30 Traffic Generation Tips for a Content Marketer

 Published | By Michael Chibuzor

Targeted traffic is the key

Driving people to your offer is the fundamental key to look out for if you’re a website owner and a writer. Bear in mind that you don’t necessarily need traffic, but TARGETED traffic.

In other words, the people who should visit your website and blog MUST be interested in what you’re writing about – to a large extent.

I don’t want to waste your precious time. I’ve divided these 30 traffic generation tips for content marketers into 5 sections. Read each stage quietly and go implement the tips therein:

Know your market

Mind you, this is different from keyword research.

Many business owners and bloggers experience challenges at driving targeted traffic to their websites because they don’t know who lives in their market. How you found out how their ages, sex, lifestyle, income range, education etc. looks like?

A market is a place where you meet your ideal customers. At first, they will not come to you because you’re still a stranger to their environment. You’ve to look for them and bring them to your website.

1.    Follow hot trends – What is happening right now in the blogosphere and the world at large have a strong impact in your market.
Aha, the changes may not directly affect you, but it’ll affect your ideal customers. And they’re the ones you’re serving. Always keep yourself updated on hot trends.

 2.    Subscribe to industry newsletter – The reason why you should subscribe to 3 – 5 industry newsletters is so that you can get current information on products, services, trends, events and research works. You need this to improve your content and consequently drive more traffic.

3.    Use Google analytics – Google has provided more than an analytics tool here. With this, you can identify the location of your most active readers. The type of content people read the most and how long they stay while reading them. Get to know the best keywords that are bringing in organic traffic so that you can focus more on those.

4.    Find and join in the discussions – Don’t spam forums and facebook walls, get involved in the discussion and learn what your ideal customers are concerned about.

5.    Study the popular posts on niche-specific blogs – If a particular post is popular, don’t think it’s an accident. Study it carefully and use the idea to create yours.

Drip feed rich content

You can use a content delivery system to drip feed your content or simply schedule it using the WordPress CMS.

There is no shortcut to building a high-traffic website and blog than paying attention to valuable content.

I know that so many people who don’t understand the importance of this would frown at it. Aside Google and their rigorous updates, your target audience is desperately yearning for rich, dynamic and exclusive content.

You can’t afford to stick to generic articles, blog posts and other forms of content and expect to drive traffic in this competitive era.

Don’t be deceived by any fake software that promises to send you avalanche of free quality traffic without any effort on your part. That’s hype and it doesn’t work in the real world.

Remember, you’ve to drip feed the content you write gradually but consistently. Don’t try to add 5 articles or blog posts to your blog every day – ideally, schedule one post to be published daily or one post per week.

This way, you can concentrate on promoting the content via other blogs, directories, press release distributions etc.

To produce rich content consistently, do these 5 things:

6.    Listen more than you talk – If you can listen more than you talk, you’ll be a better writer and win the hearts of your target audience. Because you have listened and now, you are TRULY capable of solving their problems.

7.    Set a goal that you MUST write content daily – the more you write the more better you’ll become. Yes baby!

8.    Craft strong and catchy headlines – The headline is the most important part of your content. Make it good because Google will fall in love with it, when people start clicking on it.

9.    Be personal – connect emotionally with readers. Tell a story to captivate your audience and get them fully involved. Ask open-ended questions and give welcome comments.

10.  Call to action – tell readers what to do next. Ask them to read more or subscribe to your list so that you can send them better and fresher information.
If you’ve a product, don’t be stupid or shy – ask them to buy now. I’m sure you don’t want to go broke?

Speed up your blog

What else can you do for your readers if not to save their precious time? A website or blog that loads like a snail isn’t going to drive targeted traffic, no matter the amount of rich and quality content you’ve published on it.

You really MUST work on your blog’s speed. Google would always weight a fast loading web page higher than the one that makes waiting mandatory.

Few months ago, I decided to improve on my blog’s loading speed and to my utmost surprise, Google began to send me more targeted traffic, even when I didn’t update my blog as I used to.

So what can you do to speed up your blog right now?

11.   Delete unused plugins – you don’t really need them, if they’re not activated.

12.  Reduce images sizes and resolution – to convey your message in pictures, what your target audience needs is relevant and clear picture, not a LARGE one.

13.  Use Cascading style sheets (CSS) to format your html – Just try and control your tables and color on a style sheet, instead of choking your hypertext markup language (html).

14.  Optimize your database – The major reason why you should delete unused plugins and themes is because they’re going into your database and causing disorders on load-time. Delete spam comments and revision posts as well. Keep your wordpress database clean and safe.

15.  Use a credible hosting provider – I recommend outstandingsetup.com (not aff link) because that’s what I’ve been using since 2012 to manage this blog and I’ve no regrets whatsoever. Hostgator and Bluehost are good too.

Optimize for Alexa search queries

I experimented with Alexa in February this year and significantly increased the traffic to my blog. The truth is that Alexa, a web monitoring site has a lot of traffic potentials for you if you can use it the right way.

You’ll start by checking your Alexa rankings in your own country and afterwards, you’ll be able to check the search queries to see what potential customers and readers are using to find your pages.

The beauty of Alexa is that the search queries are real-time and you may not find it using Google keywords tool – which is good news because it helps you stay off the radar and rank faster than your competitors.

Yes, the search query you’ll extract from Alexa is hot keywords and long-tail keywords. Once you get those, optimize your content for those terms, get social signal and enjoy the free website traffic. Here are the 5 steps you must take:

16.   Visit alexa.com

17.   Type your website URL (e.g. contentmarketingup.com)

18.   Click on “Get Details”

19.   Scroll down to the right and look at the bottom right hand side of the screen. You’ll find “high impact search queries for your website.”

