Content Distribution: Mastering the Art of Visibility in the AI Era [Video]

We have been sold broken promises for years, that if we create content, you will win at Google and search.

“ Do not worry so much about all of the other variables. Don’t worry about intent. Don’t worry about click through rates. Don’t worry about any of that. All you have to do is create, create, create, create, and you will win.” Ross Simmonds

We have become stuck in a loop of create, create, create — write blog posts, make ebooks, tell stories, but creating can only take you so far, and it is critical to shift the focus to distribution and amplification.

Many organizations continue to use content calendars and mistake this for a content strategy. You have likely heard the term “think like a media company,” operate like you are a media company where you have a content writer, editor, and SEO and thus you are operating in the same manner a media company is. But the principles that enabled media companies to thrive were distribution. Think, newspapers being delivered directly to a subscriber’s doorstep.

Now news is delivered 24-7 directly in your pocket via your phone. This is a new game being played.

“One of the biggest issues that we see time and time again in the industry is brands falling victim to this mentality and this idea that they can just create things, create content and the world will be theirs instead of focusing on the distribution of that content. What I’m saying is that we need to think like a modern media company. Modern media companies like the folks over at Masterclass, where when they create a product, it’s essentially a series of content assets, right?” Ross Simmonds

Masterclass products are turned into a series of content assets that get distributed through various channels via Instagram, Facebook, Reels, so eventually you get to their website and consume their content.

At this point you may be thinking, is Ross saying we shouldn’t be blogging? No!

“What I’m saying is we need to create things that are worth promoting. We need to create stories that are worth distributing across a wide range of different channels where we know our audience is spending time and on channels where we know we can connect with the people we want to talk to.” Ross Simmonds

This framework is the playbook that every organization should embrace when it comes to creating any and all content. Your content should fall into one of these categories:

1. Educate – Give your audience educational content, provide them with more information than they had before, help them learn how to do something, and provide them with new data. This type of content wins.
2. Engage – If you can provide content and create content to stir up a dialogue that gives people a glimpse into who you are and what you’re all about, that content can help you win.
3. Entertain – If you can create content and tell stories that put a smile on someone’s face, that entertains them with a light joke and a bit of humor, that content wins.
4. Empower – If you can celebrate people, whether it’s your clients, your customers, people you work with, or other brands that might not necessarily compete with you directly, you can create content that thrives.

When you create content using this framework, you have content that is worth distributing. With all this in mind let’s jump into the methodologies and various channels that Ross successfully uses and his guiding motto: Create Once. Distribute Forever.

We’ve been seeing a ton of content lately related to how Google is now favouring forums in SERPs, especially Reddit. Yes, we want to be everywhere our audience is but how do you make it seem natural on Reddit? Because posting as a marketer is terrifying (and Redditors can sniff a marketer a mile away and will eat them up)?

“One, you’re not alone. Every single marketer feels that way. When marketers think of Reddit, we sometimes break out in hives and I’m a Redditor first, marketer second.” Ross Simmonds

Reddit is a wonderful community that offers a lot of learning opportunities, open dialogue with other people, and can be great for someone trying to figure something out or learn something new. While it can be challenging to come across with authenticity, there are things you can still do as a marketer and individual.

Ross has been banned from Reddit 8 times. He learned from his past mistakes (linking all of his old blog posts into different subreddits over and over) how to reverse engineer success with different subreddits.

Ross’s recommendations for navigating Reddit as a marketer

1. “To be able to win authentically, you have to understand the voice and the tone of the subreddits and the communities that you’re going into, and then articulate and mirror that style.” Ross Simmonds
2. Be transparent. People want to see numbers and screenshots. Give them that.
3. Redditors have big egos. Use this to your advantage by saying, I love this subreddit, it provides so much value that I have created this long form post to give back to a community that has helped me immensely. Only do this if it’s true – you should be getting value out of the subreddit and give value back.

Every piece of content that you create needs to be repurposed and distributed across the channels that your audience are spending time in. Make sure to curate your content for that specific channel.

