Creating content sucks when most of it gets almost no attention.
Day after day of pumping out articles with no meaningful return can be soul-crushing.
How often do you find yourself browsing a small independent blog nowadays? They don’t pop up as frequently as they used to, with Google preferring a select few.
This doesn’t mean their content is bad in any way, it just never reaches its target audience.
I know this struggle very well from my own blog, but it isn’t the end of the world: engaging with readers through blog comments can help fix it.
It’s simply a matter of getting into Google’s good books. Building relationships with fellow bloggers is also crucial, as it can enhance your visibility and foster a strong network.
If you take the time to write a well-researched blog post and focus on providing what your readers really want, there’s no reason you can’t get some serious traction.
What role does content play in your business?
How does it actually contribute to growth?
The main job of blog content is to create conversions. But that isn’t an immediate goal. It is a journey.
Content should act as a shepherd, guiding and informing new readers, converting them into loyal subscribers.
I use the analogy of a funnel to help illustrate this concept.
Top of Funnel:
This is your broadest demographic, sitting at the top of the funnel as a kind of catch-all.
This audience doesn’t know anything about your brand, bringing only their preordained opinions and identities.
At this stage, your audience is more informed. They sense they have a problem, but are unaware of any solution.
Or, your prospect may know the result they want, just not that your product provides it. They may be interested in more niche topics.
At this point, your prospect is fully aware of your brand but isn’t sure it’s right for them.
And finally, at the very bottom of the awareness funnel, your client knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal”.
This is where a conversion is most likely to occur, and is the endpoint where (ideally) all your blog traffic would lead to.
I think of successful content marketing as successfully tailoring your content to the funnel.
It’s your job to guide the customer down the funnel, moving them from one stage of awareness to the next.
A successful blog post is one that effectively signposts the blog readers’ journey down the content funnel.
With that in mind, you have to be careful to reach the right subset of your audience with your blog posts.
You have to drive traffic to your content very deliberately, being aware of search intent and using “calls to action” to steer them from each stage to the next.
Engaging with audiences through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook is crucial for promoting your content and building a community around your blog.
Successful content marketers don’t believe in waiting.
They often spend as much/more time promoting their content as creating it.
Both are equally important and require equal attention. What’s the point of crafting engaging content if no one will ever engage with it?
This is a valuable lesson and something I grappled with for a long time with my blog.
So, how do you viably promote your content?
Before you consider writing, ask yourself these questions:
Be realistic: Do I actually have a shot at ranking for search keywords related to this content, given the domain authority of my blog and my ability to generate links?
Know your prospects: What potential audiences would be interested in this sort of content?
Maintain customer relationships: Where is my target audience already spending time? What are they already reading and consistently engaging with?
Stick to the funnel: What’s the most average stage of awareness of someone interested in this content? Is there a specific action I should ask readers to take next?
Be smart about what content you produce BEFORE you produce it. It is a hundred times easier to promote something that was tailored for promotion.
Constantly trying to appeal to new potential audiences isn’t always the right call.
Sometimes it’s worth working on retaining your existing audience of advocates and potential customers. People who know your name, that you have already guided down the funnel.
Add a simple call to action at the bottom of your content, inviting invested readers to stay in the loop in the future.
If your posts don’t have a simple takeaway that you can easily share on social media, are they worth writing? Why would you ever want a post to be so complicated you couldn’t sum up its benefit into a single sentence?
If your content falls into that category, the level of information filtering required by your readers to reach the crux of what they want makes reading your post a waste of effort. Every copywriter worth their salt will tell you that being concise is key.
So why not prove to potential readers you are going to get them what they want, quickly and concisely? Share a social media post that gives an insight into the wealth of knowledge your content offers, but keep it snappy!
Here are a few tips to help you curate your social media posts:
Tweak your presentation
You may have noticed that some posts have a well-formatted title, image and description, while others may be missing an image or just have a plain link.
First impressions are everything. You want to look as good as possible, so it’s worth paying attention to your Open Graph settings. If you don’t already know, you can Google how to adjust them for your CMS.
Be active in your community
You would be surprised how many people miss this. It’s called social media for a reason.
Engage in conversation around the post. You want to be approachable and sociable.
The people who you interact with there could eventually become your clients or refer you to others.
Collaborate
For an early boost in traffic, you can reach out to others to help you boost the visibility of your post.
You can contact any references you may have used and ask if they would check it out and consider sharing, or work with a group of like-minded peers to help push each other’s content.
Well-placed links offer the chance of additional referral traffic, but more importantly, influence the authority of your domain, and subsequentially where you rank in search engines amongst other blogs.
Here are a few ways to acquire high-value links to your blog posts.
Writing guest posts
Perhaps the most commonplace way of earning links is through guest blogging. By writing an amazing guest post for a different authority in your niche, you can contextually link to a relevant post on your blog. Guest blogging is highly effective for building brand visibility and authority, as it allows you to engage a larger audience and increase readership by publishing content on established authority blogs.
It’s popular opinion that high-quality guest posting is the best way to successfully and consistently build up links.
2. Share your resources
Many creators create “best of” lists or round-ups of resources they feel may interest their readers.
If you provide something that you think will be valuable to their audience, share it with other bloggers! They may add it to one of their lists!
3. Republish selectively
If you have the connections, and your content didn’t take off the first time, consider reuploading it (with a link to the original post) to a collaborator’s platform, or using an alternative such as LinkedIn or Medium.
This gives your content another chance to gain traction, and could expose it to new, previously unaware audiences.
Your job isn’t just to create new content.
There is an innumerable amount of content out there, with more being churned out every day.
If you want to be at the top of your game, you have to remain relevant amongst the ever-growing competition, regularly refreshing your old content and culling off any irrelevancies.
Even if an article you wrote two years ago was absolutely top-notch, information goes out of date, strategies evolve, and your audience grows and changes.
If you don’t rework your old content over time, it will get stale and your rankings and conversions will decrease.
This isn’t always the case (some niches will shift more than others), but it’s still a best practice. The more relevant your content is to today, the better.
It should be as easy as possible for your prospective customers to discover content they may be interested in.
The more content they consume, the more aware they are of your brand and product.
more aware =>
further down the funnel =>
closer to conversions 👍👍
One really powerful way to do this is with strategic internal linking.
Here are a few of the most fundamental ways to go about it:
Contextual linking
If you have more to say on a topic you mentioned, but it is beyond the scope of your current subject, link to a different article that has more in-depth coverage.
Feel free to do this loads! People may not even realise they are interested in learning more about something until their cursor is on the link.
Create categories
Sometimes more context is necessary so the reader can understand what content is most relevant to them.
One way to do this is to create categorical pillar pages on your blog, which include the best content you’ve written on only a particular topic, easily accessible and divided into subtopics.
If all related content is interlinked and clustered together on one page, it’s easy for readers to navigate a deep dive into a subject.
Alternatively, you could create a knowledge base or help centre that links common questions to an index of articles that answer them.
Suggested articles
You’ve probably seen the widgets at the bottom of an article that suggest other articles you may be interested in reading.
If you’re anything like me, it’s all too easy to get caught up in a rabbit hole of interesting content. Use that!
Your first goal should always be to provide actual value to the reader. Don’t waste their time and always follow through on your promises.
Be concise, clear, and engaging. Your content should help them find what they are looking for, and be enjoyable to read.
Be strategic with your content creation, and build up trust with your audience. Results will follow!