20.  Focus on those search queries – one by one, use it on your article headline, start the first paragraph with it and make sure you naturally include other search queries in the list on your content.

But don’t ever stuff keywords for any reason. Be natural because Google isn’t out to destroy your website’s ranking, but to support your business.

Friendly networking

When I started blogging, networking was my saving grace. I didn’t have enough money to push crazy advertising – so I stuck with guest blogging.
With guest blogging, I was able to meet with top bloggers and industry leaders including John Chow, Zac Johnson, Peng Joon etc.
But one thing I’ve discovered is that networking all by itself can’t produce great results.
It must be friendly and gradual. If you’re connecting with top people just to get them to send you free traffic and promote your product, you’ll be heading for failure.
Instead, get to know them and what they like most. Almost all of them would appreciate a retweet on their tweet or comment on their latest post. Don’t be too busy with your own website promotion or writing and neglect networking.
Truth be told, if you can focus on friendly networking, there is no height that you can’t get to.

How do you network?

21.   Understand that you can’t succeed online – all by yourself

22.  Don’t try to network with every expert – start with 3 power-users first

23.  Search for your primary keyword (e.g. content marketing) on Google. 

Identify the top 10 results from Google and use those as your starting point for networking.

Truth is, if those web pages can rank higher than yours, it means that you need to learn a lot about effective SEO and link building from them.

Remember, one of the core reasons why you should network is to learn new tips and tricks that can help your own business.

24.  Embed a slideshare presentation from an expert on your post and let them know about it.

The expert would feel honored and share your entire content with his 10,000+ email subscribers and twitter followers. This is real traffic cowboy!

25.  Identify the weakness of a particular pro blogger and use your strength to fill that need. For instance, if an expert doesn’t know how to design e-covers, volunteer to help for free but ask them to give you credit.

Or, you could help them out with content writing and let them focus on marketing. You’ll laugh louder, attract better traffic and improve your online brand.

Focused SEO

I love doing SEO because it can bring consistent traffic, leads and sales. I still have a lot of my web pages ranking highly in Google top 10 since 2011.

If you implement focused SEO on your website and blogs, your content will take a U-turn from the typical “fillers” to “valuable” piece and no matter what Google Panda and Penguin throws at your content, it’ll stand unshakable.

The common advice is that you should write for people, isn’t it?

Well, this advice might sound so cool, but there is a problem with it.

Sure, Google spider is just a piece of script that crawls, indexes and ranks content pages when all ranking factors have been considered. But if you fail to implement core SEO concepts, the people you’re writing for will not find you.

SEO is not guest blogging. It’s not keyword research. It’s not link building and it’s not twitter and facebook marketing. All these activities are channels and ways by which you get your search engine optimization to kick off.

If you want to rank your content pages high in Google, this is the best way to do SEO:

26.   Research your market and get to know what’s happening. Spend quality time listening to your target audience especially on forums and social media groups.

You’re not trying to research keywords yet, but you’re getting acquainted with the terms, logic and questions used in your market.

27.   Keyword brainstorm – With the ideas you’ll extract from the market, use it to brainstorm keyword ideas. If you were in the shoes of ‘that’ ideal customer, what keyword would you search for in Google, in other to get your desired results?

Now, instead of searching for that keyword in Google search engine, simply plug it into the keyword tool and hit “search.” You’ll be amazed by the number of low-competition key phrases at your disposal.

28.  Write to express, not impress: In order to get SEO right, and dominate Google homepage, you must eliminate every hype or gimmick.

You mustn’t write articles and posts to impress readers and the target audience.

Instead, focus on expressing your views on a particular topic. If your content message seems too good to be true – then it isn’t. And this can make you lose trust in the long run.

And when you’re writing content to express what you know, you’ll not be intimidated or limited. You’ll not be compelled to squeeze in keywords here and there.

It’ll appear naturally because you’re writing from your heart, your wealth of knowledge and passion for the subject matter.

This type of content will captivate readers. They would share the content on twitter, stumble upon, Google+, Facebook and other social media portals.

As this continues, your social signal is widening and Google spider will have no other choice than to open the floodgates of traffic for your website.

29.  Build authority and relevant links – if the website or blog you want to link from isn’t in your niche and you desire to get a link there, then use a generic anchor text (e.g. click here, visit now etc). Branded anchor texts are powerful these days, since the last penguin update.

But as much as you can, only build backlinks from websites that discuss the same subject and topic like you do. It doesn’t have to be exactly, but to a large extent, sticking to your niche would produce higher and quicker rankings in Google.

30.  Create social signals – Your blog is the first social media network to be created. So begin your signaling from there.

Then move to other blogs and create social impact. Write exclusive guest posts and submit to authority blogs that have strong social influence.

If you can get your guest post published in an A-list blog which usually gets 100 – 450 twitter tweets and facebook likes on every latest post, then such SEO value would be transferred to your anchor link, down to your content page URL and your rankings would improve significantly.

After all the traffic what next?

Getting targeted traffic to your website is good and desirable, but there is more to this.

If you fail to convert such traffic into customers and build a real rapport with them, you’ve wasted your time and marketing prowess.

Create a simple funnel that would lead free targeted visitors into your sales chamber – where you can relate with them one-on-one. Where you can persuade and profit.

Have you tried using any of the above means to drive quality traffic to your website? Please drop me a valuable comment right below. See you at the top!

via http://contentmarketingup.com/traffic-generation-tips/