Paid Content Promotion: Promoting your content with QuuuPromote

09-promotion-1600.jpg

Is paid content promotion the way to win the marketing battle?

Content Marketing is on the front line in the marketing battle. It’s use is decisive in theaters such as SEO and social media.

While most people (this author included) focus on content creation, they often forget about content marketing.

QuuuPromote offers an easy way out: Pay for it and your message gets posted to hundreds of social media profiles.

I’m not exactly an advocate of social media marketing, but this sounded to good to be true, so I decided to give it a try.

Here is what I learned…

The content I shared

I decided to set this up as a test right from the beginning: I was going to use my article about the best SaaS email marketing tactic I know and promote it on QuuuPromote.

Then I would check how often that link got shared/clicked – except neither did I implement click tracking nor a notification for when the post got shared.

01-double-facepalm.jpg

I didn’t have a way to track either clicks or shares besides the analytics provided by Quuu themselves:

02-paid-content-promotion-quuupromote-failed-test.PNG

Having your own share & click tracking

So with one completely botched-up test under my belt (how can this even happen after years in the marketing game?), I started all over again.

This time I shared an article detailing how we decreased the churn rate by 40% with a single email AND made sure I had click & share tracking in place.

03-paid-content-promotion-share-click-tracking.PNG

I used a simple “@itengelhardt” at the end of the tweet to track shares. This gave me insight into shares on Twitter.

I don’t know an easy way to track shares on other social media sites, but Twitter seems to be the major channel for QuuuPromote. So I’m good with that.

For click tracking I simply used Bit.ly which does a wonderful job of that, as you’ll see.

Analyzing the results from paid content promotion

The natural tendency is to mistrust any analytics coming from a promotion marketplace itself.

I expected QuuuPromote to over-report both shares & clicks after the first post – which allegedly had 201 shares and 91 clicks.

So after the second promotion has finished, here are the results:

04-paid-content-promotion-results-second-post.PNG

Now this one got a lot more shares, but a lot less clicks according to QuuuPromote. I didn’t count the shares in my twitter stream, but this is what it looked like for four weeks:

05-paid-content-promotion-twitter-stream.PNG

Judging from that I’d say that the share numbers are not exaggerated.

But what about clicks?

I’m glad you asked. According to Bitly, the number of clicks are actually under-reported:

06-quuupromote-paid-promotion-results.PNG

Bitly reports a total of 157 clicks – 9 clicks on the link itself, 148 from other bitlinks to the same URL. It also reports 356 shares.

That number is in line with the 353 shares reported by QuuuPromote – plus a few genuine retweets, I guess.

I wonder how and why Bitly actually reports more clicks than QuuuPromote. If you have any ideas, let me know on Twitter (@itengelhardt)

Conclusion

I got 157 clicks (&356 shares) for an investment of $30. That comes down to $0.19 per click, which is phenomenally low Cost-per-Click.

Will I use QuuuPromote again? Absolutely. It’s a cheap investment with good returns and it takes maybe 5 minutes of my time.

Share Button
About Christoph

Christoph lives in Munich, Germany and is bootstrapping his own SaaS application as a part-time entrepreneur.

He likes to write on this blog about anything of relevance to single-founder bootstrapped software startups.

Comments

  1. Hi Christoph,

    I saw you tweeting about seo and I thought I’d check out your website. I really like it. Looks like Christoph has come a long way!

    Have you thought of building a mailing list? I think people would really like to be signed up to what you have to share.

    Good job on the social buttons, social media is so powerful these days

    Good job with the Yoast plugin SEO is so important these days.

    Keep making great stuff!

Speak Your Mind

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.