How often have you heard the phrase “content is king”?
I’m sure the majority of you just nodded your head.
It’s a popular phrase that’s been around for a long time.
Marketing is all about having a great product and then creating attention around it. There’s not much difference in creating great content to generate traffic, attention and potential leads to your website.
Here are 5 ideas that in my experience have proven to attract visits and links to your site.
1. Contests
If you’re starting off in a small way, then setting up a contest is a good way to build up your following: this can be on Twitter, Facebook, via your email list and promoting the contest on other websites which can deliver links to the contest on your website
It must be said that a number of people will only enter in hope to win the prize you have to offer and that they are not genuinely interested in your business, that’s a given. But collecting email addresses from legitimate entrants allows you to keep in touch with them and send them offers.
Those who didn’t win the competition could also be sent a special offer code as a way of enticing them to make a purchase.
Teaming up with bigger websites also allows you to generate more interest. If you can give these websites an exclusive offer to their audience you should also be able to inherit a link from their blog back to your competition entry page or homepage of your website.
2. Flagship Content
Writing great content isn’t always as easy as it seems. It can be time-consuming, research heavy and, sometimes, difficult to outdo the competition. But in the end it’s worth the effort.
Flagship content can be many things: useful tips, lessons and tutorials, FAQs, research results, definitions, case studies, reviews, how-to articles, awesome eBooks etc. But what they all share in common is that they provide real solutions for real problems that your target audience are facing.
We created an SEO Accessibility eBook to help people of all levels get a better understand of how SEO works and how their site is performing.
If you create awesome content that visitors are going to reference or come back to time and time again, similar to Wikipedia, then you’re on to a winner. You don’t need to be competing with Wikipedia if you’re creating content within your niche that is not covered by the collaboratively edited free encyclopaedia.
This content does not just need to rank in Google to be successful either – it could help create a popular blog that attracts a high number of return visitors, is popular and well-shared on social media, or is successful in your email marketing campaign.
And the more great content you create the more your audience will grow and keep coming back…
3. Data
Reliable data can be an excellent way of inheriting links. People simply love data. If you’re in a position to provide great data and it’s easily accessible, should someone come across it and use it when they’re conducting research there’s a great chance they will cite the original source – i.e you.
There are a number of ways of collecting data depending on what you do. Sales figures/popular products, surveys and statistics are commonly attainable data for a number of businesses.
For example, Meluba Badges inventively used their temporary and permanent name badge data from a cross section of industries to provide insight into their economic and staffing stability. This results were picked up by larger publications because they had broader political and economic appeal. Why not look at your own data and see how it could be interpreted on a wider scale.
If you cannot provide data yourself, interpreting others’ data can also be a way of producing attractive content.
4. Tutorials
The internet is a great place to be educated. Think about it – there are TED Talks, YouTube, Coursera, Lifehack and even Wikiversity just to name a few of the popular places.
There are 40,500 searches a month for “how to” according to Google’s Keyword Planner tool. And there are hundreds of thousands more searches with another word or two at the end of that.
If you have the knowledge to create tutorials in our industry these can be used to attract both links and visitors to your website.
Mediahawk are call tracking experts and regularly publish tutorials about web analytics integration and how to track telephone leads using their software. Their latest blog about “How To Track Telephone Calls Leads In Google Analytics” is just one example of useful content for businesses who close the majority of their sales over the phone.
These types of free education articles could then be picked up by other websites perhaps on a list of resources or referred to in a blog. They’ll also receive social shares if they’re genuinely useful.
5. Lists
In case you hadn’t realised by now, lists are incredibly popular on the internet. I believe BuzzFeed made a business on the back of this. Whether you create a list that is humorous or serious it has great potential to be a success just because internet users simply love reading lists. It’s not recommended to go into great length for each of the objects in your list, so writing quick, compelling information can be great for keeping the users’ attention. Lists are very easy for your readers to digest.
A lot of lists can stand the test of time too – ‘The Top 10 greatest events of 1995‘, ‘The 10 greatest own goals in football‘ and ‘The Top 50 cities to visit before you’re 50‘ are examples of lists that could be written in 2014, rank number one in Google for their title and remain there for a long time, whilst people would still find them useful, and hopefully search for them 2, 3, 4 years down the line.
Plenty of ‘Top 10? articles rank highly in Google too. If you think about it, you’re covering 10 topics or 10 objects in one blog post, so there are a lot of combinations of keywords they can be picked up on.
Author: Barrie Smith
Courtesy: www.receptional.com
