Which approaches work best to take your traffic to the next level?
What should you do once you have your inbound marketing up and running? The scenario is that you're creating or maybe curating great new material on your corporate, brand or business blog, you're in the content marketing curve and all's well in the world, the content feels right and peer feedback is generally great too.
Yet traffic from your blog seems to be a tad slow, or simply not growing like you thought it might based on the size of your market and the blogging competition, maybe you're getting the wrong traffic and the page bounce rate seems high? Most of us have been here, are currently here, and will be here again - so don't worry!
Whether you're improving SEO, social media marketing or content creation and content marketing, it's a process and so improvement never stops, neither does the effort in marketing it. Experts like Gary Vaynerchuck rightly insist that you have to keep your head down, lay the foundations and maintain creating more content before a base-line of credibility is achieved, it's hard to be an over-night hit! Yet, there's much that you can do to increase your reach and/or quality of reach at any time.
So, assuming you've got genuinely relevant, creative, entertaining and/or informative blog content 😉 here's our summary advice to help all that blogging effort work harder for you.
1. Ensure visibility in natural search starting with on-page optimisation and then moving onto link-building
- This is SEO 101 and blog marketing 101 and yet it is most often a key area to keep improving upon. Start by looking at your posts or categories that are most effective for SEO and work out how to do more of the same. Most platforms that enable out-of-the-box blogging (WordPress, Blogger etc) will look after the more technical side such as URL structure and managing meta data, yet you can only be really confident in your on-page optimisation when using the right keywords, a little keyword research and integration can have a big impact on search engine visibility and thus traffic. Scan through your content and pick out the main topics covered in your posts. Plug those keywords into Google's keyword suggestion tool. Take note of the most popular search terms and important local variations in wording. Consider content and enhance your post title, headers, body content and meta descriptions. Also think about updating the keywords used in the blog categories and tags. Remember though, that to really boost SEO link-building is what matters, so put the time to fostering relationships with partner sites as indicated by my third point. If you're new to linkbuilding, read this Linkbuilding 101 by blog SEO expert Joost de Valk.
2. Ensure that all blog posts are shareable by your readers
- I wrote last week on recent sharing research and we already know it's extremely important to incorporate social sharing into digital marketing. Consider installing individual button such as Tweet Meme, Facebook Like/Share and LinkedIn Share. Alternatively, there are free tool bars containing all networks and you can now configure them to focus on just some of the social networks and bookmarking sites, consider AddThis as an example. Rich, paid-for tools include Janrain and the super premium Gigya - with these two there's simply a lot more features including social sign-on, and detailed analytics.
- Don't forget RSS (allowing syndication of your content) so that users can subscribe via tools such as Google Reader, plus you can leverage RSS by the pulling the feed onto any other web page and LinkedIn/Facebook profile that you have, taking the mountain to Mohammed. Blog platforms make the creation of an RSS feed dead easy, so long as it's prominent in your design and messaging then it won't be an issue.
3. Identify and participate within influential industry outposts, including blogs and portals. Form partnerships.
- Providing useful, valuable comments on other blogs can be a great way to generate traffic, develop relationships, build a following and generate back-links to benefit your SEO programme. If you’ve just finished a blog post on a topic, or want to revive interest in older posts, do a quick search to find other blog posts on the same topic. Check if those posts lack something that you've covered in your post, if not evolve your post to do that where possible!
- Forming strategic partnerships is even more important judging by the Marketing Sherpa recent poll on most effective marketing techniques in 2011. Identifying partner sites or bloggers who are influential and then collaborating takes time to setup but will give you sustained traffic in a way that commenting on blog posts wont.
- Always add your viewpoint when commenting, take a stance without being self-promotional - lead with the angle that their post is missing in your comments to them. This process is the hardest on our list, and arguably the most valuable part of content marketing since it's time intensive, and yet the benefits are compounded in terms of brand credibility, back-link generation and traffic building. Bizarrely, it's an area most often out-sourced to SEO or PR agencies - which given the importance makes little sense, to me at least.
- It's a massive area so remember to prioritise, check out Dave's digital marketing radar post to inform some of that thinking.
4. Be valuable in social outposts including social bookmarking sites, social networks and Twitter
- Social bookmarking is essentially a form of peer-reviewed content - the more others bookmark/digg your content, the more exposure you get. In turn, more exposure is more opportunity for others to link to you and reference your content on their sites.
- Social networks (and online forums) allow you to promote content so long as it's relevant and valuable to the community. This includes of course LinkedIn Answers, LinkedIn Groups and Facebook Groups. You may also have niche community groups or forums specific to the industry or topic - this is increasingly the case. The more your post is aligned to community questions or topics the better, again ensure that you're bringing something new to the discussion if you want to issue a relevant link to back your blog post.
- Twitter relies on you being valuable in order to leverage its benefits in driving reach - you can be very pro-active by searching for people tweeting requests about the blog post you've just written, share your content with them. Search for broader or related queries too without loosing site of the goals: be valuable and build relationships
5. Integrate new blog posts into your daily or weekly communications
- Update your network with your latest posts - sounds simple? It isn't so straight forward. Social networks differ based on audience, purpose and also etiquette. So you need to be able to introduce the post differently and then repeat that at different times during the day whilst using different messages. You can automate much of this in tools like Hootsuite. Don’t forget to ask your followers to share or retweet the link.
- Share new posts in a summarised format, the classic approach is to issue an enewsletter as a digest, appending industry news, top tweets, content guides or white papers and maybe a synopsis of hot discussions in outposts like LinkedIn Answers. The most popular (clicked) content also helps to encourage you to write more of what your readers are interested in.
6. Retain a purpose and a consistent brand narrative
- The only real world of caution is to ensure that you retain the point of the blog in the first place, from a strategic and brand perspective. These in turn influence content topics so careful of going off-piste into spaces that don't interest your core audience. The more people come to value you and have expectations around what to expect. Of course trying new things is great, just keep it on-brand.
7. Measure click-throughs, shares and comments specifically
- Use a URL shortener that has click analytics (bit.ly and ow.ly do) and use this shortened URL version everywhere that you post about the blog post, this way you get tighter data about clicks to view the post.
- Monitoring shares is important too, even the free AddThis tool has analytics that allows you track how, where, and by whom your content is being shared. AddThis not only measures shares and clicks back to your site, but also social mentions like Facebook Likes and Tweets, searches, and traffic generated when someone copies your URLs from the their browser address bar and pastes them into emails or instant message conversations. You can also learn what else the most influential people in your network care about based on data within the AddThis network.
- Comments are important too since one of the hardest things to do is illicit interaction from someone, clicking a Like button is a lot easier. So monitor what gets most comments and be sure to interact with those commenting, highlighting your other blog posts where it can also be of value.
