It doesn’t really matter how good your content may be, if it doesn’t reach the right people at the right time – it’s basically worthless. Thanks to the expansion of content marketing, a lot of brands are now producing all sorts of blog posts, case studies, use cases, etc.
Why? – Well, because they have finally figured out that investing in content marketing actually pays off. Quality content does a lot more than just create links. It generates all sorts of smart leads, increases sales, establishes trust, forms strong brand-customer relationships, builds up reputation and positions its creators as influencers and leaders in a particular niche or industry.
Terrific, right?
Nowadays, a lot of businesses know this and they’re doing their best to effectively implement content marketing in their existing marketing strategy.
Although this insane expansion of content marketing is actually great for the consumers because it makes it a lot easier for them to form smart and well-informed decisions about products and services they’re interested in buying; from a distributors angle – this trend comes nothing short of a complete nightmare.
How come? -To be frank, this kind of content saturation makes it extremely hard for anyone and everyone to get people to notice their writing and actually click on their messages. If you operate in a “boring” industry that isn’t that attractive to the general public – you’ll have to bend over backward in order to get people to notice your content.
Trust me, I’m speaking from experience. As you already know, people aren’t really that excited about web hosting. They kinda get that it’s important, but they aren’t really interested in reading more about it. Having this in mind, I had to spend a lot of my time on research and getting to know my potential audience until I finally figured out how to transform my blog into a real content hub that offers a wide range of useful tips and tricks for various types of small to medium-sized businesses.
Thanks to a lot of hard work and progressive thinking, today, our company blog generates a lot of intelligent traffic on daily basis, and we couldn’t be happier.
As I already wrote on this blog before, creating good content is not just about writing grammatically correct articles. No. Apart from producing well-worded, data-driven content that offers solutions to our customers pain points, the thing that really helped us achieve success within this field is our tireless and endless desire to amplify our work.
We use a lot of different tactics to stimulate people to share our links and get them to return to our web address. You can say, we have more than just rabbits and pigeons up our sleeve. It’s like a zoo in there.
This is just one of the tactics we use to get people to share our content. If you frequently read our blog, you probably know that I already shared a lot of tips and tricks that help brands generate more relevant traffic to their website. If you don’t, you should probably start browsing. Heck, there’s even an entire separate section on the blog called “tips”.
As we established, all my practices are already documented here. So, in order to bring something new to the table and provide you, our readers, with fresh and new insights, I decided to branch out and ask a couple of successful online business evangelists to answer the following question:
What Kind Of Tricks Do You Use To Get People To Amplify Your Content And Increase Traffic?
In order to get people to share your content, they first have to see it. An easy way to get more people to see your message is to use images. It is extremely easy nowadays to create custom images using programs like Canva. And even though this is no secret, if you are not using images with every single social media post you share (especially the ones with your own original content), you are missing out on valuable page real estate.
When it comes to getting more eyeballs on each piece of content, you should try to take up as much space as physically allowed to you. Make sure you have Facebook Opengraph and Twitter Cards enabled so that when someone does decide to share your post, the image auto-populates.
Another way to make sure that people are seeing your content is to increase your promotion frequency. At SplashOPM, we’ve found a lot of success using a Twitter tool called Socialbro. There is an automation function that allows you to mention new followers who have specific keywords in their bios in a tweet with a link to our content. These automation tweets are crafted in a conversational manner and they have been proven to drive more engagement than simply tweeting out a link to your content. Plus, they happen frequently, which gives more users a chance to see our content. It is basically promoting itself to the right people, which means that it will usually be received well.
Once you get beyond the basics of simply reaching your audience, you need to be creating content that they actually care about if you want them to share it. Making sure that you know exactly who your ideal customer is, what their biggest problems are, how to talk to them and where they are hanging out is the best way to increase your chances of breaking through the noise. We recommend only creating content for one specific person. When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one. When you are writing, only speak to them. Really focus on being genuine and conversational, and speak to them like they are your friend, not someone who you are hoping will buy something from you. If you create content that matters to them, helps them, or entertains them, they will be more likely to share it after they’ve consumed it.
Also, make it easy for people to share your content by including social buttons on your blog and click to tweets in your posts. And just a heads up: people don’t share content with sales pitches at the end. Save that for your pricing page.
The last trick of the trade when it comes to getting amplification is to use industry and/or influencer outreach. Create a spreadsheet and list every person in your industry, their twitter handle or other social media contact, their klout score, and their blog. Then, rate them on a scale of one to ten on their likelihood to engage with you. The higher their influence, the less likely they will be to help you out. Next time you create a piece of content, try to incorporate some of these industry people in some way. You can link to their blog as a reference, use a quote that they said, or even offer a critique of some sort.
When your post goes live, make sure to let them know that you’ve acknowledged them, and see if they won’t help you amplify your content. You can even use a tool like BuzzSumo to find out which influencers are sharing what types of posts and you can use this information while you are crafting your content. You can reach out to them and say “I saw you shared X, and I just created Y! I think you might like it. Take a look” or something of that nature. Either way, influencer outreach can come in handy when you are just starting out and don’t have much of an audience yourself.
My tip in getting content read is simple: you can never be too specific. Find a specific area of your customer base to target with each piece of content – and really target them! For example, our company, Leavetown, specialize in Vacation Rentals in the Canadian Rockies – this is a market that can be attractive to many different types of people from all walks of life. So, create content that is not just general or “fluffy”, but begin to think about what markets lie within your market, and hit these individually.
