Your next step is to find places where you can publish your content. The obvious places are: your site, your blog, Facebook, YouTube, Squidoo, EzineArticles, and other similar places in your niche. For example, maybe in your niche there is an industry blog or article directory where experts in your niche are welcome to publish content. Each time you submit content, simply link to both your website and another instance of your content.
If you want, you can use just those obvious places. And many people do. However, there are a few more places that are harder to find, but because they are harder to find, and because they tend to be very niche-specific, you can end up with much more and much higher quality traffic and visitors if you choose to do the extra work to find these more advanced sources. However, once you have done the hard work of finding these sources, the process of publishing your content at each one is just as easy as publishing at any of the easy sources I have listed above. Therefore, I highly recommend that you find some of these sources for yourself, as you will be amazed at how many visitors you can generate by using the advanced sources.
Advanced sources of content traffic
The two primary advanced sources are: other people's blogs, and niche forums.
I'll show you the niche forum method first, only because it is fast and easy to explain. Then I'll explain the "other people's blog" method and how to find high-traffic blogs and a way to get your blog posts published on their blogs.
Niche forum method
Before giving you the steps, I'll give just a little background on niche forums. A forum is a web site that is usually designed in a question and answer format, where people who are interested in a certain topic gather to talk about ideas and get their questions answered about the topic. Generally if someone spends time in a forum and isn't trying to establish credibility and traffic like you will be, he is generally interested in the topic and is a likely prospect for you. This means that the people asking the questions are generally prospects for your help. Having said that, I have to give you one strong warning: if you try to sell to these people on the forum, you will likely be excluded (banned) from the forum. Don't sell in the forum.
The idea instead is to position yourself as an expert on the topic, and when someone needs more help than the forum can provide, he will seek you out as an expert. He might ask you for help through the forum, he might google you and find your website online, etc. But never offer help directly. Let the prospects come to you.
So how do you position yourself as an expert? Let's take it back a step and ask yourself this: what leads YOU to believe someone is an expert? Is it their knowledge? Their ability to answer your questions? Their appearance on a place where it is assumed that if someone is answering questions, especially many questions, that he is an expert?
My guess is your answer is in the "yes" category for those 3 questions, especially if all three conditions are true for the person you are evaluating as being an expert.
On the forums, those are generally the criteria people use to assume you are an expert. So if you go onto a forum and do those 3 things, then over time people will begin to see you as an expert. And if they see you as an expert, when they need help, they will come to you, not someone who is not positioned as an expert.
So here's how to do it:
Find the forums in your niche. To do this, Google "forums + (your niche)", for example, "forums + natural foods." For most popular topics you should find several forums. Become a member of all the forums, and simply begin answering 10-20 questions per day from people who are asking questions. Don't start with 100 a day or some other big number, because the forum administrators might think you are trying to pull a fast one. And only give good advice. If you don't know the answer, either find it, or skip answering that question. Never answer a forum question like this: "I don't know, but maybe you could . . ." If you don't know, don't answer. Also, only answer posts from the current day. Those are the people who need help now. If someone posted a question 2 months ago, they either have figured out their answer, or likely don't need help any more.
Do this every day for 90 days. It shouldn't take more than about 20 minutes a day to answer everyone's question that has come in in the last 24 hours. After 90 days, your credibility value on that forum will be high. At that point, if you are allowed a signature file in your posts, put a link to the highest credibility place you have online. If you have a website, link to the website. If you have a book, link to where someone could buy it. If you are a published author on an industry website, link to your author page. But I re-warn you: don't put something in your signature asking someone to go to your site or link or anywhere for any reason. Just put your name and the link where you want him to go; under your name, link in a normal email signature. That's it. If someone wants to find out more, she will figure out how. You don't have to spell it out (who doesn't know how to click a link these days?; no one should need to be told to do it if he wants to do it. If he doesn't want to do it, telling him to won't make him.)
Blog posting method
The next method is finding other people's blogs to publish your blog posts on. We generally call this guest blog posting, although sometimes a blog or website might call you a "guest author," a "syndicated writer," etc., but the terminology isn't important. Getting to write a blog post (or article or other content piece) on someone else's (preferably high traffic) website or blog is what is important.
The first step is finding the websites or blogs that are potential places you could become a guest writer. Once you have found the potential sites, you send each owner or editor an email asking if he or she needs another writer. If he says no, that's okay; you are going to be asking many people and some will say yes. If he says yes, you now have a new site to be a guest writer for. I recommend becoming a guest writer for at least 10 websites.
The next consideration is the quality of the blog or website. You want to write for the best and most highly trafficked websites or blogs possible. When you first start out and no one respects you in your niche, the most highly trafficked sites might turn you down. So when you start out, you might have to start out writing for less-trafficked sites, and over time as you gain a reputation as a niche writer, you can move up to higher-trafficked blogs and websites.
Here is the process for finding websites to write for:
1) Go to Google and search for topics people might be interested in if they needed help in your niche. For each topic or keyword search, there are 10 websites or blogs that are featured in the first page in Google. So if you can find 50 keyword phrases to search for, you will be exposed to something in the range of 500 possible websites or blogs.
2) Look through each blog or website and ask yourself, would my writing fit on this site? Is this topic relevant for me? There are no hard and fast rules for this; use your gut, intuition, etc.
3) If the site passes that test, then try to determine if the site is open to guest writers. The easiest clue is if the daily posts are written by multiple people instead of one person. If they are written by one person, then it is likely it will be more difficult to convince the owner or editor to allow you to guest write. If the site only has one writer, but doesn't appear to have new posts lately, possibly the writer is no longer able to write posts, or is personally tired or bored of writing. If that is the case, he might be excited to have someone like you write for his site.
4) If you want to focus on highly trafficked sites, then go to a traffic tracking website like Alexa.com and do a search for the site you are interested in writing for. The lower the number, the more traffic that site tends to have (I say tends to have, because the traffic numbers are skewed estimates, not exact counts.)
5) Write a personal email to each owner or editor asking if he needs a guest writer.
This email might look like this:
Dear (owner's or editor's name)
I am a writer in the (niche), and wonder if you would be interested in having me do some guest writing for your site. I have attached a few samples of my writing; or you can view some of my blog posts on my site here: (link to your site or someone else's site where you have written blog posts).
Please just reply if you are interested, and we can talk more.
Thanks,
Your Name
Many people will ignore the email, but that's okay. You only need responses from the people who want to pursue you writing for them.
So what's in it for the blog or website to let you write for them? The key is that their websites need content, and if you write it, they don't have to. So they let you put your resource box at the end of your article, so you get traffic and visitors from the articles and blog posts, and they get content for their website or blog, so it is win-win for both of you.
This method takes some time to find the first 10 blogs or websites to write for. But it is well worth it once you find those sites and you are regularly writing content for each site.