How do you promote your content?

Thanks all for the great responses!

Use social media that you can tag appropriately.

• Twitter: Tweet with 2-3 relevant hashtags.
• Pinterest: Create a graphic promoting your content and tag appropriately.
• Instagram: Same as Pinterest. It's a visual medium.

You can expand this to many platforms (Facebook, Medium, etc.) but the point is discovery via people searching for content like yours. You can slowly build an audience this way.

Reddit in particular is tricky, because self promotion is so disliked/regulated depending on what subs you're involved in.

I tweet each screencast, podcast or article I create. At first I had no followers. I think it took me 12 screencasts to get one follower per video I'd made. But it's now I'm gaining followers more and more quickly on twitter.

Google is a bit slower, but it's also sending more and more people my way. Overall, I'd say Google is my #1 source, then YouTube, then Twitter and Reddit is #4. On Reddit, I've had decent success by submitting my (free) content to a sub that's very focused on my niche of the Elixir programming language. Earlier, I tried submitting my tutorials to broader subreddits like /r/webdev, with less success.

I write a lot of content. Way too much. In fact, it's the primary way we establish authority and gain clients at Discosloth (our PPC agency). Here are some examples:

• Authored two books (Becoming A Digital Marketer, Beginner's Guide To Google Ads) and published via Baltika Press. We sell a few hundred copies every month or so.
• Focus on SEO over anything else. This is my specialty, but it's extremely important and gains us thousands of readers a month for various projects.
• I almost solely rely upon LinkedIn for social promotion. I'm not active on other platforms, but I've got a decent following on LI and usually get a few dozen comments per post, which organically boosts the reach.

For a long time content creation was a depressing venture for me, because like you said, at first it's an empty stadium. It was probably 3 years before I felt like my work finally grew legs of it's own and started paying back dividends.

Hmmmm I've been pushing out some of my blog posts recently, but I'm very intrigued to see what comes out in here.

I've primarily used Slack channels I'm a member of, haven't used Indie Hackers yet because I don't really see a portion of the site that allows me to share my posts.

Reddit I haven't cracked yet beyond just creating original content, but that then doesn't really accomplish my goal of getting more people to visit Pulsemetrics.io, as I can't throw a link anywhere on my post without a mod taking me down.

Beyond that I'm hyperaware of spamming my posts, so I try to not put it anywhere where the content isn't welcomed (often to my detriment, but my pride is PRISTINE I TELL YOU).