval.
Once the topics are approved, we proceed to write a detailed article.
We then proofread the final version of the article, including relevant images that meet the publisher’s standards, and share it with the editorial team for approval.

Here are a couple of email templates (with a response rate of 85%) that we tailor to each publication for guest post outreach. Feel free to make a copy and use them for your own outreach efforts:

Email Templates for Guest Post Outreach // Growfusely

2. Blurbs

A blurb is a short summary or description of your content that gives readers a preview of what they can expect to find in the post. It typically highlights the main topic or theme of the post and may include key takeaways or benefits for the reader.

Here’s an outline of the process our outreach team follows:

First, we research and identify the top-performing blog post pages already published in SERPs, creating a list of targets to reach out to.
Next, we read through each existing piece, identify gaps in the content, and compose a blurb that fits seamlessly with our target anchor and URL.
Then, we send a personalized email to the publisher, emphasizing how our suggested resource, such as an infographic link, a long-form blog post link, or a tool mention, could enhance their piece and be a valuable addition.

Done right, this approach works wonders for building relevant backlinks from quality websites, quickly.

Case in point: for our client JetOctopus — a technical SEO SaaS toolkit — we acquired a contextual mention and homepage link from an existing listicle article on Monday.com (domain authority 71).

All we had to do was nail the outreach and provide a well-written blurb. This could’ve easily been a link to one of JetOctopus’s blog posts, too. Here’s the email conversation we had with Monday.com’s editor:

This was technically also a link exchange (more on it below) as we included their link in one of our domains.
Another case in point: for our client Zeda.io — a product management SaaS toolkit — we acquired a link to an infographic article (that we had freshly created and published) from a new article on AxiomQ by collaborating with other like-minded contributors in the industry. Here’s the email conversation we had with AxiomQ’s editor:

Besides these two tactics, we also leverage other approaches such as:

Link insertions: We reach out to influential marketers, bloggers, and contributors, and offer them our content to include in their future guest post content when they have the opportunity.
Link exchanges: We share our link/resource to be added to the publisher’s existing posts, and in return, we give them a link from our own domains such as PRmention.com and preceptist.com. If they are not interested in our domains, we offer them guest posting opportunities on our partner websites in exchange for a link.

For each approach, we ensure to make the collaboration a win-win with value-add content that helps the publisher improve their reach and authority (in the eyes of both readers and search engines), and simultaneously build a relationship with us for continued collaboration in the future.

Wrapping Up

Your target audience values good, useful content. But speaking of business results, the most successful content doesn’t always equate to the highest-quality content (though they often fall in the same bucket), but rather the best-promoted content. Content distribution is pivotal to reaching your ideal customers faster so you can maximize your content marketing ROI.

In other words, no matter how stellar your content is, it’ll be a waste if it’s not correctly distributed in a way that your audience finds and engages with it.

Need help with that? You’re in the right place. Our content marketing team is adept (with over a decade of experience) at creating and executing effective content distribution strategies for SaaS brands. Connect with us to learn more.