Whenever a blogger writes a new post, he is secretly hoping that it will bring a large number of new visitors to his blog. But hoping is definitely not enough, because it is not the circumstances that determine if your articles will get traction it is the tactics and strategies you use to make that happen. Truthfully, the most successful bloggers spend 80 percent of their time promoting content, and only 20 percent of their time producing it. By using content marketing, you will promote and distribute your content in the most effective way, as it will get in front of the right people, at the right time and at the right place.
Whilst many think that content marketing is the spawn of internet age and SEO, the truth is far from it. Actually content marketing genesis dates back for nearly more than a century – just like it’s shown in this interactive infographic created by an SEO company from New York called Four Dots.
5 Content Marketing Tricks to Increase Your Blog Traffic
Search Traffic
People search Google for hundreds of things daily and sharing your content on such a highly searched site will make it reach more people. However, if your competition is using the same keyword tools, similar long tail SEO phrases, doing the same research you need to do a few things in order to stand out. You can change the Meta description of your blog post from the default into a sentence or two which will appeal to your ideal audience.
Also, if your site is not optimized for mobile devices your search rankings may be impacted, so you need to bear in mind site design, site structure, page speed and user experience. Your content needs to be fresh as Google’s algorithm gives priority to it. Another point is that the images you use need to be optimized, meaning they have to be properly tagged and named, and their size needs to be considered so it does not slow down loading time.
Your Audience
In order for your content to reach the right audience you must get to know your target market. You need to know who your customers are, what you offer them, how it makes them feel and how it differs from other products. This is called positioning and the goal is to create an emotional connection with your customers so that they will gladly come back. Then, they will tell about your content to their friends and get a word of mouth going.
Make Your Content Contagious
There are several ways to make your content contagious. Firstly, you can use someone else’s old idea, which may be considered as stealing, but how well you execute that idea is more important than originality.
Secondly, adding practical unity to your content will make people want to share it. This is done by giving your readers detailed action steps they need to take, providing them with examples and case studies, and showing them the accurate numbers they can achieve.
Thirdly, you should make your content visually appealing. Your article does not need to be worthy of sharing as long as it is visually appealing people will share it. This can be achieved by writing an introductory paragraph, using meaningful headlines, using bulleted lists, using one idea per paragraph, using high-quality graphics and a lot of outbound links.
Easy Sharing
Contagious content will definitely be shared a lot, but there are a few ways which will get you even more shares. Making sure your share buttons are easily available is one of them. For example, you can make social sharing button float so that they are always accessible no matter how much people scroll.
You should optimize the text on your sharing buttons, using “share with your friends” phrase, and also add a twitter button next to it. Another thing you can do is ask people for shares.
You can also make it possible for quotes to be tweeted. This will put your visitors in a “whether to share an article or a quote from it” dilemma instead of “whether or not to share the article”.
Exposure
If you do not have a big following to share your links with, you can borrow from those who do and share a similar audience. You can post comments on other blogs and get the blog owner’s and audience’s attention. Once they get to know you can ask influential people to share your content. Guest posting is another option, this way you can reach readers who otherwise would not come across your work. Also, you want to promote your post as having your articles feature on an authority site adds credibility to your work.
I’ve been using Cloudways since January 2016 for this blog. I happily recommend Cloudways to my readers because I am a proud customer.