Content marketing is a buzzword in the business world these days, and it can be challenging to get the results you could get a few years ago when there was less competition. Sure, you’re writing blog content, but so is everyone else.
How can you get your content marketing efforts to take you further without dumping a ton of time and money into them? Follow these five steps:
- Go beyond the blog post
Blogging is absolutely an effective way to create brand awareness and thought leadership, but content marketing really should include much more than that. You can attract more email subscribers if you have a report or e-book you can give away in exchange for an email address. Creating videos or infographics can attract people who may not want to sit and read a 1,500-word blog post.
Diversify the content you create, and you’ll have more opportunity to attract people with different interests, as well as different preferred methods of consuming content.
- Take one article and turn it into a content marketing machine
It can be difficult to continually come up with new topic ideas (trust me: I’ve written literally thousands of articles on small business. Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing new to say). You might find inspiration closer than you realize: your existing content is a great place to start in order to create new content.
Look at your analytics and identify a few blog posts that were really popular. From these topics, you could:
- Create additional posts that go more in-depth on different aspects of the original post
- Develop a longer e-book
- Source industry experts for their tips on the subject
- Create a second post with more insight on the same topic
- Set up a series of emails to provide subscribers more info on the subject
- Automatically publish older content
The frustrating thing about blog content is that a few weeks (or even days) after you publish a post, it becomes ancient history. All that hard work…for nothing.
Here’s a secret tool I use that sends a lot of traffic back to my older posts: it’s a WordPress plugin called Revive Old Post, and it does just that. Once you set it up with the schedule of how frequently you want older content to be promoted on social media, you can forget about it. People will see shares of your older content, and you’ll get traffic to your blog.
Related: What to Do When Your Content Goes Viral
- Automate shares of new posts
If you’re sharing older content, you of course also want to share your newer content to increase reads, right? There are many tools for this, but I’m currently loving dlvr.it. Set up your blog feed, and every time a new post goes live, it’s promoted to your various social media profiles. It’s nice not to have to do it manually, though I do suggest scheduling a few manual shares in addition to that first share to maximize the number of people who view your content.
When you share content manually, change up the text of the share. You could:
- Cite an interesting statistic from the article
- Ask a thought-provoking question
- Pull highlights from the post
Your goal is to make people curious so they’ll click on the link. Schedule each share for a different time each day, then look back to see which time got the most interest. Be sure to keep your audience in mind: are they likely using social media at work, where they’ll click on your B2B blog post link? Or do you target consumers who browse social media in the evening?
- Boost your content
One way to attract new readers is to boost a post on Facebook. For as little as $5, you can get your blog post featured in the feeds of people who fit the demographics you’re looking to reach. This is an easy and affordable way to increase blog traffic, which can result in a boost to your customer base, as well.
Select your more popular posts for the boost, and make your target audience as large as possible, while still making sure your content is relevant to that audience. You don’t want to pay to promote your post to people who have no interest in it.
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These strategies can give you an extra oomph when it comes to your content marketing. By implementing the above strategies with little additional effort, you can get better results in no time.
