The age of digital technology has seen an explosion in not just the number of users online but also in the number of content creators. Statistics show that over four million blog posts are published daily and online shops are reaping the benefit of a market valued at around $2.84 trillion.
While in context this may seem intimidating to website owners, there are many ways in which you can handle your content more effectively. The savvy site owner knows that content creation is only one part of the job – reaching out and increasing traffic is the other half of the challenge.
Whether you are a blogger or an online business, using the right marketing tactics is one of the strongest ways of getting more web traffic. Here I would like to share with you some tips on exactly how to do that – from some of the most obvious ideas to the more obscure.
1. Leverage on Social Media
Social Media channels are an interesting phenomenon because they have the potential to increase reach at an exponential rate. Here’s how it usually works;
You promote content on social media and those who follow your channel will likely see it. Those who find it interesting may share the content with their friends. This act of sharing is what extends the reach of your content beyond your immediate audience.
The key to successful social media marketing is to know the right way to present your content. Use it well and you may see an explosion in traffic from social media sources.
2. Focus on your SEO
One of the biggest avenues of promotion is via search engines like Google – it processes on average around 40,000 search queries every second. By focusing on your SEO, you will be able to make use of those huge number of searches and gain traffic organically from search engines.
Even if you’re not an SEO specialist or website developer, you can make use of tools to help boost your website SEO. For example, if you’ve used something like Wix to build your own website it can help you leverage on SEO.
Since it is a site builder you won’t even need to know any coding to not just build a beautiful website but also get it SEO-optimized for Google. If you’re not convinced, here’s how to use Wix for your website SEO.
3. Advertise!
This may be a ‘duh’ moment but the most obvious and easy way to market your content is by advertising. There are so many platforms you can do this on, and you basically pay for results. The downside is that advertising costs quickly add up, so if you are looking to head in this direction, make sure that you have a solid campaign plan before throwing your money around.
Advertising online is good though since you are guaranteed X results for X amount of money put in. The only question is whether the traffic you are paying for is actually converting to income for you.
4. Create Great Content
Great content usually markets itself. If you aren’t in a rush for anything, spend time crafting content that is useful and evergreen. Newsy headlines may catch large amounts of traffic quickly, but evergreen content assures you of a slow and steady traffic rate for a long time to come.
I have seen some people sell very heavily on catchy headlines, but I am not a fan of this. In fact, this borders onto the zone of being clickbait sometimes and that is something that will ultimately affect both your site SEO standings as well as increase bounce rates.
5. Make Use of Email Marketing
Building traffic organically through SEO is one thing, but with the amount of competition for eyeballs on the web today, you must reach out to visitors and not just wait for them to come. Try to build an email database from existing visitors so that you can reach out to them later.
There are many great email marketing tools which can help you to do this. Take for example MailChimp. This awesome application lets you create stunning newsletters and send it out to any database of emails which you’ve collected.
From there you can also track how many of those emails are still valid, how many have opened your email and how many visit your site after an email blast.
6. Use News Listing Sites
If the nature of your website is truly in the domain of current news, try to get your site listed on aggregators such as Google News. It can be incredibly easy and once on you’ll stay there if you don’t violate their terms of use.
Sites like Google News get an incredible amount of traffic daily and there you will be grouped with sites offering similar topics. This is where you pay attention to your headlines and extracts to entice people to click through to your site. Remember though, crafting clickbaity headlines isn’t a viable long-term solution.
7. Create Infographics
Infographics are fantastic for many reasons, although they will take a little time to put together. Once you know the content that goes on to the infographics you can use a tool like Canva to help create an attractive visual design.
This serves many purposes. Because of their highly visual nature, infographics are ideal to share on social media platforms. They are also attractive enough to entice other sites to want to use them – which usually results in at least an attribution link back to your site.
The result: More visitors and better SEO rankings!
Conclusion
This list is by no means exhaustive, but I am sure by now that you realise how much work can potentially go into marketing your content. Unfortunately, this is a necessary evil since if you do nothing you will likely fall behind other sites who may have weaker content but are willing to put time, money and effort into their marketing.
The good news is that as you can see, marketing your content doesn’t have to be all about the money. There are free channels you can rely on to bring more visitors in as well.
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