12 Content Creating Tips to Drive Traffic
In the current business sphere, 92% of brands now consider content marketing a business asset, and for a good reason. In fact, content marketing can generate 3X more leads than outbound marketing while costing 62% less. It can also increase conversion rates. Unfortunately, not all content is great content, and not every content marketing strategy will get you the desired ROI. Consequently, you must be extremely selective with your content marketing campaigns. As such, we bring you the top 12 proven content-creating tips and marketing tactics to get more from your campaign.
12 Content Creating Tips to Drive Traffic
1. Survey your audience to find out what they want
The best content marketing strategy produces and publishes posts that resonate with your target audience’s needs. Surveys, such as email surveys, can help solicit your audience’s opinions and find out their needs. You can then use this data to build content.
2. Optimize your blogs for SEO
Ultimately, you’re looking to search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to reach your audience. For this reason, it only makes sense to optimize your posts for the leading search engines. Ensure all the content you post is optimized, whether on social media platforms or in blog form.
3. Invest in evergreen content
Evergreen content is content that doesn’t age. Rather, the content continues to remain relevant for months and years to come. Two easy tricks to make your content evergreen are to remove dates from your blog posts and avoid fast news. Focus on content that offers timeless solutions to issues.
4. Make your content easy to read
About 81% of digital consumers skim content. They don’t read every article word by word. So, you want to make your content easily skimmable. A few ideas to help include adding images, using bullet points, and writing shorter paragraphs.
5. Optimize for social sharing
Add social media buttons so that readers who wish to share your posts with friends and followers on the various social networks can do so effortlessly. Fortunately, you can easily insert social share buttons with the SumoMe WordPress plugin. Share your own website content onto your social media pages to encourage your followers to share your content with their friends.
6. Quote industry experts to add authority
Industry experts shape the opinions in their respective fields. As such, consumers often find them more trustworthy and tend to follow their advice without thinking twice. Therefore, including a few industry-expert quotes in your blog can go a long way to building trust with your community.
7. Spice up your content with infographics
In a recent report by Venngage, 40.8% of surveyed marketing departments said infographics were their most potent visual marketing tool in the past year. In fact, they even performed better than videos at 23.7% and charts at 15.4%.
8. Leverage freebies to boost opt-in
Lead magnets, specifically freebies, and giveaways, are age-old tools for driving opt-in responses. For a quick return, we recommend free e-books, whitepapers, and workbooks. Resource libraries are also very enticing, especially among more learned demographics. Use effective CTA buttons to encourage visitors to sign up and get their free book or coupon.
9. Take advantage of guest posting
Guest posting has many challenges, including low-quality content and security issues (social engineering). However, when done correctly, it can be highly beneficial. It opens the doors to new leads and instantly takes you to new markets. Additionally, it adds another opportunity to effectively use backlinks.
10. Drive engagement with the comment section
The comment section exists to help you solicit feedback from your readers. Create time to interact with the comments, and you’ll learn so much about the readers’ needs. You’re even allowed to ask questions and provide links to external resources to solve your customers’ needs fully.
11. Write conversationally
If you’re wondering what conversational writing means, it’s when you write as if you’re speaking to a customer right in front of you. So, yes, you’re allowed to skip heavy jargon and break grammar rules whenever necessary to communicate better. In other words, write how your readers talk to see an increase in engagement. After all, readers are more likely to comment if it feels like a conversation.
12. Interview industry thought leaders
Finally, we already mentioned the benefits of capturing industry leaders’ thoughts first hand. Interviewing a field expert once in a while is another excellent way to relay their thoughts to your audience. It not only builds your credibility but also helps to educate visitors. Sharing within the community helps to build your reputation as a leader.
Summary
The good news is that most of the content-creating tips on the above list are things you can implement right away, freely, or at a minimal cost. Simply choose a few to get started, and start driving traffic where you want it.