The key to any online business is content. There is no denying that websites with high quality, relevant, unique content, stand a better chance of ranking within SERPS (search engine result pages). But do you know what the key to successfully marketing a content campaign is?
Sure content quality helps but that alone won't guarantee success. There are a number of little things which make up the whole picture and this blog post will outline 10 simple tactics you should be employing to make the most of your content. All you need to have is the willingness to take time in implementing these techniques.
1) Cross-promote your Twitter profiles
When it comes to content marketing efforts, Twitter can play a huge part. By no means will it make up the majority but it can play a vital role in helping influencers find your content. These influencers are super important, as they're the people who will retweet your content to their own followers and ideally share it with readers on their own blogs.
So maximising this Twitter traffic is an aspect of your content marketing which mustn’t be overlooked. How do we do this? One simple way is to cross promote your Twitter profile with the other people in your organisation. By using the bio section of your Twitter profile you can cross promote to other members in your organisation with the @ symbol handle of your colleagues profile page. If all your employees carry out this cross linking and promote your company Twitter profile, you will quickly gain more followers. So when you tweet out your latest blog post you'll get more traffic.
2) Using these great keywords in your headlines
Although having high quality content on your website is important, no one will read your content if the headline is poor and uninviting. Believe me when I say that a great headline could mean the difference between a few hundred visitors and a few thousand visitors.
If you struggle to create appealing headlines, perhaps consider using some of the words listed below as they tend to encourage visitor clicks.
How to
Free
You
Tips
Blog post
Why
Best
Tricks
Great
These keywords work well and if you're able to use them in your page title tags you could see an increase in your organic listing click through rates as well. For more help on headline formulas there's some great advice to be found on 'Copyblogger'.
3) Using Facebook Connect to collect emails
If you want to grow your email subscriber list at a faster pace, I suggest using Facebook Connect. It allows users of Facebook, who are logged in, to easily subscribe to your blog without even having to enter their name or email address. A Facebook Connect form can be created through a website called Aweber pretty easily.
4) Use your blog post to ask a question
If a visitor has taken the time to read through your blog post, it means they're engaged, which is great, your blog post has done its job. When the visitor then finds a question at the end, there's a good chance of that person leaving a comment. You may find that asking a more technical question won't receive as much response as a more generic question but test this out on your blog to see the results.
5) Make content skimmable
Use subheadings in your posts and perhaps a heading conclusion at the end of each post. Using subheadings helps to break up the content, making it easier on the eye and easier to learn from the important points. Breaking your blog posts in to sub headed sections will help to increase the time spent on site for each blog post.
Neil Patel from Quick Sprout did some research in to this on his blog and found some amazing results. When using subheadings the average time a user spent on site for a blog post went up from 2 minutes 41 to 3 minutes 26 seconds. Further testing resulted in more time spent on site due to subheading use than blog post length. Even when Neil increased his blog posts from 1000 to 2000 words the average time spent on site didn't really change. Using subheadings however helped to create more engagement and increase time spent on site.In short, to increase the number of visitors actually reading your content, use subheadings to break it up.
6) Draw blog images
Blog posts which contain custom drawn images tend to receive significantly more traffic. If you're not a natural designer then you can head to fiverr and have one drawn up for you for no more than £5.
Some people claim using these custom drawn images can generate twice, or even three times more traffic.
7) Share your content more than once
It's a fair assumption that if you only share your blog post once on your Facebook timeline or Twitter feed, the majority of your followers won't see it. An experiment carried out of Thomasz Tunguz found that by tweeting the same blog post again, he received roughly 75% of the retweets of the previous tweet. Because of this he was able to get roughly 131% more retweets by sharing his post three times instead of once.
For optimal Twitter engagement you should time your tweets, as the time at which you tweet has a big impact on the number of people that see it. Through study, it's been found that tweeting at 8am or 5pm gives optimal visibility and that Fridays are popular days to tweet.
8) Analyse the numbers
Content marketing, although it may not provide direct conversions for your primary keywords, does provide indirect conversions for more random search terms that are related to your industry. One thing that is for sure with content marketing is that you will see more traffic. This might be coming from organic search, direct, social media or email marketing but the trick it to know which one to focus on improving.
With Google analytics there is a feature called "assisted conversions" Assuming you have conversion tracking activated you'll see a chart which breaks down your revenue channels. From this you can work out whether to focus more on organic or referral traffic for example. If say you wanted a further appeal to social media channels, you could blog about Facebook and Twitter marketing. To increase organic traffic you could focus on creating timeless content i.e. How-To articles which can do well in search over time.
9) Content calendars
Not being consistent with your content could be one of the biggest mistakes you make as your traffic could have a tendency to drop considerably.
So how do you remain consistent? If your site is a Wordpress theme you can use the content calendar. It will identify when your posts will go live and if there are gaps or overlaps.
10) If it works, do it again
It can be a struggle to come up with popular content ideas. The Quick Sprout analyser tool allows you to compare five of your competitor’s content engagement.
With the report you'll see the popular blog posts they have created from a social media aspect. With this you can generate your own version of that blog post with your own unique twist, so you're not blatantly copying your competition. Ultimately this will help you to create more content which receives increased social traffic.
Conclusion
Believe it or not, content marketing isn't all about the content. Making some adjustments such as content layout or when it's tweeted can help to drive more traffic. If you're going to put the time in to creating content, you may as well maximise the traffic you generate from it.
What have you found with your content marketing? Do you employ any of these techniques or any different ones?
Christian Michaels
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