For example, instead of writing a piece of content on Family Vacations in the Canadian Rockies (there are a million of these articles out there), find a niche within this market – get as specific as you can and think outside the box. Try “Hiking With Young Children in April in Whistler” or ” Free Family Activities in Banff on Weekends“. In today’s market, so many areas are saturated with copious amounts of content, and yours may get lost in the noise – so find specific keywords that will hit a more niche market, and try ranking on these – you are likely to find your efforts much more successful!
Before I came on board at Leavetown, the content strategy was much more generalized, and my first move was to streamline the strategy to hit different areas of our target market with each blog post. Not only will you resonate with your target market, but the content will often be more unique and informative than a lot of the other articles out there.
Content marketing drives our business. At OutreachNinja, we sell software at an average of $40/month and when you sell to customers at such a low amount – traditional sales just doesn’t work, economically.
We knew from the start that we would need to build traffic through content marketing, and therefore, launched a blog straight away.
18 months later and we have increased our traffic over 10x through a combination of content marketing and influencer marketing. This means writing great content, connecting with influencers to promote it, and then optimizing it to generate leads via emails, who eventually turn into customers.
We’ve learned that people rarely convert straight from the blog itself. They have to be nurtured over time. They follow a few blog posts, sign up for the email, then eventually sign up for a trial, maybe hop on a call with us, and finally, they turn into a customer. By then it’s like they “know” us.
We’ve made a ton of mistakes and continue to do so such as not promoting our content, or not writing content for our target audience.
Content marketing is an evolving channel, so you have to stay on the cutting edge.
The key to amplifying content you create is to work with a strategy. Start by identifying 3-5 measurable goals that you aim to achieve by creating content in the first place.
These goals should be achievable within 12-18 months; easy to track using a system like Google Analytics; and have a measurable impact on your business (such as click-through rates on your website, trials started for your product, etc.).
Once your content strategy and goals are in place, research which social platforms your audience is using — and, most importantly, why they are using them. LinkedIn’s purpose is to serve as the largest professional publishing platform; Twitter’s purpose is to succinctly share real-time information.
Therefore, a person will use LinkedIn for different reasons then they will use Twitter. Your job as a business is to meet your audience where they’re at and use content to help them solve their problems.
Each social platform will have its own nuances for how to amplify your content. On LinkedIn, content is amplified when it is categorized in one of their “Pulse” channels. On Twitter, content is amplified when you contribute to trending topics and use the right hashtags to help other users find it.
So, the most important way to amplify your content is to find the social platform where your audience is already most active. Then, research which specific tactics will amplify your content on that particular platform.
Start with one platform and scale to others once you have succeeded; the fastest way to fail is to try all of them at once.
Content Marketing is one those subjects you talked about in your queries that are covered on pretty much every marketing, SEO, small business blog out there these days. Truth be told though, people are making it a lot more complicated than it needs to be. I’m sure you are going to get a ton of pitches saying “produce quality content!”, “always be blogging new stuff!”, “SEO the heck out of it”, etc. Although these are valid, they are extremely general.
At CanIRank, we had numerous clients come to us after following the above and that blog post that took them 40 hours to research and write only ever gotten seen by 10 people. A waste.
So, here are our tips:
Find Effective Keywords
Many people take a shot in the dark when it comes to what keywords they will incorporate in their content and try ranking for.
Big mistake!
Keywords are so competitive these days and there many are tons tools out there that can save you time and effort by giving you the competitiveness of a keyword and some even tell you how likely you are to rank for it based on your website’s current content. CanIRank does this. If you have a site that’s just starting out then you will need to pick less competitive terms that you can rank for.
Once you are ranking for those less competitive terms you can use your new page rank authority to rank for more increasingly competitive terms. Increasing your audience and potential customer base as Google continues to view your site as a more and more authoritative resource for people looking for information in your area.
Use the Yoast Plugin
Especially if you don’t ever remember what SEO stands for and are a beginner. This plugin is free and although isn’t the most thorough way to do SEO, it is helpful for those that need some guidance and extra pointers when checking to see if their content is optimized even semi-well be posting. Using Long Tail keywords in your URLs, content, titles, and meta descriptions is now a practice that almost all content marketers are promoting. We preach the use of long tail keywords in order to build authority while you build your audience. It’s just as good to rank for a bunch of lower traffic long tail keywords as it is to rank for one big one. The tail for keywords that people are searching for is extremely long.
Know Your Audience
Think about all the different combinations of words that people can type into a search engine and all the ways they describe the things that they’re looking for.
Even a very specific search term will have a couple of searches on Google each month. The opportunity for you as a small business marketer is to rank for those niche keywords and get your business in front of the people who are searching using those keywords.Lastly, stay up to date.
We all know the online world is changing by the second and it almost seems impossible sometimes to stay current with the latest updates, rules, & versions.
Best way to try and avoid this? Subscribe to a content marketing guide site. I know we all get tons of emails a day but you don’t have to open every single one and when you have some downtime, you can freshen up on the latest news thanks to others that have researched it and already summed it up for you.
Here’s 5 content marketing guides we recommend. Hopefully, some of our tips will help in your article. Please let me know if you have any other questions or need any more information from me!
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