For Ross and his team they would:

• Repurpose podcast episodes and submit them in comments on Reddit.
• Share podcast clips on LinkedIn.
• Embed podcast episodes in a blog post.
• Turn podcast episodes, blog posts, or research into threads on X.
• Utilize channels like Medium, Quora, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

This approach to taking your greatest content hits and repurposing them and sharing them in different formats across different channels is not a new idea. Disney has used this same model for years.

“You need to be okay with this idea of taking something that is a great hit and then distributing it and don’t end with just the channel distribution, spread these things into communities.” Ross Simmonds

Create a thriving modern media engine

“All of these things combined give you a thriving modern media engine. And if you can have that, if you can get that thriving modern media engine, you win.” Ross Simmonds

1. Creation
2. Optimization
3. Budget
4. Distribution
5. Research

If you want to think like the new media companies, you need to start by identifying where your target audience is spending their time. This step is fundamental.

Understand your audiences

There are many tools in the market that can help you perform your research. You can unlock powerful insights into who your audience is, what their interests are, what other accounts they follow, and so on.

Tools that can help you unlock insights:

• Audiense – You can plug in brand or categorization of audience/persona’s and unlock powerful insights of who they are.
• Sparktoro – You can essentially upload someone’s profile, your persona, et cetera, and it will identify things like the subreddits that they browse and that they spend time in. They have a hidden gems feature as well.
• Buzzsumo – It gives you the ability to see what channels people are on, what contentis being shared most frequently, which gives you an insight into what we call content market fit.
• Podscan – Essentially, it runs an AI that’s similar to Google but focuses on podcasts. It scrapes and listens to every podcast published, looking for keywords mentioned by guests and hosts. You can get notified about specific keywords and mentions, allowing you to discover which podcasts are discussing you or your brand and then reach out.

Let the data guide you

According to a 2024 study on America’s Social Media Use by Pew Research Center, the vast majority of U.S. adults are spending their time on YouTube, Facebook, and then Instagram, followed by other platforms.

When Ross speaks to marketers where they are spending their time, they say creating content for Google and hoping that it ranks. We can see from the chart shared above that people are active on many different platforms and it’s possible that you are missing out on massive opportunities as a business by not being on these channels.

You need to embrace the channels that your audience spends time on.

“Reddit, I believe, is the most underrated channel today. And I ask, like, why aren’t you using these channels? It’s possible that resources are the constraint, but if the data tells you that these are channels worth spending time on, then maybe we should use them. Anything that has the ability to truly influence culture within your niche, within your audience, is probably a channel that you should think about.” Ross Simmonds

Find the Taylor Swift of your industry

When Taylor Swift announced that she was dating Travis Kelce his jersey sales went through the roof, all because of the T Swift bump. While she has macro influence, think of the industry you are in and the players in it that have micro influence – find the T Swift of your industry to talk about and celebrate your brand.

As marketers it’s harder to do our jobs. There is more noise, complex algorithms, and we’ve been tricked into believing that we should pay people to follow and like us, only to continue paying to reach the people we just paid to follow and like us.

What can we do?

“We have no choice, in my opinion, to actually embrace the idea of going to the channels where our audience is spending time, to actually spend time to understand how we can connect with them and ask ourselves if we can find the T Swift of our space.” Ross Simmonds

Sparktoro and Datos teamed up this year to study Who Sends Traffic on the Web and How Much? They found that across all of the referring domains to websites the top referrers were:

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. Reddit
4. Twitter (X)
5. Instagram
6. LinkedIn

If you’re not investing in these channels, you may be missing out on connecting with your audience. As marketers it’s important to take advantage of the opportunities that are within our control.

“What we can control is the number of channels that you’re on. And which channels you decide to place your bets on. And my hope is that the data helps you see things like this. This is marketers saying where they’re allocating their time. And a lot of marketers are spreading themselves very, very thin across a lot of different channels. And my advice. is to become great at one thing before you start jumping on to the next. Become excellent at YouTube and then look into [00:25:00] Instagram. Be excellent at X and then be great on TikTok. Do not try to be good at all of the things. My dad had a quote. It was kind of wild, but it was true. He said, it’s Always better to have one good kid than have five bad. And I 100 percent agree with that on social media too. It’s better to be really, really good on YouTube than bad on every single channel.” Ross Simmonds

We know that AI is changing the industry. About 95% of the internet has been scrapped by Large Language Models (LLMs). The technology is good enough that it is constantly scraping new content that is produced.

