Content Marketing Strategies Build Website Traffic

Building traffic to your website through social media requires 2 things:  1) Content that is sharable and 2) engagement with your network.  Today, we’ll focus on the first strategy — content marketing.

Sharable Content

The Internet is chock full of interesting information, pictures, and videos.  When people find something they like, they share it with their friends and followers, by “liking” it on Facebook or Re-Tweeting the link.  If the content is interesting enough, it can go viral — meaning it spreads quickly from 1 person to another.

Every company wants their content to go viral — called viral marketing, but it’s difficult to predict what people will decide to share.  If content is not interesting enough, it may be shared, but sharing stops quickly.

Your content marketing strategy needs to focus on learning about your target market, what problems they face, what they’re interested in, etc. You also need to make it easy to share by putting share buttons right on the content. One great opportunity I think too many firms miss in their content marketing is adding links to their infographics. You spend a lot of time creating that content, make it sharable.

Where Do you Find Interesting Content?

A sound content marketing strategy requires you create and curate content (find content from other sources) and share it on a consistent basis. But, where do you get content ideas or sharable content?

You can create content that’s sharable.  For instance, Roto Rooter created a contest giving away a “pimped out John” in honor of the birthday of John Crapper — inventor of the modern toilet.  The contraption featured a laptop, remote, MP3, and other bizarre gadgets.  It was so bizarre, people HAD to share pictures and stories about the toilet.  The contest generated over a million dollars worth of free publicity for Roto Rooter.

You can have fans create sharable content — crowdsourced. Ask customers to create videos or images featuring your product.  An even better strategy is to have other fans decide the winners.  Contestants spread the message about their entry to win the prize and, in the process, spread word about your product. More businesses use this content marketing strategy because it works.

You can find content that’s sharable. I set up Google Alerts on topics my followers might find interesting.  Every day I get these alerts and Tweet the best to my followers, friends, and fans.  Sure, I’m not sending them something directly related to my product, but I’m building my brand as someone who shares interesting stuff.  This gives me permission to sometimes share self-promotions with them.

Getting Your Content Noticed

Build your brand – part of getting your content noticed is building your brand.  If you have a reputation of sharing interesting content, people will begin looking for your content.  They’ll sign up for your RSS feed or your email newsletter. They’ll also be more likely to visit your website if you have a reputation for having good, reliable information.  Look at Huffington Post.  Thousands of visitors read post there each day because Huffington Post has a reputation for providing accurate, interesting, and humorous information (and most of it is crowdsourced).

Timing – an annoying aspect of social media is the content flow of information.  It’s a little overwhelming.  Plus, unless you spend all day checking your social networks, you’ll likely miss numerous Tweets and Posts every day.  So, timing your Tweets and updates is critical for bringing visitors to your blog.  A recent study suggests Saturday is the best day to post a status update, but this varies.   You should test out different days and times of the day to see what works best for you.   You also need to test this on different social networks. Many social media analytics tools include “best time to post” services.

Headline – a good headline will help bring traffic to your blog.  You can test out different headlines and track which one works for you.  I find headlines that challenge the status quo draw a lot of traffic.  A headline that teases readers will also generate a lot of visits.  Putting a number in the headline also seems to work well for me.

Need help building a content marketing strategy?

And, I’m happy to help — whether you need a complete social media strategy or just a little help building your keyword strategy or content marketing strategy. You can request a FREE introductory meeting using my vCita pop-up or sign up for my email newsletter to learn more about social media marketing.