Everyone wants to attract more traffic to their website. But to win business you need to get the right type of traffic and engage them once they arrive. To do this you need high quality, relevant content. Information that interests your target prospects, adds value, and makes them want to read it and come back for more later. After you create great content, you need to promote it by publishing it online so it gets in front of your desired target audience.
To really grow your audience and drive traffic, you want your content to spread virally across the community by having readers re-tweet, post experts, add comments, and publish to other blogs and social media.
Here are 5 Keys to creating content that drives traffic, engages prospects and has the potential to spread virally:
- Understand What Your Customer is Interested In – begin by thinking about your customers. Make a list of the top problems your customer’s face, the top reasons they buy from you, the most frequent questions they ask, and the type of industry information they are most interested in. Look at the search terms your target uses when coming to your page. Visit some of your customer’s LinkedIn pages and see what groups they have joined and what discussions are most popular. Look at industry associations, forums, and information they consume.
- Make a List of Compelling Headlines – after learning what your target is interested in, make a list of “Headlines” to write about. Keep the list on file and start working your way down the list to create relevant articles and posts. Think of different ways to write short, impactful headlines. You can ask provocative questions, explain “How to” accomplish an important task, make a “Top 5, 7, or 10 List”, share important or breaking news, learnings, or facts in the industry, or tell a story about a recent encounter with a customer who had a challenge or solved a problem.
- Have “Stopping Power” – Successful magazine ads have stopping power. There is a lot of clutter, so advertisers know they need to GRAB your attention with a powerful headline and an eye catching visual. The Internet is no different. There are two critical hurdles you must pass in order to get people to read your content.
Instantaneous Attraction – Most website visitors make an instantaneous decision, in the first few milliseconds of landing on your page, whether they will engage and start reading your content or whether they will click away. This instantaneous attraction is driven by a powerful visual and compelling headline. Make sure you write good headlines and try to have an attention grabbing image.
Engaging Point of View – After to have “Stopped” someone, they will spend about 30 seconds to 1 minute reading your first paragraph to determine if you have something that engages them, or if you are just regurgitating plain vanilla information they either already know or can get just about anywhere. - SEO Optimize Your Content – to attract the right target you need to use the right keyword terms that they will be searching on. Make sure you do your keyword research using the right 2 to 3 word keyword phrases and also very specific 4 to 5 word keyword phrases. Use these keyword phrases in the headline, body copy, content description, and tags.
- Promote Your Content and Create Backlinks – each backlink you have is a pathway that leads people and traffic to your content. Create as many links and pathways as possible by promoting your content across a wide variety of social media venues. Publish to Facebook, LinkedIn, eZine Articles, Yahoo, and online industry sites. Also, place links to the content in relevant blogs and forums. But make sure to only place links when the content adds value and is on topic so you build up a good reputation among the target audience.