Now, LLMs technically cannot scrape everything, but some break the rules. For those that follow the rules they do not go after proprietary data sets or content behind a closed wall. Why should you care?

Well, this opens up new possibilities for distributing your own content on the sites that LLMs are scraping and sites they may scrape in the future.

OpenAI already has a deal with Reddit, so if content is not on Reddit you’re going to have a hard time showing up on OpenAI and ChatGPT. You can have an influence on LLMs by distributing your content, stories, and knowledge on the channels where you believe your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is.

“I actually do believe you have to create content that is worth having the LLM steal it from you. And then distribute it forever because that is where things are today. We can’t control the fact that the LLMs are taking all of the content and then they’re giving it back to us.

Is it a problem? 100%. I am fully in support of holding organizations accountable for, for doing bad things. 100%. But I’m also a big believer in the fact that time is limited on this planet and we all need to just take care of our business. So let’s take care of business and distribute our content and be able to unlock some opportunities while we can.” Ross Simmonds

All of this said, don’t just go and create a bunch of accounts on all of the channels you are currently not utilizing. You first need to understand where your audience is and assess where your existing channels are at. Remember, you should work hard to maximize your reach on the channels you are already investing in and once you’ve achieved the success there, move on to the next channel your audience is active, but your business is not.

Like all marketers, Ross is a big fan of tactics — real world tips that you can actually implement and use to improve your marketing skills and grow your business. At the start of the webinar Dana and Ross chatted about how Reddit is intimidating, so if you feel hesitant or nervous start here.

Reddit research

• Create a Reddit account if you don’t have one already
• Go to Reddit and in the search bar enter site:[yourdomain.whatever]
• Sort the results by top content
• Start creating great content

Seeing all of the posts that every single Redditor has ever made regarding your brand and the content that was shared is powerful because it gives you direct insight into what your audience cares about and talks about. Now you know what people think of your brand.

• If something “bad” has come up, don’t get upset, get to work. Take the feedback and connect with who you need to on your team to make changes and improve.
• If you don’t show up, that’s okay. This means you need to continue to build your brand and audience, giving you more motivation to create great content.

Ross shared an example of Reddit research HubSpot, their number one mention by Redditors was a piece that was created six years ago, about Ben and Jerry who met because they were the slowest kids in their gym class. This post generated over 190 comments and got 9,9000 thousand upvotes!

What this shows you is that for the past six years a team member at HubSpot should have been submitting this same story in that subreddit, over and over again. Optimize the story and find a way to bring it back to their product.

“This is what you want to find. This is called content market fit. It gives you the ability to market your content, to reach a bunch of people, and you can submit your content once and then just reap the benefits.” Ross Simmonds

Reddit stats

When it comes to Reddit, marketers are terrified. But as a marketer, you should be more terrified of missing out on opportunities to grow your audience and brand.

• Reddit has surpassed Facebook and is the 3rd most visited site in the U.S.
• The latest Helpful Content Update skyrocketed the amount of traffic to Reddit because Google is prioritizing Reddit content.
• Reddit is showing up in the SERP for valuable keywords.

Reddit is continuing to evolve and we are starting to see that there is B2B content showing up, and this growth means more opportunities for all business types. You need to start asking yourself if there is a place for Reddit within your marketing mix, especially in the AI age.

How do you use Reddit as a marketer without getting banned?

When it comes to Reddit there are two critical elements that you need to know:

1. Subreddits are very very important. A subreddit is essentially a community of people who are interested in specific topics.
2. Always add value. Go big with value and don’t be overtly salesy (unless you want to get banned).

Ross shared an example of the r/GetMotivated subreddit (for people who want to be motivated) where he submitted a blog post he wrote that speaks to important reminders people should give themselves when life gets out of hand, and it received 57 upvotes and wasn’t banned. This worked because it’s the right audience.

