Yesterday, I wrote about what we believe to be the future of online content distribution. I’ve also written about Tippingpoint Labs’ New Media Life Cycle Analysis in which I demonstrated the idea that comprehensive trend analysis can help determine where any new distribution channel fits into the larger world of online content creation and dissemination. Today, I hope to be able to bring those two concepts together to help you, as a content creator, build a strategic plan for broad and effective content distribution.

Remember, there are seven stages in the life cycle of a any content distribution channel: experimentation, adoption, gestation, escalation, consolidation, monetization and maintain. If one prescribes to the belief that the future of content distribution will be highly fragmented across tens or hundreds of distribution channels designed to deliver and analyze specific types of content, one might spend their days chasing each new channel without a concrete understanding as to the potential ROI. For example, how much energy should one spend creating and distributing content on 12Seconds.tv versus Vimeo? Or, should you be participating in LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Facebook and Tumblr?

The answer to your online content marketing quandry lies in the careful creation of, what we call, a Diversified Content Distribution Portfolio.

Tippingpoint Labs' Diversified Content Distribution Portfolio

In the financial world diversification of a portfolio is defined as:

…A risk management technique, related to hedging, that mixes a wide variety of investments within a portfolio. It is the spreading out investments to reduce risks. Because the fluctuations of a single security have less impact on a diverse portfolio, diversification minimizes the risk from any one investment. (Source: Wikipedia)

We’ve taken the concept of financial diversification and applied it to the distribution of online content. The goal of our portfolio is designed to ensure that you’re spreading your content wide enough to ensure that the it is being consumed by your audience, while you ‘hedge your bets’ on early stage content generation or distribution channels. This concept ensures that you’re experimenting with new channels (like 12Seconds.tv in the adoption phase) but relying on stable, proven channels (like Flickr in the maintain phase) for the majority of your content distribution.

Let’s look at how one might distribute their content using this model:

• Experimentation - today, it’s crucial that if you’re creating valuable online content you must experiment with the newest most immature channels for content distribution. This allows you to try new things and see what might work while the channel is in its early phases. As a result, you only should spend 5% of your marketing resources working on platforms in this phase of the life cycle.
• Gestation – as the channel matures, you want to participate more heavily in the gestation phase as you hone the content you’re producing for that channel. If you’re successful, you may actually help the channel move into the Adoption phase by proving the value of the new distribution channel.
• Adoption – It’s here in the Adoption phase where you find the ‘internet celebrities’ born out of the new distribution channel. This is where the ‘next big hit’ comes from and you’re hoping for the highest return on your investment. However, you shouldn’t be spending too much time or expense working in the adoption phase because the channel isn’t mature yet. That being said, this is your opportunity to deliver the highest quality content on the channel, which means spending 15% of your time on these distribution channels may pay big dividends.
• Escalation – Paradoxically, the escallation phase is where you’ll see a huge jump in the number of participants on the new channel, however, the quality of the content is at it’s lowest given the huge increase in content creation. (Twitter is in the escalation phase right now.) This means, that you should only dedicate 15% of your energy on participating in this channel.
• Monetization / Consolidation – As the channel matures and the volume of low quality content starts to diminish it’s worth investing a larger portion of your time, money and energy  on any one content distribution channel. There’s now less noise and the high volume users who couldn’t find value in the channel start to leave, opening the door for your exploitation of the new distribution opportunity.
• Maintain – by the time a channel has reached the maintain phase of the life cycle you must be spending the majority of your effort distributing content on what are now considered reliable, proven content delivery platforms. Flickr, for example, is a great place to aggregate your imagery and is clearly in the maintain phase of its life cycle.

As you build your portfolio try and avoid the urge to dedicate large amounts of resources on those early phase channels; they’re ROI is unclear, they’re content is low quality and the audience is usaually too small to make a great impact. That being said, make sure you experiment and try new things. You’re biggest successes will be found on content distribution channels in the gestation and adoption phases.

Like any financial portfolio you must re-allocate your Content Distribution Portfolio on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly, to ensure that you’re still hedging your bets and participating in a wide enough array of distribution channels to be effective, efficient and successful.

What’s your content distribution strategy? Do you have one?