Content Marketing Strategies To Generate Traffic
As most online marketers know, the lifeblood to any online business is generating traffic to their website. One of the best ways to get exposure to your blog or website is through utilizing content marketing strategies. In this post, I want to discuss some of the advantages and sources of these content marketing strategies to help you in getting more traffic, which means more leads and sales conversions.
Content marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to get your products or services in front of a targeted audience. Unlike a direct sales marketing strategy, using content marketing enables you to build trust among your readers. As you provide more and more content for your readers, you are building confidence with your audience as far as your knowledge of that particular subject or niche.
One of the best content marketing strategies, in my opinion is creating a blog. Bloggers who provide daily or at the most, weekly content tend to drive large amounts of traffic to their site. Over time, as you build a faithful following based on the content that you provide, you are eventually building your targeted audience at a point where you can start to monetize your blog with your products and services and produce really good sales conversions.
Not only will your content drive new organic readers, but based on the type of content that you are producing could quickly become viral if shared on social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. This should really be your goal when providing content. Getting others to share your content on social media channels not only builds virility, but also helps in increasing your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings among different search engines such as Google.
When I first decided to start my own blog four years ago, I was very hesitant because writing was not a strong skill set of mine in school. I hated writing as a matter of fact; I’ve always been good with numbers and arithmetic. But I after researching some other known content marketing strategies, I realized that blogging would allow me to provide the content that I believe most readers would find interesting based on that niche and would allow me to monetize and build a brand all at the same time.
So if you’re not a literary scholar like me, in this article I want to give some suggestions on popular content marketing strategies that can be used to help you get your content in the eyes of your targeted audience to build your brand and exposure to your online business:
6 Popular Content Marketing Strategies
- Blogging – As I mentioned earlier blogging is one of the most effective ways in building a following when it comes to generating traffic. When starting your blog, you really want to provide content on a daily basis. The norm is usually creating new content every day for 2 months. This will help you get your blog established much faster and also Google loves when you provide content on a regular basis which will rank you higher on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
- Article Marketing – another good content marketing strategy is providing articles to online article directories. In the past, article marketing was a really great way to provide value to readers looking for information on a specific topic. Not to mention, search engines favored blogs who linked to certain article directories for SEO purposes. Although Google’s algorithm doesn’t favor these directories as much now doesn’t negate the fact that articles on these directories can drastically help in getting people to click over to your blog or website to drive traffic. Some really great article directories would be EzineArticles, Hubpages, and one of my favorites Buzzle.
- Forums – Forums can be very beneficial content marketing strategy that can be used to drive traffic to your site. One of the ways that I use forums to generate more traffic is by using my referring readers to my content on a specific niche or topic. This has to be done tactfully because in some cases, some forums won’t allow you to post links to external content. But when you find one that does, use it to your advantage.
- Yahoo Answers – One forgotten content marketing strategy is using your content to provide answers to questions that people post on question and answer forums. Yahoo answers is a great way to provide readers with in-depth answers to questions that they have based on a given topic. Good thing about Yahoo Answers is that their forums are broken down into topic categories, so it makes it easy for you to find topics that people are curious about or have questions pertaining to that specific topic.
- Social Media – I know this is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how people don’t take advantage and harness the power of social media. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are some of the best ways to get your content exposure to the masses. Couple this with the power of content syndication with sites such as Buffer and Hootsuite to enable you to schedule your blog content makes an amazing difference in generating traffic to your blog/website.
- Press Releases – Press releases are also a really great way to share your content and build a faithful reader fan-base. Over the last several years, I’ve leveraged the power of press releases to drive thousands of readers to my blog. You want your press release to provide readers information in regards to special announcements or news about your particular product or service. You want to pique the curiosity of the reader into wanting to learn more about what you have to offer. Some press release sites will even offer to syndicate your content for you on several different platforms. If you haven’t already, you might want to take a look at this valuable content marketing strategy.
So there are six content marketing strategies that you should seriously consider when it comes to providing and utilizing content marketing when driving insane amounts of traffic to your site. Like the saying goes “Content is King”, if you want to build brand recognition and sustain a long term following online, content marketing is truly where you want to focus your attention. In the next post, I will reveal some of the best ways to find content for your online business. Until next time!
