An Easy, Effective Post-Publication Plan for Your Sponsored Article
Most weekends this summer, you’ll have found me in my happy place—out in the greenhouse pruning and trellising our tomatoes, showering them with care and attention so they will produce tons of gorgeous, juicy heirlooms. But I have to admit. I spent so much time on the growing process that I barely had time to consider the question of what comes next.
What was I going to do with all those tomatoes once the harvest really starts rolling in?
Developing a plan for my tomatoes’ post-harvest life (Make confit? Stuff my freezer full? Give them away to the food pantry?) has a lot in common with deciding what to do with your custom sponsored article after it’s been published online or in print.
As a follow-up to last month’s post about how you can use sponsored articles to drive interest in your business, I’m diving into a question that our advertising partners ask me all the time: Now that I’ve invested in the creation of a sponsored article, what comes next?
But First: What Happens During a Sponsored Article’s Initial Publication?
As a quick refresher, here’s what happens after you’ve invested in the creation of a sponsored article in one Chronogram Media’s publications, such as Chronogram, Upstate House, Upstater, Rural Intelligence, or Chronogram Explore.
During the initial publication phase, your sponsored print article will make its way to hundreds of high-traffic locations in the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Berkshires, or your digital-only sponsored article will be shared with thousands of readers through our email newsletters.
Your business’s story and marketing message is already reaching a much wider audience than would have otherwise been possible! But that initial publication push doesn’t have to be the end of your custom article’s journey.
You’ve already invested a lot of time and effort working with our sponsored content team to create an evergreen article that contains information that is always relevant to readers. Here’s how to get the most out of your sponsored article in the future.
1. Cross-Publish Your Sponsored Article in Another Chronogram Media Publication
The purchase of your custom sponsored article includes publication in one of our magazines online and/or in print. Want to reach a brand-new audience? Simply run the original article in another one of our other publications, and you’ll reach an entirely different group of readers with the same piece of content.
If you originally commissioned an article for the print issue of Chronogram, for example, you can reach new readers in the Berkshires region of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts by cross-publishing on Ruralintelligence.com.
2. Republish Your Article in the Same Publication at a Later Date
Just as you might reuse your display ad creative in the same publication at a later date, you can republish your sponsored article in the same publication a year later and reach a refreshed audience of readers. And since you’ve already refined your messaging with the original publication, the hard work is already complete!
You can simply republish the article as-is, or work with our team to make a few quick and easy updates to the copy and images that reflect your updating offerings or most recent branding.
3. Send Your Sponsored Article to National Publications
In addition to ensuring readership in Chronogram Media’s owned and operated publications, we have the capability to send your sponsored article to other publishers channels with a marketing tactic called a native display.
Through our media partner, your custom article will appear online in national publications such as Time, Buzzfeed, Entrepreneur, Axios, and People just the same way it appears to readers on our websites. And even better—we can target the audience to exactly the readers you want to reach.
4. Share Your Sponsored Article on Social Media
One super simple way to extend the life of your sponsored article is by sharing it on your own social media channels. This way, it reaches a new audience of readers who are already invested in your business, and will keep your fans up-to-date on the latest media coverage of your business.
Want the benefit of a super-charged social media presence? Our social media team can create a robust social media campaign that sends brand new traffic to your sponsored article and brings your messaging to targeted audiences across Facebook and Instagram for a week or the duration of your choosing.
5. Add a Link to Your Sponsored Article on Your Website
When prospective customers are researching your business, they often first visit your website to learn more about what you do.
What better way to show them the impact and reach of your business than by directing them to an in-depth article in a third-party publication like one of Chronogram Media’s family of magazines?
Simply add a link to the full article on your own website (we recommend the “News” or “Press” section, if you have one) then let the professionally produced article do the rest of the work of reinforcing your brand’s authority and market positioning to your potential customers.
Because all of our sponsored articles live permanently on our publications’ websites, readers will continue to discover your business through them long into the future. And the more traffic that flows between your business’s website and our publications’ sites, the better your website’s chances of showing up in the top results of your potential customers’ search engine pages become.
When combined, these five easy tactics can dramatically extend the reach of your sponsored article—introducing your business to new audiences and delivering customers for years to come. If you’re interested in how you can get the most out of your native article after its publication, contact our sales team at [email protected] to learn more.
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