17 Killer Content Marketing Hacks To Skyrocket Website Traffic
If lead generation is the engine behind your business, think of content marketing as the fuel that powers that engine.
Content marketing has opened myriad doors to implementing lead generation strategies, converting leads into happy, returning customers.
While content marketing has often been linked to lead generation, most people are still oblivious to clever and simply genius hacks that will generate leads in mind-boggling numbers.
Hotmail was one pf the first to contrive a growth hack in the early 90’s. In order to boost growth, their team decided to spread love by adding “PS I love you” at the bottom of every email.
Since the text was linking back to their homepage, this seemingly innocuous nugget of content alone brought in over 12 million email accounts!
You may be no Hotmail, but here are 17 downright genius traffic boosting growth hacks that can skyrocket your search traffic and act as a client magnet for your online business:
Capitalize on Emotions in Headlines
To reel in your readers, you need to create magnetic headlines to get them hooked to your content.
The secret is to tap in their emotions to supercharge your content. Not only will people be willing to peruse through a content piece that “gets them” and resonates with them, they will be tempted to share it on social media as well.
For instance, if you put yourself in the shoes of your customers, what would you search for on Google if you are looking for ways to shed a few pounds? Perhaps something like:
- “Drop 10 pounds in a month”
- “Fastest way to get rid of belly fat”
- “Lose 20 pounds fast”
Not to overwhelm you, but there could be countless variations to just the search terms above.
So as an individual desperate to trim the potbelly and get your life back on track, you will be quick to respond positively to an article targeting any of these keywords.
This is because they mirror what is in your heart. If your headlines target the keywords they are looking for, you can be sure that those keywords will eventually convert into clicks, visits and sales when you rank on google.
So, lets assume you are looking to create powerful headlines for a content piece that targets revenue generation, here are some of the emotional keywords you can target:
- “How to increase sales”
- “How to generate revenue”
- “how to generate revenue from website”
- “Revenue Generating ideas”
These are called emotional keywords since people searching for them are already looking for ways to increase revenue.
They don’t want to be sold on the idea of revenue generation, they just want a nudge to act.
In addition, when crafting high-converting deadlines, it would do you good to increase, especially odd numbers. Buzzsumo found these headliners openers most effective:
Create A Content Calendar
Strategic success drives in great parts from creating a content calendar. It is a shareable resource that brings everyone on your content team on the same page and can be used for content marketing planning. Here is a great explanation of content calendar by convinceandconvert:
It is prudent to get one planned out at the beginning of the year, to provide a visual display of what, how, and where your content will be published.
This will support your marketing goals by helping you guarantee a consistent flow of content.
Create Proper Strategies for When and What to Share
It is possible to identify the best times to share on social media.
Depending on the lifestyles and businesses of your followers, some time slots may prove to be best for better interaction, so it is better to take a sneak-peak inside the lives of your followers.
According to the research, the following are the times and days that work best:
- The best time to achieve maximum involvement after a workday is 7 PM.
- If the goal is to garner more comments on your posts, the best time to share things is on Saturdays.
- The best time to post a featured story is between 11 AM and 4 PM.
- The best time to share anything is 1 PM.
- The best days to get the most numbers of clicks and involvement are Sundays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.
- The best time for getting a high CTR is between 12 PM-6 PM during word days.
- The best time to receive more retweets is 5 PM.
Google+
- Posts achieve the highest engagement at 9 AM on Wednesday
- For weekdays, it is best to post between 9 AM and 11 AM.
Not only should you promote your posts on the above-mentioned schedules, you can also add social shares on older pieces of content to boost traffic to your website.
Segment Your Audience
One of my favorite frugal blogs, Miss Thrifty is targeting young mums with treasure trove of wisdom on living a frugal life and rightly so!
The blog is targeting a huge market by fulfilling their need for this type of information. Young mums are often pressed for money and may have to give up working to care for their little ones.
With just one wage flowing in the house, the need to be more frugal with everyday living is a must.
This blog embodies the concept of catering to a “segmented audience”; in this case: young UK mums!
It often helps to learn about your potential and current audience to determine the type of content you should produce.
Audience segmentation is the perfect way to get to grips with myriad characteristics and customer personas, who they are, how to reach out to them, and how they are different.
Once you have segmented your current audience, it will also help you discover and connect with new target audiences.
