Many content creators and marketers often ask: "How can I get my content more visible online?” And rightfully so, because what would be the point of investing your valuable time and assets to create useful content that will not reach or benefit anyone?
Content marketing is crucial when it comes to getting your content to be more visible. Additionally, getting your content seen directly relates to Inbound Marketing.
Inbound Marketing is the strategic way to build content that aligns with the needs of your prospects so that they reach you on their own. Being more visible online will attract potential customers to you, rather than you having to seek them out.
While doing research on content marketing, I came across a powerful video, 10 steps to getting your content seen by Neil Patel. This video is a goldmine! What I loved best about it, is that it shares simple, yet actionable steps that you can implement today and see a tremendous improvement in your business.
Let’s get to it! Below are the ten steps to getting your content SEEN online:
1. Write Really Good Content
This is the first step because it is the most important of them all. Google used to say "Content is King," and it's true! Really good content can be read a year or two from now and still be relevant to implement into a business and get results or make more money.
Podcasts, how to guides and lists are some of the best content you can write. Why? Because it’s ACTIONABLE.
“As long as you can produce good, high quality content, you will do well in the long run.”
2. Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that will be valuable for a long time. Just like evergreen trees retain their leaves throughout the year, evergreen content is always relevant and does not get dated.
News articles and reports, holiday or seasonal articles, and articles that include numerical reports and statistics that may change frequently are not usually evergreen. They have a limited window of usefulness as they are likely to become outdated.
Articles on, for example, how to save money on airline tickets, how to differentiate your agency from all the rest, how to generate more leads for your business or how to start an online business, are still going to be relevant in a few years.
Evergreen content is incredibly valuable and "many people make the mistake of writing too much short term content instead of long term content.” Evergreen content may not get a lot of traffic in the beginning, but in the long run the search traffic adds up.
3. Don’t Write an Essay
Many people will agree that one of their least favorite parts of college was reading and writing essays. Don’t put people to sleep.
Create a conversation. Write in a way that allows people to respond or share in the conversation. Actively seek to get the readers to share your content or write back to you.
Use simple words instead of hard vocabularies that people can’t understand. Throw in some humor.
While writing, use the words ‘you’ and ‘I’ throughout the blog post. This will make the reader feel as though they are having a conversation. Doing this increases the chances of your blog being read and shared on the internet.
4. Promote Your Content
“Writing content is only half the battle in content marketing. You have to promote it.”
Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will take care of the basics. For example, optimizing the individual web page (On-Page SEO) and making sure your url is clean will increase your SEO. For more information on this, check out: The Beginners Guide to SEO by MOZ. They break down all the basics.
Assuming the basics are done, you now need to promote the content. To do this:
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Write down a list of 100 bloggers who write in your space. These are people who are already interested in content related to what you are offering; therefore their audience is likely to be interested as well.
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Once you have a list, email them, introduce yourself and ask them to tweet out your content. Asking them to tweet is a much lower ask than asking them to blog about it.
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An example of a message you could send to them is: “Hey! Check out this post. I know you blog on XYZ. This may be relevant to your audience. If you like it, feel free to tweet it out.”
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If you target the correct people, 5-10% of them will tweet out your content. Obviously, if you email food bloggers about your marketing content, you will most likely not get 5-10% to share your content.
Doing this will get traction to your content. People will see it - and a portion of those people will start linking back to you.
5. Comment on Other Blogs
This is a simple strategy that works extremely well.
Go out and participate on community blogs. Read and genuinely comment on other people’s blogs in your industry. Too many people are lazy and don’t do it. I would recommend you make this a ritual - do it for 20 minutes every morning. Later on, if you email someone who's post you commented on, they will be more likely to respond. It will also lead you to get more traffic on your site and hence more readers.
Make sure that when you are writing a comment, to include your name, email address and url. This way it will link back to your site.
6. Mention people in your blog posts
Who doesn’t want to be mentioned or quoted?
There's a big chance that when you write a blog post, there are other resources that you can link. For example, include other people in your industry and link to resources that will benefit your readers.
When you do that, let those people know that you mentioned them in your blog post. This way, when you ask them to share it, you are likely to get a 20-30% response rate. People will be way more likely to share it on their social media or website.
7. Network with other writers
Go to wherever people are guest posting (e.g. Forbes, Huffington Posts, etc.) and get to know the authors in your industry.
Build a relationship with them.
How? You can do this online by reading and giving them feedback on their posts. Share some of their content on your social media or website, email them, following them on social media, etc.
When you ask them for a favor, for example to introduce you to an editor at Forbes or Huffington Posts, there is about a 50% chance that they will follow through.
This is really useful because these sites can drive a lot of traffic. Many editors at these sites are stuck in their roles. The best way to get in is not through a submission form, but to get an intro from another writer who writes there frequently.
8. Start guest posting
Once you are accepted, for example on Forbes, Huffington or any other site, you can write content or a few blog posts.
Make sure it’s not promotional. It should simply be a really great blog post.
They will give you a bio where you can link back to your site. This will start to drive traffic.
When you start to write regularly, you can throw in links to content on your site that will benefit the reader. You’ll notice that your traffic will really spike because these big sites get tens of millions of visitors a month.
Even if the website is not so big, it doesn't hurt to go ahead and write guest posts. This adds to traffic, which increases social shares and linking back to your site, which ultimately helps with SEO.
9. Start collecting e-mails
Once you have more people visiting your site, start collecting emails.
You can do this by using WP Email capture.
When you generate new content you can blast it out to your mailing list. This will help you create consistency in traffic and keep people coming back to your site, both of which will create more social shares.
The email list usually generates more social shares than any other form of traffic. This translates to more comments, which means more text, which means you will be found on search engines through long term key words, helping your overall traffic.
When collecting emails, make sure you give something for free. Fir example, a free newsletter, e –book, audio, etc. This dramatically increases your open and sign up rates.
In your free offer, be specific. For example, instead of saying, “Sign up for our free newsletter,” increase your sign up rate by saying, “Get these 7 lessons to do XYZ.”
10. Create and promote groups
Create groups related to whatever you are blogging on. You can do this on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Add or invite people to the group and advertise to get new group members.
When you generate new content, you can easily blast it to the group since you are the owner. If, for example, the group has 5,000 people, you can easily generate 5,000 to 10,000 visitors per blast.
I would personally recommend using a LinkedIn channel because the traffic is valuable and highly converting.
Sounds like a lot of work?
Here are some tips:
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If you have limited time and money, but you can’t hire people to help you out, just do steps one through four (write great content, create evergreen content, create a conversation, and email 100 people.)
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If you have money, you can go to ProBlogger jobs board. Here, you will find people to help you with content creation and you can also assign them to promote it at an affordable fee.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see quick results. It takes time. For the first few months, it's normal if traffic is really slow. But, if you consistently follow these steps, and post about once a week for at-least 6 months, you will start seeing the results of the traffic and an increase in Inbound Marketing!
Have you tried to increase the visibility of your content by applying any way mentioned above? Please share and let us know what has worked best for you.
Additionally, if you think you might need help with your Inbound Marketing, book a call with us here!
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