Lacy Boggs May 13, 2021 Here’s the sad truth: we could write the best blog post ever written, but if nobody sees it, it won’t do your business any good.
*sad trombone*
Every business needs traffic that it can convert to leads, which can be converted to sales.
Creating amazing content is step one, but you need to be able to use that content to drive traffic in order to drive leads and sales.
And there are two kinds of traffic: free and paid.
Which one should you use? They both have their place and can play well together. To overly simplify things:
- You will pay for awareness either way — with either time or money. Organic requires more time, paid traffic requires more money.
- If you need speedy results, paid traffic is the way to go. Organic takes time to build.
- If you want long-term results that don’t require continued investment, organic is the way to go. Paid traffic disappears the moment you stop paying for it.
Paid traffic is a topic I’m not an expert in (and frankly, don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole), so let’s focus for the moment on how to drive organic traffic to your website. First and foremost, you want to have something to drive people to. A great home page or brilliant sales page will do you well for specific calls to action, but it also benefits you to have some valuable content that people want to consume — like blog posts.
There are three main ways we can help drive free, organic traffic to blog posts:
1. Optimize for SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of writing your blog post for humans and the Google (or other search engines). If you want to be the answer when someone types a question or query into a search engine, then SEO is where you need to be.
We start with an SEO report from our favorite guru, Meg Casebolt of Love at First Search. She determines what you’re already ranking for, what your competitors are ranking for, and what people are actually searching for, and then turns that into an actionable list of topics we can turn into blog posts on your behalf.
Because here’s the thing: What you THINK people are searching for, and what they’re actually typing in may be two different things.
Now, SEO isn’t a great fit for every business, but most businesses can benefit from doing some basic SEO research and optimizing their posts to what people are actually searching for.
2. Social Media Repurposing
The second way we can drive free traffic to your website is via social media.
But not just any social media.
We’re not talking about cat memes and photos of what you had for lunch. Those have their place, but they’re not going to drive traffic to your website.
Instead, we start with a valuable piece of content, like a blog post, and repurpose it into smaller bites for social media.
It’s easy to take a juicy blog post and slice and dice it up into 5, 10, 15 — even 30 separate social media posts. (I’ve come up with a list of 30 social posts you can generate from one good blog. Would you like to see it in a future post? Comment below and let me know.) Add some pretty graphics and BAM. You’ve got a bunch of opportunities to send warm traffic to your blog post — which could turn them into a lead.
If you’re doing the work to grow your social media following, then those people who follow you go from being cold to warm leads, and then when they land on your blog, they’re primed to become smokin’ hot email leads or buy your low-end offer.
3. Email Newsletters
Both of the previous two strategies have been about getting cold (SEO) or warm (social media) leads to your website, but you can also use content to heat those warm leads up to boiling.
Your hottest leads at any given time are probably sitting on your email list — but you have to nurture them to prevent them from cooling off.
Whether you send your entire blog post to your list in the body of an email, or repurpose part of it to entice them into clicking thru and reading it on your website, getting that engagement is turning up the heat on your leads.
And, better still, you can include a more direct call to action in your emails. For example, if your blog post call to action is to sign up for the email list, your email could instead say something like, “If this resonates with you, click here to learn how we can work together.”
Writing great content is only the first step
The point is, getting that amazing, valuable blog post out into the world is only the first step; you also have to do the work to promote it so that the right people see it and act on it. <– That’s where the real value of content marketing lies.
When clients sign up for our retainer services, they can add on SEO research and optimization, social media blurbs, or email teasers to make the content we create go further.
If you are an online business owner, CEO, author, or coach with a successful businesse (generally earning $ 10k/month+) and you are spending anywhere from 8–16+ hours a month creating weekly blog posts or emails for your business and want to improve the consistency and quality of content you’re sharing — and spend a lot less time doing it — we should talk!
Our retainer services are a minimum 3 month engagement and are a good fit for people with small teams who want to get more strategic about the content they’re producing and spend WAAAY less of their own time creating it.
We can help you with the following things:
1) Creating a big picture, 30,000-foot-view of your content marketing plan — including a week-by-week editorial calendar that defines exactly what content we’re producing and WHY, so that every piece of content feels more strategic and aligned with your goals.
2) Turning intellectual property you already have into nurture content pieces. We can take your existing intellectual property (in the form of podcasts, videos, coaching calls, books, courses, marketing materials, or old articles) and turn them into brand new, unique articles. You’ll be matched with a dedicated writer who will learn your brand voice and become a mini-expert in your niche. This is guaranteed to save you, the CEO, up to 16 hours a month or more!
3) Optimizing content for SEO, social media repurposing, or email newsletters to drive organic traffic. As add on services, we can research your best SEO keywords and optimize your posts, create a number of social media captions from the articles we write, or draft copy for your weekly email newsletter — all of which will drive (FREE) organic traffic to the blog posts we create.
Together, the above 3 steps make up a system that we’ve used with more than 100 1:1 clients over the last 9 years to consistently drive quality traffic to websites, increase monthly email leads by 3X or more, improve search engine rankings, enroll dozens of clients per month into membership programs, support multi-six figure launches, and drive millions of views of our articles.
When you sign up for a retainer, you get a half-day VIP day with me to go over and create your strategy; a bespoke editorial calendar planning out six months of content; a minimum of one quality, professionally written blog post per week; one dedicated writer to work with who will get to know your business inside and out; and additional support creating a promotion plan that will get your content in front of the right audiences.
Our retainers get the best results for business owners who already have a clear marketing message and proven offers, and who have a catalog of existing intellectual property that can be mined for new article ideas…OR business owners who are willing to be interviewed for 1 hour per month by their writer to extract information for the articles.
The investment for a retainer is between $ 2,000 and $ 5,000 per month, depending on the number of articles and add-on services desired. Once you start with us, you lock in your retainer price for at least one calendar year.
Imagine: 3-6 months of quality content you don’t have to create yourself that drives traffic every single day!
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