A great place to start is to analyze demographics. Group your audience members by family size, income, geographical location, gender, age, race, and other factors. For this, you will need to dive into data and insights that indicate preferences and behaviors. You can create data-driven personas with the help of these indicators, which will help you create more relevant content to your audien
Create Evergreen Content
Segmenting your audience will better equip you to craft tailored content that resonates with each segment group as effectively as possible.
Try perusing through pertinent social media groups, forums, industry and competitor blogs to see what potential customers are looking for and what type of content they are talking about, sharing with others, and spending most time with.
This is where audience segmentation comes into play.
For instance, if you want to channel more new users on your website, your content should be focused on establishing your brand as a trustworthy industry expert (think e-books, whitepapers, and how-to-guides), and building brand awareness.
For current customers, your focus should be to expand their affinity and relationships with the brand, perhaps through comprehensive guides, specialized discounts, or webinars.
Furthermore, you can create separate landing pages for each of your targeted segmented audience, replete with relevant content.
Diversify Your Reach
In my experience, the way forward is to follow a diversified approach to content distribution.
Content Marketing Institute has reported that B2B marketers use on an average 13 different content marketing tactics.
You are severely stifling the potential impact of your content in this digital era if you are only creating one kind of content, such as a blog or podcast, and promoting it through only a single channel.
Leveraging the right channel will direct qualified leads towards your diversified content.
While YouTube is popular video-driven content, such as inspirational stories, reviews, and tutorials, while Facebook is well-known social media channel.
For B2B interactions, Twitter and LinkedIn are more appropriate, while Snapchat and Instagram are better for reaching millennials.
Finding a social media platform that is a great fit for your particular needs will aid you in garnering more traffic with your content.
Get to Grips with LinkedIn Pulse
If you want to share your content with people in your industry, LinkedIn Pulse is your go-to tool. As soon as your content is published, you open up doors for a wider target audience to enter.
With LinkedIn Pulse at your disposal, you can customize the reading experience for every-day personalized content.
Not only do the published posts serve to boost brand awareness, they also reel in your users.
The secret of the trade is to keep your articles short for LinkedIn Pulse, since they get the job done better than long posts.
However, care must be exercised when crafting a snippet of the original article for linking to the site, since it can create a duplicate-content issue if the content is not properly rewritten.
Your connected people and LinkedIn followers receive notifications about your post as soon as it is published.
If they find the snippet to be captivating, they are more likely to click on it to read more. This is how they eventually end up on your blog!
Start a Group Discussion
Both LinkedIn and Facebook groups are great places to fuel a discussion or interact with people by sharing, liking, or commenting on their work.
With such a vast number of groups available on LinkedIn and Facebook, you will inevitably find a question relevant to your niche and target audience.
If your end goal is to increase engagement, the secret is in the way you share your views or how you make yourself heard. With so many active participants, it won’t be hard for you to reach your target audience.
Not only can you encourage your audience and industry relevant influencers to share your content, you can also create engagement with them.
If your updates are riveting enough to hook them in, they will be more apt to visit your blog to read more. This boosts traffic to your blog by building a great impression of your brand across the platform.
By participating in a group, you encourage your audience to share your content as well as easily create engagement with them.
If people like your interesting updates, they will surely click on them or visit your blog to hear more. As a result, you build a great impression of your brand across the platform, which will help you increase traffic to your blog.
If you are living in a hermit den and oblivious to this amazing way of attracting traffic and sharing worthy content, let me confide in you.
However, if you try to spam it, prepare to get a lot of heat from Redittors. Solely based on user-generated content, Reddit is one of the best social media platforms for content marketers.
If you want your content to share the maximum engagement rates, you need to share worthy content. Here is how you can make the most of this content distribution platform.
- Reddit is brimming with subreddits, so you need to sort through the pile and select the best ones for your niche.
- Redditors don’t respond well to people who seem overly promotional.
- Instead of focusing on yourself, engage with others in the community by downvoting, upvoting, or commenting.
- Try your hands at different subreddits pertinent to your niche and see which ones work to your benefit. List down all the ones that fared well with you.
- Here’s something to turn your smile into a frown. Reddit can block your functionalities unlike other social media platforms, if you are found sharing the same link in multiple subreddits.
- Once you have gotten the gist of Reddit, its time to get your hands wet in it and start sharing your links. Remember that you will get negative as well as positive comments, so don’t lose heart and reply to all of them.
Know Your Audience, and Give Them What They Want
Before you start creating compelling, engaging, and successful content, you need to know your audience in and out.
Keyword research can greatly help you in this regard, by focusing on what your target audience is looking for.
