How to boost traffic with content marketing?

Content marketing is of utmost importance because it serves you in generating leads and building a vast community. In addition, it will not make you look like a salesperson. Ignorance of the content is ignorance of the sales.

According to Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers plan to create more content in 2017 compared to 2016.

The below-mentioned tips do not follow any particular order, but they all are a package that will give you success in your digital marketing campaign.

Use these tips to inflate your content marketing to boost your web traffic.

1.    Use various interactive platforms like Quora

Content marketing has a lot to do with social media and especially interactive platforms. There are multiple platforms where questions and queries are openly shared and millions of people truly attempt them to satisfy the query. Such platforms include Yahoo, StackExchange, Quora, and others. To boost your content knowledge and thereby raising content marketing results try to contribute to such sites and interact with people. Such platforms are growing rapidly and they can very well help you find a new audience. In addition, these sites will also help your target audience reach your website.

You can promote your content across these sites by following the simple course of action.

• It is best to follow influencers. Read their posts and try to analyze the way they have written. At times, they serve as the best tutorials in finding out how to write and how to get more thumbs.
• Start replying to a few relevant topics which are in line either with your services or with your blogs.
• While replying to the relevant topics, you can include links to your blogs. However, in NO circumstance, it should sound self-promotion.
• Initially, try to post succinct content so that anyone can read it even while surfing the page. Later on, depending on the question and comfort, you may even post lengthy content.
• In case your readers will find your content interesting, engaging, and informative, they will surely follow you till your website to check out your own blogs.

2.    Makeover your old blogs

Though it is true that old content can also drive traffic, it is equally important to keep your old content updated and in line with the trends. Each blog listed on your website, be it fresh or old, should have valuable, relevant, and right content.

Your main aim behind the blog posts is to convert your readers into your subscribers. When a reader visits your website for some information and what if they find that your content is stale and irrelevant? It will simply cost you by making you lose your audience. Losing a valuable visitor and subscriber is of course not a welcoming thing. On the other hand, search engines always update their algorithm. There are prominent chances that your site may get penalized if you are not up-to-date.

You can make a few amendments to your existing content in the following suggested manner:

• Rectify all minor and major grammatical issues
• Incorporate trends that are new and relevant to your blog title. At the same time, delete which is now not relevant based on the recent updates and algorithm workings
• Only use images that are relevant and search engine friendly.
• Identify the keywords that are actually performing well for higher rankings. You can use SEMrush tool for the same
• Periodically moderate comments on your blog posts.
• Identify the well-performing posts using blog analytics. Observe a number of views for the specific post.
• Keep an eye on the number of shares of your blog on social media.
• While updating the old blog post:
  • Do not modify URL
  • You may amend the blog title but ensure to retain the keywords.
  • Assess meta-description if it can be improved.
  • Provide internal links to your new posts for strengthening internal linking

3.    Use compelling infographics

A picture can portray 1000 of words. This is a sort of ‘not-to-miss’ in your effective content marketing strategy.

Infographics should contain no more than 5-6 statistics/ points of information. Research by KISSmetrics found that any more than 6 and it becomes too much for the reader to consume.

Keep these guiding principles handy while creating valuable info graph:

• It should be easy to embed to enable more social media shares
• Use odd numbers in your title to catch attention. E.g. 243% hike (instead of 250%). Odd numbers always do better than even numbers
• Instead of writing long stories, present short, crisp, and catchy phrases/sentences
• If your infographic has information in list format, e.g. “5 SEO techniques ”, ensure to label each point with numbers.

4.    Make your brand creative with a variety of content

No doubt content marketing is all about blogging, eBooks, articles, and other content in written format. These strategies are going to stay for long and probably forever. However, do not miss out on the new bud of content marketing; video content.

Video content will enhance revenue in 2017 and beyond. Marketers who use video grow their revenue 49% faster as compared to non-video users. According to Cisco, 69% of all consumer Internet traffic will be the result of a video. A video is for sure the future of both content marketing and SEO.

While creating effective video content that makes your brand more creative, do not miss out to ensure:

• Your content voice is in line with your audience voice
• The video has been designed corresponding to your goal and it serves the purpose
• Video content contains the kind of emotion you need to drive with
• It does have a strong CTA; it should provide a way to the user to take some desired action. Sometimes it is also better to have lead capture set up with the best possible minimum fields. For example:

• Last but not least, it fulfils all possible SEO criteria, e.g. usage of relevant keywords, optimized titles, wise usage of tags, proper description, and others

Conclusion

So far, content marketing has grown from marketing activity to an approach of marketing. It is nothing but creating engaging content to inform your target audience about your offerings and drive them to your website. Follow the given guidelines and enjoy the boost of your search traffic and sales.