Traffic Strategy #7: Write Reviews or Top 10 Lists

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Creating traffic to your website should never be a lonely affair. Although creating the initial strategy is a one person job, once your strategy has been set, the fastest way to be bringing more traffic in is through collaboration, either through JV Partnerships or Link Roundups and Blogging Communities.

Here’s another great way to multiply the outreach and subsequent blog traffic:

Curate a list of favorites within your niche; topics and writers who compliment your services. Think ‘what would my audience benefit from knowing that does not directly compete with my services?’

Take Omaginarium for example:

I could write a “10 Best” list of my favorite Social media Experts. “The Top 10 Social Media Experts to follow”…or Top 20! Or…“The Top 10 Most Creative Content Marketers”, The 10 Best WordPress Plug-ins for generating Traffic” and on and on.

In these top 10 lists I would research the experts, give an example of their work, write a small blurb about what I find valuable about them, and of course give a link back to their site, and maybe a link to one of my favorite articles that they’ve written; the one that pushed me to name them on this list.

Then I’d send them an email letting them know that they are included in my Top 10 List, and include the link to the article I’d written and cited them in.

This is a huge honor! Now I ask you, what would you do if someone just informed you that you made their Top 10 list of a published article or blog post?

Why, unless it’s an embaressingly poorly written article you would share it with your followers, that’s what! Not only is this a huge compliment, but it’s great marketing for them as well, so of course they are going to share it, both through their Social Media as well as in their emails, their blogs, etc. This is a Coup for everyone on the list.

Why Creating a Top 10 List Creates Traffic to Your Website

Now, lets do the math: Take 10 authoritative, heavily followed bloggers or niche experts, who probably have a minimum of 5000 email list followers, many upwards of 60, 000, so lets give them an average of 25,000 followers, and multiply them by 10, you now have 250,000 additional people your post is now being exposed to just through email.

Now look at their social media following, and again take an average:

  • 25,000 Facebook page fans
  • 25,000 Twitter Follower (usually many more, but still, we’ll skew low for this purpose)
  • 10,000 LinkedIn followers
  • 5000 Google Plus followers
  • 400 Pinterest followers

and these are just their own; does not account for:

  • guest posts,
  • article marketing
  • mentions on others blogs
  • citings in trade newsletters
  • citings and collabarations from Joint Venture partners
  • etc., etc.

I think you get the picture of the enormity of the possibilities here. All of this sharing will have a link back to your l’il old Top 10 Social Media Experts To Follow’.

Here’s an important point however, before you get all hot and bothered under the collar and run out to create that first Review Column, or Top 10 List:

This will only work if the quality of your post is top notch, if the content is authentic and written from the heart.

It becomes glaringly apparent when someone writes a post simply for the exposure, the link juice or the SEO, and this technique can backfire, or just die a slow painful death by blacklisting. No, no…we don’t want that.

Remember that you’re writing for people, not search engines, or rankings. The more helpful and valuable the article, the more exposure it will get. You want people referring back to it, time and time again. That’s how you’ll be remembered and that’s how this technique will drive traffic to your blog or website.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Suzen Pettit
I am principal at Omaginarium and Omagine Health, an online marketing and SEO solutions provider. With my small business experience, combined with expertise in communications and marketing, I guide small businesses through the maze of technology to help them grow their online presence with successful SEO.

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