Most businesses know that they should be posting content on their website regularly to generate traffic to their site. However, they might not know how to get real value from those posts.
These days it’s often not good enough to simply post an article and be done with it. If you want to get more from your blog posts, then you’ll need to put in more often, use different tactics and spread the word.
Blog posts can be extremely powerful, and you only need to do a search for ‘SEO case studies’ to see how many businesses have benefited from content creation.
What Most People Do
Most companies that we see take the time to craft a short blog post of 500 – 800 words at least a couple times per week and they’ll post it on their blog. Some of them might even send an email out to their subscriber list or post in on their social media profiles.
Everything they’re doing is fantastic; it’s what they’re not doing that is losing them thousands of new visitors each month and potentially more revenue.
What You Should Be Doing
Instead, it’s critical that you take proactive steps to try and generate a greater return from each of your blog posts. Simply letting your existing customers and subscribers know about your content is important to retain customers, but it’s not going to be especially useful in driving new client growth.
To do this, you need to create mind-blowing content and make sure that you’re putting in other places around the internet where potential customers could see it. This helps you to attract a new audience, rather than just communicating with your existing one.
Email Outreach
Perhaps the most important way to get more from your blog post is to engage in email outreach. The purpose of your outreach is to convince other influencers in your industry and related niches to share your content. This could be on their website in the form of a link or on their social media profiles.
These links and shares will help you to rank better, but they’ll also send traffic to your website today. SEO is incredible and can completely change the future of your business, but it’s also important to drive sales today.
If you can convince somebody to share your post with their audience of 50,000, then you should be able to earn customers right away, while still receiving the SEO benefit.
Firstly, you need to find the influencers in your industry through Google or social media. Secondly, send them a hand-crafted email to let them know about your content and ask them to share it on their website and social media if they enjoy it.
Create a Video or Graphic
If your competitors are also creating blog posts regularly, then video and graphic content can help to set you apart from them. Not only that, but it’s also easier to convince people in your email outreach to share visual content than a written post.
You also have the added benefit of being able to share visual content on platforms like Imgur, YouTube, Vimeo and graphic galleries. Each of these will give you a nice link which will help with your SEO.
Many local businesses avoid visual content because they think that it’s expensive and complicated. Fortunately, you can outsource a lot of that work and end up with superb visual content that you can promote around the internet, helping to put eyeballs on your site.
Promote in Relevant Places
Once you’ve created your content, you should be hungry to get out there and let everybody know about it. You’ll often find some SEOs saying that for each hour you take to create a piece of content you should take two to promote it. It’s that important!
Some examples of places to promote your content would be on content aggregators like Reddit, industry specific forums, blog comments on relevant websites and video comments.
The idea is to put the content in front of the people that want to read it, not only to get them to see it but for the chance that they’ll share it and give you even more traffic.
Most of the posts that go viral aren’t because of luck. It’s because the team behind it has made a conscious effort to promote that piece with strategic shares on relevant websites where they know their audience congregates.
Conclusion
Don’t fall for the idea of ‘build it, and they will come,’ you need to be willing to put in the effort to promote every single post that you write. If you’re going to spend the time to write it, you might as well spend a little more to make sure it gets traction.
If you’d like to hear more about how we can promote your content to get you shares, links and more traffic, send us an email today.