5 Actionable Content Marketing Tips To Drive More Traffic

As a site owner, you are always looking for ways to increase traffic to your site. After all, it is that traffic which makes people like you and me keep going – we constantly publish new information on our blog hoping that someone might stumble over it one day and find it useful. By increasing the traffic to your site, not only you will be able to make some money through advertisements but also there are many chances for you to get a potential client interested in your business or service.

Marketing tips for small business owners

To be honest, I landed my first few clients for my web design service only after I started to post regularly on my blog and shared it on social media. If getting enough traffic for your site is the biggest problem you’re facing, worry not as I’m here to help. I will share some useful tips and tricks to help you gain more traffic for your website.

Though there are many legitimate ways you can hack to get more traffic for your site, we will stick to content marketing in this post as it is the best option right now.

Create high-quality viral content

To make your content go viral, you need to craft your content carefully. It relies on two things totally – first, the content should be worthy of being shared and second, the content should be shared widely enough to reap the benefits of the networks they’re shared on. Before you even think of trying to create viral content, you should realize what emotions make content go viral.

The content you are trying to create should appeal to your readers. Now, here are nine tips from Gawker’s most successful writer for helping you to make your content go viral –

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I do agree that you can’t come up with a viral post now and then but still, you can try to market your content emotionally to your readers. By doing so you will be able to get some decent amount of traffic to your site constantly, which is also good for SEO.

The greater the strategy you have planned for promoting your content, the better chances it has for getting viral. Most importantly, find relevant bloggers, publications and influencers in your niche and get them to share your content with their followers or community.

Write well-researched & in-depth articles

There is no use of promoting your content if your content sucks – people aren’t going to get any value from it. You can shell out money on marketing your poor content and get visitors to your site but once they are on your site and they don’t find the content useful or rich in information, they are going to abandon it and never come back.

You should instead focus on creating evergreen content which will be useful for the readers and writing in-depth articles is one such strategy. By writing in-depth articles not only are you providing value to your readers but also to search engines. Search engines like Google & Bing love long and detailed content as they assume it will be of more value than short articles on the same topic in the relevant niche.

Another reason why this strategy would work every single time is that you cannot write an in-depth article just like that. You need to do some research, read about similar articles by expert authors in the niche and talk to some influencers before you can even start writing down your post. For an article to quality as in-depth, the word count should be effectively greater than 2000 and nothing less than that. It is always better to publish in-depth articles continuously rather than to publish low-quality articles every now and then. It should also be noted that these in-depth articles generally perform well in search engines and rake up enough social shared to keep the traffic coming in for months or even years!

When you’re concentrating on in-depth articles, don’t go for very specific subjects in your niche, rather make it broad and target long-tail keywords and LSI keywords. Also, try to back up your claims and mentioned facts with references and proof – linking back to authority sites. And most important of all, include visual content like infographics and slides for graphs, statistics, comparison, etc.

Make your headlines irresistible

You may be good at writing valuable content but what if no one is reading them? That’s the problem when your headlines suck. Even if you’ve just got average content you can make your visitors stay on your site for a longer time if your headlines are catchy. Write headlines with people in mind – they shouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to know what’s inside that article.

Writing good headlines is more important than creating content for any website. If the headlines suck, people won’t be tempted to hang around and they’ll quit your site without even checking around for more information. To be honest, you should give it equal importance you give to your content. There are so many tools out there to assist you in creating irresistible headlines. Check out HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator and SEOPressor’s Blog Title Generator to generate ideas & titles for your blog posts and use tools like Sharethrough’s Headline Analyzer and CoSchedule‘s #1 Headline Analyzer to analyze your existing and new headlines.

Do advanced guest posting

You can market your content in two ways – you can either publish high-quality articles on your blog and share it with influencers in your niche or you can contribute to relevant high authority blogs and link back to your site. Whether you post on your own site or contribute to other high standard blogs, what matters is your content and the value it adds to the site.

By guest posting on high authority blogs, you can build powerful backlinks to your site. Don’t go for the numbers – it doesn’t matter how many backlinks you can generate for your blog by guest posting. All that matters is the authority of the backlinking site and the value of your content. Too many backlinks with low-quality content can make your site look spammy in the eyes of Google.

Guest posting is known to generate high quality targeted visitors to your site, that is, people who will truly be interested in your content – not like the regular visitors who come and go. You can build a special landing page for this category of visitors and use them as potential leads. There are high chances for them to become your potential clients. But be warned, do not focus too much on guest blogging – the aim is to build your audience, not improving your SEO. If the content you contribute is really worthy enough, people will start linking back to your site on their own. Demonstrating your expertise is the key here.

How to improve your guest blogging chances and audience reach

1. Search for relevant blogs in your niche which accept guest posting. Open up Google and look for

• “Keyword” + “guest post”
• “keyword+ “write for us”
• “keyword” + “This post was written by”
• intitle:guest post guidelines
• intitle:guest blog guidelines

2. Look through the blogs to check the level of user engagement on the site (comments). Also, make sure they have a good social media presence (look at the share counts on posts).

3. Analyze the site’s influence further using tools like SimilarWeb, BuzzSumo, or Open Site Explorer. This is a very important step because it helps you in deciding whether or not to contribute to a particular site and how much reach you can expect in return.

Rinse and Repeat

Now that you have found success by following the above steps, you don’t want to stop now. You should keep doing it again and again like a cycle to reach new heights each time. Raise the bar every time you complete one cycle. Try to post unique and well-researched content often and land yourself guest posting opportunities in bigger publications in your niche.

I am sure you will be able to rake up your traffic by more than what you were even expecting before. Keep up with the streak and contribute new content again and again till you get bored with the traffic. More often you publish content, higher the inflow of traffic it will be to your site. Moreover, you will be recognized by other fellow publications & bloggers – you may even be invited to contribute content to their site. Persistence is the key.

Conclusion

Though there are many ways using which you can attract legitimate traffic to your site, it is always better to follow the methods used by industry leaders and influencers. They have already done the heavy lifting and calculations for you. All you just need to do is implement their results on your site and check if it is working for you too. It should work well in 90% of the cases and you should observe some desirable effects.

These strategies have been evolved and developed over time. It works for them, it works for me and it should work for you too. I’m pretty sure you can notice some surge in traffic during the first month itself if you did everything right. Remember, all your visitors are your potential clients for your business. If you liked this post, I’m sure you would also love reading about five ways to improve your international SEO strategy.