Keely Closa
Keely is an Online PR Specialist at Spiralytics, a full-service agency that specializes in marketing that’s backed by data science.
Blog promotion is more than just sharing a link on social media. Promotion goes a long way when you’re looking for a...
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Perhaps you’ve heard of the phrase “content is king.” It’s fairly simple to understand and very straightforward in its meaning — the kind of content you create will always matter. If you have a brand or product you need to sell, the solution is to make that quality content you can’t get anywhere else. But what if you were told that there’s more to it than just churning out that content, no matter how unique it is? Today we will tell you how to boost your blog traffic and rank your website easily on Google.
The fact of the matter is, you can create as much output as you want, but it will be all for naught if you aren’t attracting enough of an audience to notice you. The secret, therefore, lies in a promotion. Say you’ve got your business ready and you’ve created several blogs filled with unique content that can serve as excellent resources for a specific audience; you’ll need to drive consistent traffic there. Your best bet to get those numbers soaring, of course, is through the right promotion strategies.
Blog promotion is more than just sharing a link on social media. Promotion goes a long way when you’re looking for a bigger audience who will find your content valuable and eventually become your customers. There’s a lot of thought that must be put into this process, most especially if you’re only just starting. Here are 6 ways you can develop your content promotion habits and get that quality traffic going. Develop a strategy Map out the kind of content you should be creating for your brand. This will be entirely dependent on what you want to sell, how hardsell you want to sound, and ultimately what values you want to uphold for your brand — this should steer your voice and tone, which you can build after identifying these things. Based on your audience and the type of content you want to create, you can then take a gander at trending topics. Some great references for trending topics worldwide are Google Trends, Reddit, Sprout Social, Pinterest trend reports, and Youtube. Once you get a pulse on what’s hot, you can then see how these topics can be framed in such a way that it will work for your brand.
Create evergreen content The main point here is to always stay relevant. You’ll want to steer clear of mere trends and just reposting your old content. The trick is to get to know your audience, or at least speak to them directly by giving them the kind of information they’re looking for. To do this, you can:
- Create a focus group to identify your audience’s interests. In this way, you can flesh out what it is they might be looking for by putting yourself in their shoes and asking, “If I were my target audience, what problems do I want to solve? What questions do I want answers to?”
- Take a look at your target audience’s communities. Go beyond the hunches that maybe test A will work better than test B. Check out discussion boards—you may find niche interests that you can provide resources for.
- Share your content with these communities. Build a connection with the people who may find value in your posts. In this way, you gain trust and a stronger following of an audience who will more likely return to your site for more content.
Hook with headlines So you’ve narrowed down who your audience is. The next step is to reel them in with the title of your content. It’s important that you’re able to make an impact with just a few words because, ultimately, headlines are what you first see. If it doesn’t strike your audience as interesting, chances are they’re bound to skip it. Think of it as front-loading your titles with the juiciest bits of your content that will entice your audience to learn more. Don’t be afraid to experiment with what works, too. Here’s a quick checklist to make sure your headlines make a statement.
- Highlight your main topic. There’s no better place than to put it up front in your headline. Getting right to the point will save people the time and energy in checking what your post is about. If it resonates with what your audience is looking for, you’ll get a click.
- Make your headline as short as possible. Time is always of the essence. The shorter it is, the easier it is to read. So long as you have your relevant topic mentioned, this can improve your chances of driving better traffic.
- Make your headline unique. This is particularly helpful for getting a better ranking on search pages. You can take inspiration from how your competitors phrase their headlines and apply it to your own posts.
- Make your headline simple. Following up on readability, using simple, straightforward language can improve traffic as long as it speaks to your target audience.
Target search terms Again, we circle back to your content’s relevance to your audience. Keyword research will always be your best bet when it comes to optimizing your content. Yes, that means you’ll need to work that SEO magic on your blog posts, but fear not, optimization isn’t as daunting a task as everyone makes it out to be. So long as you find the right terms your audience actually uses on search engines and apply your research properly to your content, you’ll be driving better traffic. Some tips to get you going with search terms:
- Don’t stuff your keywords into your content. You’ll rank much lower once Google notices you’ve only been jamming keywords in without providing any valuable content to your page.
- Use these keywords as a guide to what you create. Allow it to shape the kind of content you’re putting out there and supply information.
- Link out to other resources relevant to your topics. This can help build your content’s authoritativeness and your overall ranking on search pages too.
Get seen on social media: Social media presence is today’s standard. Every brand is on it and quite literally everyone is on it. Creating an account for your brand on social media will not only make it easy to find, but it will become an avenue for you to connect with your audience immediately, making you all the more accessible. - Partner with other bloggers and social media influencers with an audience relevant to whom you’re looking for. Promote each other through your platforms. This can help you build a bigger audience.
- Don’t be afraid to explore different platforms. Each channel will have a variety of different audiences with different intents. Through this, you’ll be able to increase blog traffic, brand awareness, and trust, as well as your SEO. Take for example Twitter; it’s ideal for quick and snappy statements because of its very small character limit. You can link your posts to each tweet and boost your traffic provided that your tweets resonate with the right audience you’re looking for.
- Try email marketing. You can start building a mailing list where you can launch your latest blog posts. It doesn’t have to be as often as 3 times a week, but you can try and experiment spacing it out to monthly newsletters and see what works for your audience.
Look into paid promotion Paid advertising is a valuable strategy for businesses both big and small. It can help grow your audience significantly with that boost of exposure to a wider audience that you may not normally get with a considerably new or small social media account. Here are some options you may want to try:
- Search ads. These ads are what you see at the very top of search engines where each click costs a certain fee. It’s a much faster alternative to building organic traffic. This can likewise help support any of your SEO tactics and improve your brand awareness if you continue to use this over a longer period of time.
- Remarketing. Choosing remarketing can re-engage up to 84% of people who have already visited your site. This is a good way to remind your audience that you’re still around to serve them useful content. If you’ve got more to offer them, this is a great avenue to take them further down your marketing funnel.
- Recommended content ads. Think of it like the ads you see in places you’d frequent online, the same way you see ads in places you frequent on your daily commute. You’re essentially buying space from sites that drive a lot of traffic with an audience you’re looking for.
You can create a ton of content, but it’s meaningless if it cannot bring your target audience its intended value. The real challenge is finding that sweet balance of regularly churning out relevant, high-quality content and then serving it to the people who are looking for what you’ve produced.
Proper promotion goes beyond hitting the share button with only a summary of your post. Promoting your content takes a lot of planning — you have to find out the interests of your target audience, match this research with what you’re producing, shape it into something worth looking into, and then getting it across a variety of channels that will work for you. There are many options to explore in getting better traffic to your site. It’s only a matter of research, application, and building good habits for your brand.
Keely is an Online PR Specialist at Spiralytics, a full-service agency that specializes in marketing that’s backed by data science.
How would you encourage customers to buy your products online? 
True, I agree content is the king. And every content writer must know how to use it effectively for generating traffic. Because at the end of the day you want people to read your content.
The article was very insightful. Loved the content