Nico Prins — September 6, 2019 — September 6, 2019
Content marketing is alive and well in 2019 and most likely in the years to come. However, with each passing year, there’s more and more noise and if you’re trying to do content, you have to fight for your readers’ attention.
Whether you’re using it for lead generation, educating your visitors or simply to talk about where your company is going, you surely want as many people to read your blog as possible. Besides spending a small fortune on ads to promote your articles, there are some better ways to make more people read your blogs.
Here are a few that are used for content marketing to get more readers that spend more time on your website. If your aim is to make money through blogging, you can use these tips to get more traffic to your affiliate website.
High-quality sources
Every good writer knows that the quality of their sources matters greatly in readers’ perception of content. Unless you’re writing a think piece, you want your article to be based on references and research. Just like with journalism, picking your sources is one of the secrets of writing a great piece of content.
In your article, you will use external links as your sources. For example, if I’m writing a piece on marketing, I would definitely want to use an article from Hubspot as my source. If you’ve found an excellent source, but you don’t know whether you should use it or not, I have one simple trick – checking the website’s domain authority.
Using a tool called MOZbar, you check if a site’s website authority is good enough – whether it has a good reputation and solid SEO. Simply install the extension for your browser and every time you land on a new website, it will show you its DA right in the browser.
The importance of good links is twofold. First, you want reliable sources that have a reputation and have done the research behind the words on their site. Second, Google wants to see your piece of content have strong external links in order to rank your piece of content better. The stronger the sources – the better the article.
Bear in mind that domain authority is just one piece of the puzzle. You should check the overall quality of your source, who wrote it and what credentials they have. Take all this information into consideration before linking to a source in your own piece of content.
Finally, you can (and should) reference to yourself, i.e. link to some of the articles on your own blog. Having strong internal links is one more signal for Google that the article is high-quality, and besides, it’s great to have your visitors read more of your stuff while they’re already on your website.
Thoughtful keyword research and planning
When I have the freedom to do so, I can write an amazing blog post that incorporates storytelling, great sources and is pure joy to read. However, without proper keyword research, no one will find this blog post through search engines. So, besides worrying about the content itself, you have one more concern – the keywords you’re using.
The idea is pretty simple – you want to find out high-volume keywords with low difficulty so that you can drive people from Google to your website. Unfortunately, in the triangle of:
- High-volume
- Low difficulty
- High possibility for conversion
You often have to choose 2 out of 3. Since you’re bound to run out of keywords that get thousands of searches and have low difficulty, it’s a good idea to move on to the next best thing.
My best tip for keyword research is to find keywords that have great search intent and the possibility of conversion and low keyword difficulty. Let me explain what I mean. Let’s say that I want to write an article with “youtube banner size” as my keyword. I’ll use a paid tool called Ahrefs to show you the results for this keyword:
As you can see, targeting this keyword shouldn’t be too difficult – it gets 55,000 monthly searches and it has the keyword of 15, which is pretty good. However, I would rather choose “youtube banner size template”. Even though it gets fewer searches (2,500), there is a higher chance that the person searching will click through.
In fact, 51% of people who search for this term click on the results, while only 33% do so for the main keyword (youtube banner size). If you can offer an actual template on your website that visitors can download – you can grab their emails with ease.
The bottom line is, you should aim for those keywords which are likely to be of use for the person searching. Think about providing value and getting visitors to come to your website and stay there for as long as possible. Don’t just go for higher volume, because the clicks you may get won’t be as valuable.
You can use this strategy for doing content marketing for SaaS, e-commerce or any other type of sites
Personal experience
If you’re in the rush to write as much content as possible, pump up your organic traffic and get more leads from SEO, something bad will inevitably happen. You start churning out content that is similar to everything else out there, covering the same topics in the same way. You get more traffic because of SEO, but none of that traffic converts and the visitors don’t stay on your website.
The reason is simple – you’re not making it personal.
The most successful articles aren’t always those that have a high-volume keyword. Those articles aren’t provocative, groundbreaking or revolutionary. They have one thing in common – personal experience.
Some of the most successful articles are those that talk about company and the struggles while launching the startup, getting first customers, managing content marketing efforts and similar. Those articles are based on personal experience and people want to read them to learn what to do in similar situations. It’s just much more interesting than another 1500-word article on “lead generation strategies” listing the same old 5 methods which you can see in every other blog in existence.
Needless to say, you can’t have personal experience with absolutely every topic out there, but you can give your own opinion about it and present a unique angle. This is what engages readers and makes them care and come back to your website for more.
Wrapping up
Blogging as a way to get new customers won’t go away any time soon. However, as time goes by, it will be much more difficult to get results if you don’t commit yourself fully to this effort. With so many bloggers writing, succeeding will take hard work, perseverance and lots of faith. Good luck!
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