In another subreddit for r/Entrepreneur he wrote an in depth response to a question about, What are some things I should know if I’m going to jump into entrepreneurship? In his response he included two links to articles that he published so people could go deeper into the response. Not only did he add value , he was able to subtly reference more content that he’s written on that topic in a way that was not salesly.

B2B marketing and audiences are on Facebook and we need to stop thinking it doesn’t exist. If you dive deeper into Facebook groups you can see people self-identify as having interests in topics like digital marketing, MSPs (managed service providers), digital imaging, and physicians. People are passionate about these topics, and by joining these groups, you can start distributing your stories within these communities.

How can you distribute your content in Facebook groups?

1. You can sponsor groups.
2. You can join and natively post to the groups.
3. You can interact with other content and provide your own insights from experience.

Capitalize on graveyard Facebook pages

Take your sleuthing to the next level and look for existing Facebook pages that have a large audience but don’t seem to be active. Reach out to the admins to learn more about the page and see if they are interested in passing the page on to new management.

Ross shared an example of how he was able to purchase a Facebook group from a page that hadn’t been active for a while. After a few casual DM’s back and forth he purchased a group with over 100,000 people following it for $3,000 and was able to quickly monetize it.

Arbitrage opportunities still exist on Facebook; you just need to spend the time and money to take advantage of them.

After Ross invested in that page (which was related to plant based diet) he shared cool recipes, followed the the Four E’s framework of giving some content for free, educate, engage, entertain, empower, and then he monetized it. And that’s the playbook. If more brands can tap into these simple ideas– Create once, distribute forever– they will win.

“When you ask B2B folks where they’re spending time, they’re on Facebook. You want to know why? Because humans are like onions. Just like Shrek said, we have layers. We’re not all professional all the time.

After this, I’m going to be outside playing with kids. We’re not just professional suits all the time, folks. We are humans. We go on Facebook and we’re scrolling through sports. We have a group chat on WhatsApp where we’re sending messages to our old friends. We have all of these different places. Yes, LinkedIn is without question, the number one platform for professionals.

And it is the number one place to go. If you want to connect with professionals on when they’re in that professional setting, but when it comes to. straight up humans all the time. The Meta properties are without question one of the top places to look at time and time again, because that’s where they go to get distracted.” Ross Simmonds

Pay attention to new Facebook releases: Threads & AI

When it comes to Meta properties there are a couple of things that Ross believes everyone needs to keep in mind.

The platforms always show their cards. Over the last 10 years Meta shows you the direction they are heading when they roll out something new. They are always going to emphasize the new “feature” or “thing” in their user experience. Especially when they are attempting to capture new market share.

Threads rolled out and why? They are trying to capture market share from X. You see threads directly in your Facebook feed and on Instagram. They are giving users prompts and while it may be difficult to start using, Ross believes it’s an opportunity.

Meta is also heavily invested in AI, more than any other brand. We know Microsoft and Google are big in the AI space, but no one is talking about Meta as a big AI innovator.

So what’s coming? “If you haven’t used Facebook’s AI yet, like, use it. It’s actually good. It is. As someone who uses ChatGPT mostly, I have tried it out for some stuff. It’s impressive, but they kind of launched and they were like, Hey, we have AI and they just kind of dropped it.” Dana DiTomaso

Repurpose the content that you create so that you can leverage the channels that your audience spends time on. There are so many opportunities available to businesses.

1. If you have a podcast or host webinars identify the key moments, aka money or mic drop moments, then share them across your channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, X, etc.
2. Take long form content, stories, or ideas and distill it down into slides (known as a carousel on LinkedIn) and share.
3. Now, turn that content you created above into a graphic and share it on Instagram.
4. Take the data from your whitepapers or research and share it as social media posts. Yes we know that you want people to download the white paper by giving their email address, but if no one knows what’s in the paper, why would they want to share their personal information? You have to create excitement and give them a little taste to get buy-in.
5. Turn your blog posts into LinkedIn articles, which have been showing up in SERPs. “I believe there’s an arbitrage play right now that exists for you brands to take old blog post content, upload it as an article on LinkedIn, Google, because they believe that anything on the LinkedIn URL is high quality and trustworthy is ranking that content.” Ross Simmonds

Quora is another forum where you can distribute your content and get some amazing wins. Jason Lemkin, who is a VC in the world of SaaS, is one of the best Quora marketers that Ross has seen.

