Content marketing is a lot like fishing. You need to get a hook in your audience, engage them for a bit, and finally reel them in. Blogging as a form of content marketing, is generally quite effective at the last two steps of the process, but it doesn’t offer much of a hook.
Blog content doesn’t have any sort of organic reach. The Hub and Spoke model of marketing your content can add organic reach to your blog.
Hub and Spoke Model Explained
This model of content marketing uses social sharing to add organic reach to your blog content. Your blog is the hub of all of your marketing, while social media platforms are the spokes.
For each spoke, you engage in a platform specific marketing campaign that is designed to drive traffic towards your blog hub.
Building the Model
The hub is quite simple. It is a standard blog designed to optimally market your content. You will create this independent of what spokes you are using.
The spokes are a different matter. Each spoke should be created uniquely based on the platform of that spoke. The spoke should be designed to take advantage of the unique qualities of that specific social media platform. For example:
- Facebook – Facebook is a highly interactive platform. Use a quiz or poll to engage the reader and direct them to your hub.
- Twitter – Twitter is great for teasing readers. Tweet a snippet of something exciting and link to your hub for the whole story.
- Google+ – The main advantage of this hub is multimedia. Mix your marketing with a sound bite on Google Play or a shared file.
Whichever platform you are using, the purpose of your spoke is to drive your audience towards the hub. If your spoke engages or entertains, but fails to actually increase traffic to your blog, you need to change the way you are marketing on that spoke.
Finally, a major advantage of this model is that it is easily expanded. If you want to start using a new social media platform, you don’t need to change your hub, you simply need to create a new spoke.
