Are you struggling to try to keep your website competitive?
Maybe you are just starting out, and are wondering how to get your site ranked on the top search engines.
The truth is that more websites than ever are vying Internet traffic. By January of 2014, more than 86 million websites were built with WordPress. And if you look at the infographic below, you’ll see how much data are uploaded and shared every minute. The numbers are staggering.
With this explosion of content on the web, the chances are that you are going to face stiff competition to get traffic to your site even if you have a highly specific niche audience.
Here are 9 simple steps that you can take to drive more traffic to your site through effective content marketing.
Website content is not limited to blog posts. There are many options for formatting your content. For more effective content marketing, you should consider a wide variety of formatting options that will appeal to a larger audience. Here are few to consider:
To learn more on this topic, read this related article:
How To Present Your Boring Information In Interesting Ways
As it gets more difficult to find new readers from search engines, you will need a little help from your friends. That is why effective content marketing involves building a robust social media following to share your content with. Your followers on social media have expressed an interest in seeing your content. So you want to let them know about new content by sharing it.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are the most popular social media sites. Being present on these sites will bring you into contact with a wide variety of people from all walks of life.
You need to be on the most popular sites, but you should also consider a broad range of other social media networks. These sites are more focused and could connect you with a more targeted audience. Do some research to find out if these other sites might provide good channels for your content, select a few and get involved.
Pinterest and Dribble are great for sharing infographics and images. These sites are great for designers and artists whose content is highly visual.
Reddit is great if you have a very specific niche and want to find a lot of active users interested in that niche to share your content with.
Quora is another interesting social media site. People ask questions grouped into categories. You can follow categories related to your business and answer questions in those areas. If you have a piece of content that answers a question, you can add the link to it in your answer.
Building a social media following requires that you be active on these sites. You want to engage with other people’s content and offer your own perspective in the discussions. When you share valuable information, people will see that you have something to say and will start to follow you. Once you build a following, you can share your own content.
Timing Is Everything
Studies show that there are ideal times to post content on social media sites. Think about it: activity on these sites is driven by human behavior, so it only makes sense that timing is important. If you post your content when people are not really paying attention or available to look it over, you are not going to get likes or shares. Here is some basic data for Facebook and Twitter, but you can also look at the research to determine the best times for other sites as well.
The best days to post on Facebook are on Thursday or Friday. People are looking for outlets at the end of the work week. Early afternoon is the best time for a Facebook post. People are checking their social media accounts just after lunch. After workKeep in mind the time zone of your audience when posting.
Twitter users tend to be more active at lunch and in the early evening. They are checking their account during their break or while commuting home.
There are many tools that are available that can collect data on your followers to tell you when your best time to post would. Tweriod is just one of the many tools that can help you with this.
There are also tools to help you schedule your posts at these times. One of them is Co.Schedule. You can set up in advance what content you want to post and when you want to post it. This means that you will not miss these optimal times.
Make it easy for your readers to share your content
Beyond sharing your content on social media, it is important that other people share your content. You can make this easy by including social sharing buttons in your content. When you make it easy for people to share your content, then you will get more likes and shares.
When people share your content, that means that their connections will see it in their newsfeeds. This expands your audience beyond the people who are following your social media. Now the connections of your followers will also see your content. In addition, social media likes and shares are an important signal that search engines use to rank sites. So you will be helping yourself with the search engines as well.
Add share buttons with tools like Simple Share Buttons Plus or Cresta Social Share Counter. With these easy and inexpensive tools, there is no reason not to use social sharing buttons on all your posts.
Tools like Social Metrics Pro can help you measure the effectiveness of your content on social media sites. This information can help you plan for future effective content marketing.
Guest blogging
You’ve spent hundred of hours to develop a really top-notch piece of content. You’re thinking – “Great! now I can post it on my site.”
Wait! Don’t do it just yet! Instead of posting on your own blog, you should give it to someone else and let them post on their blog.
And before you think that I’m crazy for asking you to give your best content away, hear me out.
If you have a genuinely great content, you need to show it to as many people as possible. If you post it on your own blog, chances are, most of the readers that read it are returning visitors while only a small handful are unique visitors that found you from search results page. And everyone knows that if you want to gain traffic quickly, you’ll need to bank in on gaining unique visitors.
By posting your content on other’s blog, you’ll gain a whole new set of readers from the blog’s subscribers. If your content is genuinely insightful and in-depth, then these readers will go to your blog to look for more quality content and even subscribe to your blog.
If you’re new to guest blogging, here are few tips you should follow to get a desired result:
Because the competition for search engine rankings is so high, you really want to give yourself every advantage. Make sure that you are practicing good SEO to squeeze every little bit out the search algorithms as you can.
One thing you should always do before posting your content is keyword research
Organic search results that are produced by the natural operation of the search algorithms are still the best for effective content marketing. Putting in the extra effort on SEO will help your ranking and give you a better chance of being discovered by new readers. The best place to start working on your SEO is keyword research.
The Golden Ratio
People love stunning pictures. The most successful blog posts have one image for every 75 to 100 words. On Facebook and Twitter, posts with images are 70% more likely to be shared. So you want to make sure that you find great images for effective content marketing.
Here are some good sources for images:
Internal links
Internal links are links that point at a different page within the same domain. This happens when you link one blog post to another related blog post.
This internal link structure makes it easy for search engines to find and rank every page of your site. It also increases your page views as people click through and explore your site.
For example, you might have a page on your site about the best practices for using images on your blog. You could link this to another post about the best place to find free images. These internal links are most effective when the anchor text contains a keyword for the page that it is linking to. You have a lot of control over this.
For more effective content marketing, you should be diligent about your internal links and continually update them as you add new content.
Another strategy for effective content marketing is to build an email list of people who visit your site. Email allows you to engage your followers more personally and build a community around your site.
You can do this by giving your visitors an attractive offer in exchange for leaving their email. Ebooks, white papers, templates and other freebies are great items to offer in exchange for contact information.
To improve your opt-in rate, you should also offer your readers freebies that are relevant to your content. The more relevant the better. For example, you can see that we have different offers in different blog posts.
For blog posts that are related to social media, we offer our readers a free e-book on how to use hashtags in their social media marketing. Meanwhile, on blog posts that are related to content marketing, we offer our readers e-book that contain tips and tricks to make their content go viral.
Doing this has significantly improved our opt-in rate because people who are reading about social media are more interested in learning about how to use hashtags in social media marketing and hence are more likely to opt-in.
You put a lot of effort into creating great content. Don’t let this effort go to waste because your content is not capturing significant Internet traffic. Follow these simple steps to maximize your potential for effective content marketing to drive traffic to your site.
Updated: 10/7/15
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