Jason’s strategy is essentially:

1. He searches for questions in Quora that he can answer.
   1. You can use keywords to identify where your audience is.
2. He gives the value directly in the answer and then subtly throughout, similar to Ross’s Reddit post example, he references articles that he published on his website.

“That is the playbook. That’s the methodology that brands should be embracing. Create once, distribute forever” Ross Simmonds

You also want to look at things like Substacks or newsletters. What industry are you in, is it possible you can find your T Swift?

How to find sponsorship opportunities

1. Go to Substack and search your niche.
   1. For example, if you target SaaS companies, you could search SaaS and find a bunch of newsletters that target SaaS leaders. Then reach out, to see if they offer sponsorships and what the rates are. Or if you don’t have the budget, you can reach out and just be like, “Hey, I just wrote this piece that I think your subscribers will like”.
2. If you are not interested in a specific platform you can also do a Google search.
   1. Search “newsletter” + “your niche/keywords” in quotation marks, and see what prospects are out there. Reach out to the opportunities that best align with your business.

If you’re part of a community, forum, or group if people are excited about something use this to inspire the content that you create.

Ross shared an example of how someone in the digital marketing Facebook group he is part of was talking about how they analyzed a bunch of TikTok accounts to get insights and were sharing them. People were excited about this, which indicates that:

1. There is an opportunity to replicate the same format but analyze a different platform.
2. If he did this and shared his insights the community would likely respond well.

It’s not only about distributing your existing content and stores, there are opportunities that exist, you just need to pay attention and be open minded.

Depending on your audience different content types will have different levels of impact. Take Stripe for example, their blog generates mediocre traffic. But their audience is engineers, so the money traffic is in their documentation and guides.

“You need to start, folks, by understanding your ICP. And if you are targeting folks like engineers, maybe you need to invest not in a bunch of blog posts that they’re never going to read, but instead, you need to take a page out of Stripe’s book and create content that is just for you. Great developer, API guidelines, guidance, things like that.” Ross Simmonds

Depending on the industry that you are in and your audience, you want to allocate your time and money to the content marketing mix that makes the most sense for your audience and business. Not all assets are the same, do your research!

“I know everybody hates marketers who say, I don’t know, but we should be okay saying, I don’t know. Right? Like that’s something that we as an industry need to be able to say. We all need a Hippocratic oath of some sort. And mine is, we should say maybe. So you have to do the research to understand the stories that your audience wants, the types of formats your audience wants, the channels in which they’re spending time, look for content market fit, create educational, engaging, entertaining, empowering content, and then distribute it like wildfire.” Ross Simmonds

The time has come to say goodbye to the traditional marketing plays and embrace the new playbook.

Share your content the best way:

1. Research the channels your audience is spending time on to discover channel-user fit.
2. Identify clear intent from the content you are going to create.
3. Captivate your audience through the channels that you own.
   1. You’re distributing through your email list.
   2. You’re distributing through LinkedIn, Facebook, X, YouTube, etc.
   3. You’re updating the banner on your website and making announcements.
4. Then you’re distributing through secondary channels like TikTok or through sponsorships, or the T Swift of your industry.
5. You maintain momentum by repurposing the content from week 1 and beyond.
6. You’re continually resharing the content and measuring the results.
7. Update, revise, and keep going so that you are optimized for future success.

“I do have a belief that today, more than ever before, with chaotic algorithms, with more noise than ever before, the best approach for all of us is to create ridiculously valuable content and distribute it across as many channels as possible. I wrote this book, Create Once, Distribute Forever, for the sole intent that I believe that some of the greatest creators, some of the greatest minds, some of the greatest things that you’ve ever done and created are going to collect dust because you don’t have the playbook that you need to distribute those stores. And my hope is that this book gives you that.” Ross Simmonds