You can leverage Google Trends to garner an idea of the market demand of your topic. Simply typing your target keyword into the search box will reveal how hot the topic is and how much engagement it has received over a specified period of time.
You will be empowered to base your content creation on your readers when you know them better. The more user-centric your content is, the more effective your content marketing strategy.
Get on the Local Platform
How serious are you about local placement? Content marketing isn’t just to tap into an international audience; it also means to reel in customers and local clients as well.
Bright Local has published statistics which testify that 97% of consumers use online search for local services and products.
To put it in a nutshell, local placement should be an indispensable aspect of your content marketing strategy.
Local customers also rely on search engines to look up businesses around them. According to LocalVox statistics, 43% of web searches use a local keyword on a daily basis.
Of those searches, 86% come from highly qualified leads. Almost always, these searches lead them to visit the physical locations or the website of those vendors.
Regardless of your overall content marketing strategy, you need to look out for keywords commonly used by customers in your locality.
For web designers in Los Angeles for instance, they can attract clients from their locality using keywords like, web designers Los Angeles, Web design Los Angeles, website design Los Angeles, Los Angeles web design, web design company Los Angeles, web site design Los Angeles, or web design in Los Angeles.
You can jump on this strategy to target keywords relevant to your locality as well. However, unless you are physically present in a city, don’t use any local keyword.
Be Consistent
A great way to engage customers is to maintain consistency in your content. When we talk about consistency, publishing regularly doesn’t cut the bill alone.
Maintaining a consistent quality, tone, and voice are also quintessential. A style sheet can help you curate a consistent tone and voice and you can plan consistent distribution with the help of a content calendar.
These items can fine-tune distribution, notate special events, trigger the sharing of content ideas, and make your team stick to a clearly defined schedule. This will also help you gain an edge over your competitors.
Comment on Relevant Blogs
Commenting on a blog is a great way to attract the attention of the audiences of other bloggers and cement relationships with them.
Not to mention, leaving thoughtful, positive, and detailed comments is bound to rub well with the author, as well as their followers.
In addition, it won’t harm you to leave a link back to your website in the comments section so that people can click on the link and end up on your website.
This can greatly channel traffic to your website. Remember to leave a valuable reply and not spam it. As an industry expert, your suggestions and feedback will be valued.
Build More Targeted Landing Pages
When Neil Patel created advanced guides on a lot of other internet marketing topics, such as SEO, his search traffic saw a massive surge.
Each advanced guide was followed by its own landing page, which was optimized for the applicable keywords.
Nuffield Health saw a 60% boost in their revenue when they optimized their landing pages for the best keywords.
They embarked on a journey of constant learning in their quest to know their customers and market inside out and then apply their discoveries to their content.
In another example, each landing page of Copyblogger Media targets a keyword that the target audience is actively searching for.
This is a splendid example of a brand developing a sound content marketing strategy. When it comes to creating landing pages, using the right keywords and building your content around them is the key.
Facebook’s Instant Article
Bloggers, content marketers and publishers looking to publish news can greatly benefit from Facebook’s Instant Article.
This HTML-document is optimized for customized visual display, exclusive design, rich and engaging storytelling capabilities, and fast mobile performance.
Facebook’s Instant Article is the only way for people who access Facebook through their smartphones to view articles on the app in the same format as the publisher’s website. Facebook’s Instant Article is great because of:
- Analytics: web based analytic systems help publishers track articles
- Customization: Multimedia can be incorporated within an article, such as geo-tagged media, audio-caption, and slideshow
- Speed: stories are displayed faster than on a run-of-the-mill mobile browser.
Leverage SEO
If garnering organic traffic is your end goal, you need to incorporate accurate SEO seamlessly into your content marketing strategy.
Highly ranked pages yield top-notch click- through rates, and this is where SEO jumps in; helping your website rank higher on search engines.
A viable SEO strategy, complete with descriptive URLs, quality images, effective meta-descriptions, and long-tai keywords can boost website traffic and CTR.
Analyze and Optimize
Unless you are constantly measuring the performance of your content, you can never know for sure if it is driving enough traffic to your website.
Knowing what type of content performs the best is critical to content marketing and A/B is particularly useful in this regard.
Cherry on top of the cake, split A/B testing helps you gain a deep insight into your target audience, which would help you create content tailored to their needs.
Anything on your website that can affect user behavior can be tested, but the focus should be on elements that affect the flow of traffic to your site, such as landing pages, site speed, images, content length, call to action, and headline, and so on. Your social media strategy becomes clearer when you have determined which content types work best for you.
