7 Authentic Ways to Get More Visibility For Your Content

6 min read3 days ago

I receive this question often –

“How to get more visibility for my content?”

Here’s my response:

Start with posting where you already have engagement.

If you haven’t started social media yet, or it’s been a long time, then it’s time to test the few platforms that intrigue you most, and see where you get the most reactions and comments.

Perhaps it’s posting to your Facebook profile, or to LinkedIn. Or Instagram, X (twitter), Threads, YouTube, Tiktok. Whichever platforms interest you (or at least, don’t repel you!) you’ve got to try it — it might become very useful for reaching your ideal audience.

You might also consider gathering a few fellow content creators (maybe a couple of supportive classmates from a course you’re taking?) and making a private group with them where all of you will post your new content for each others’ support and potential sharing.

Before I list the various distribution methods for content, let’s first discuss the most important factor:

Visibility is really about “quality”…

Many content creators believe that they need to learn how to find algorithmic hacks to spread their content online. The problem is that those hacks are always temporary, and then you’ll have to go chasing new hacks.

Those techniques have never felt authentic to me. Nor sustainable.

What I’ve seen after personally coaching hundreds of creators is that — ultimately — it’s about the quality of their content.

Think about it for a moment — why should your content spread, when there are millions of other creators who are posting everyday? Lots and lots of content is always competing with yours…

So… what’s great about your content?

Quality content spreads for free, on its own. (Otherwise, you have to spend money to distribute the content. More about that later.)

But what’s “quality”?

It’s often not in the eyes of the creator. Quality is simply defined by the positive reactions of the audience. The stronger their reaction, the more that piece of content will spread.

Even if it’s only three people who receive that piece of content, if they all love it, the algorithms will spread it to 10 more people… and if those 10 love it, it’ll spread to 50… and so on. Quality content will spread faster than you might expect.

The opposite is also true: let’s say 5 people see your content, yet none of them like it. It’s not “quality” to them — they don’t naturally react to it — and the algorithm will notice that, and stop showing that content to more people. (5 people is not a specific rule — I’m just giving an example. The larger your audience the more people the algorithm will “test” your content with, before it decides whether to show it to even more people.)

Maybe the piece of content you posted was too long, or too short, or too confusing, or not easy enough to consume, or not relevant right now to your audience’s mindset. This is why it doesn’t get engagement, and this is why it doesn’t spread naturally.

But how will you know?

Don’t judge. Create more.

The tough part is that we tend to judge our own content quality before we publish it, when the truth is that it’s very hard to know whether the audience will like something before you show it to them.

The more energy and time you spend creating something, the more attached you become, and the more blinded you are to whether it’s going to be quality in the eyes of the audience.

The more content I create (now more than 300 blog posts and 1,000 videos) the less obvious it is to me what “quality” is, until I let the audience tell me.

The only sane way? To keep creating. Let quantity of creation lead you naturally to chancing upon quality ideas. From the best of your ideas (according to your audience), you can then spend additional effort to improve that quality as well. To understand this process, check out the 3 stages of content creation.

Content distribution methods

Although the biggest contributor to a content’s visibility is the quality itself, you can also speed up the distribution in the following ways.

I’ll name each method, and then give you links to my course outlines. Those pages contain the key ideas you’ll need to learn if you want to utilize the methods I do. Or you can take those ideas and investigate them on your own through internet research.

Social Media Ads

You can reach about 1,000 people (with specific interests and demographics you define) for about $10 USD using Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube ads. Here are the relevant course outlines:

Facebook Ads Course
Authentic Instagram Mastery
Authentic YouTube Mastery
LinkedIn for Soulpreneurs (LinkedIn Ads are more expensive, but might be perfect for some who want to target specific job titles and roles.)

Collaborations

You can also spread your content through collaboration, for example, swapping interviews with other creators that have a similar audience as you. Courses that are relevant to this strategy include:

Email Newsletter

Don’t neglect your email list. Keep your newsletters simple. I spend only 15 minutes per month to create and send my monthly newsletter because it only needs to give links to my best recent posts. Borrow that method if you’d like. It’s worked really well for me for years. See examples: George Kao Monthly Newsletters

Packaged Content

After you’ve created a bunch of content, put it together into a package, such as a book or course and launch it. That will tend to get disproportionately large attention from your audience because you’re giving a concerted effort to announcing a higher quality piece of content. Relevant courses of mine include:

SEO

You can get a lot of free and relevant visitors to your website if you learn how to align your content with what the search engines want… which is ultimately what humans want and are searching for. Authentic SEO for Solopreneurs

Individual Outreach

Lastly, don’t forget about individual outreach! There are likely some people in your network who would enjoy your new and best content. Email it to them occasionally, with a quick thoughtful note about why you thought of them for this piece of content.

The 7 Authentic Reach Methods

To summarize the 7 ways I’ve mentioned in this article:

Quality content will spread on its own. Practice the 3 stages of content creation.
Social media ads
Collaborations
Your email newsletter
Launch a packaged piece of content (such as a book or course)
SEO
Individual outreach

You have an audience (no matter how small)

Get to know your audience, even if it’s “only” a few people right now. They matter. Even if it’s just your 15 email subscribers or your 100 followers on Instagram, they are gifting you with their valuable attention.

Connect with them individually to see what kinds of questions they have about your field, and what topics they’d love to see you create on.

Over time, as you consistently connect, and then post quality content (what’s good in their eyes!), your true audience will grow.

And as your true audience grows, your content distribution gets easier!

But again… it takes quality, as well as consistency of effort in distributing your content. You can get some inspiration from my free videos about authentic content creation.

Keep returning to the practice of your values as you create and share. Why not use your creation efforts as a way to express your care, your joy, your play? You don’t have to wait for some far off goal (“a big audience”) but instead, every day that you create — with heart and dedication to practice — can be a deep and meaningful experience.