Best Way to Market a White Paper

[CleanEdisonInc]

Hello everyone,

I had to write a white paper for an entirely different purpose than to drive links, but it did come out very well and I think it would be a fantastic tool in my SEO efforts.

What do you guys think is the best way to market a white paper? Obviously I will let our email subscribers know about it and place a link to it in a prominent place on the website, but if anyone has any extra ideas, I would love to hear them.

Also, what is the best way to host it? Taking the Moz beginners guide for example, I would love to just put it on my server like http://static.seomoz.org/files/SEOmoz-The-Beginners-Guide-To-SEO-2012.pdf but is it necessary that I make it web-friendly like http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo?

Can the former do anything for SEO? What if there are links to and from the site?

Any advice would be great.

Thanks

[ReferralCandy]

On top of email marketing, you can consider promoting it on your social media channels, and writing blog posts to promote your white paper. Treat it like one of your products, and market it the same way as you would normally do for your product. Here's a link that will be of relevance to you: http://www.benchmarkemail.com/blogs/detail/online-marketing-branding-how-to-market-your-white-paper

In terms of SEO, it would be preferable if you gave it a web-friendly url, which would help as a ranking factor, and easily shareable as a link. You would want your white paper to rank well on search engines too!

[Ron_McCabe]

You might consider setting up a dedicated landing page for the white paper and requiring an e-mail and name to download. You could use pay per click to drive leads and collect their contact info when they download.

If you are set up in directories that offer coupons consider setting up a coupon that allows leads to download the white paper.

[KaneJamison]

Both suggestions from Ron and ReferralCandy are good ones. Have a dedicated landing page, promote on all of your owned channels like newsletters and social media profiles, and do your best to promote through your writing onsite and offsite.

Beyond that I recommend that you look into paid social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. You can get reasonable CPCs and highly targeted audience demo/psychographics like job title, region, etc. Very handy if you only want to target CMOs or CIOs, for example.