You may have heard the advice that creating content can help you build your practice and the saying, “content is king,” so if you’ve written an article – excellent! But don’t stop there. Now is not the time to take a break.

Whether your article was published on your own website or blog, in another online location, or in a print publication, that article is valuable content that can be leveraged to reach even more readers, potential clients, influencers, referral sources, or even the media.

If you create great content and nobody knows about it or sees it, it won’t do much for your marketing or business development efforts. The more people who see your article, the more it will help build your reputation, establish you as an expert, boost your credibility and grow your network – all of which can help you build your practice and bring in business.

Get more mileage out of every article you write

Use social media to your advantage

If the article is already online, you’ll want to post the link to all of your social media accounts. These may include: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and even Pinterest or Instagram (good reasons to include images in your article).

There are several ways that you can get more visibility for your content using LinkedIn. Post an update on your personal Profile and on your firm’s LinkedIn Company Page. Look at the LinkedIn Groups you belong to and use the article as a jumping-off point for a Group discussion (your Groups will likely contain many more – and different- contacts than you will reach by posting an update alone), and don’t forget to include a link to the article in each of these.

You can also add the article to your Profile under the Publications section (now part of Accomplishments on LinkedIn), or as a link or attachment under your Summary, Experience or Education sections on your Profile.

If the article is not already online, you may want to pull one or two points from the article and create a blog post or mini-article from your original article to post online, either on your own site or, if you don’t have one, on LinkedIn, using LinkedIn Publisher. You can also take articles that are already online (for example, an article that is on your firm’s website) and re-purpose that into a LinkedIn article using the Publisher platform, and then link back to the full article on your site.

For example, let’s say you’ve written an article on the five most important things to know before you prepare your estate plan. Pull out the five points – perhaps a sentence or two about each one, write an introductory sentence, a conclusory sentence with a link to the full article on your site, and publish it on LinkedIn Publisher. Or choose just one or two points to include in your LinkedIn article and link to the full article for the remaining points with a read more link (don’t forget to include images here too).

Other social media platforms

In addition to LinkedIn, think about the other social media platforms you participate in or have accounts with. Some of these may be “strictly” personal, and others you may use for mixed business and personal reasons. You may even have separate personal and business accounts on many of these platforms.

As you can see, using social media for this purpose provides a substantial amount of options to help get your article seen by a wide variety of people. Every article may not be appropriate for every platform or for both business and personal accounts, but don’t rule out the possibility of sharing your posts on personal accounts, particularly if the article contains information that is written specifically for the kinds of people who follow your accounts on these platforms and contains information that could be valuable or helpful to them.

Keep in mind that even if you are using a platform mostly for personal reasons and not for business reasons, it makes sense every once in a while to remind friends, family and followers what you do for a living, and posting a link to an article that contains helpful information is a great way to do that – it promotes you without being “promotional.”

Schedule posts wisely

Remember that your social media followers don’t see everything you post all of the time. Post the same link more than once on same social channel; try posting at different times of the day and emphasize different points from the article in your posts to reach different audiences.

If your article content will be relevant for a period of time, while you are creating those initial social media posts immediately after the article’s publication, use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule social media posts into the future. Consider scheduling several posts about your article in the first week or two after publication, and then schedule additional posts for at least several months thereafter.

Use email

If your article is especially relevant to specific clients, referral sources, or to a certain segment of your contact list, send the article link or a PDF of the article in an email. Or include the article in a firm newsletter that goes to your clients or prospects. You may also wish to include links to articles or other related content on your site.