“Build it and they will come” is a failing content marketing strategy—but there’s a better way to get instant web traffic than posting and praying.
Don’t struggle alone to promote your message. Follow this playbook instead. You can implement these seven tactics to get the website traffic and social shares that you need to meet your marketing metrics for your content. Ultimately, it will feed your site with traffic that can be converted into leads or monetized directly with ads.
Use Press Release Distribution Services
We do a lot of SEO work at Honeypot, which involves building streams of organic traffic by meeting demand for searches with optimized content—but it’s not the only strategy out there.
The beauty of press release platforms is that they come with built-in audiences specifically for distributing news. With a distribution service like PR Newswire, you don’t need to hustle your content through a dozen PR channels
It’s worth noting that you aren’t just paying for an announcement to appear on a well-known PR website. A proper PR service pushes your announcement to journalists, columnists, and bloggers in the same space as you. This can give you instant web traffic if it’s tailored to the right audience with news-worthy content.
This should be a staple tactic for enterprise-level companies looking to distribute formal announcements, such as new customers, partnerships, product launches, or hiring high-profile leaders. The format’s age doesn’t make it a bad thing in digital marketing, either; traditional press releases carry more authority than blogs.
The limitation with press releases is that the content needs to be highly newsworthy. Readers and media influencers won’t take you seriously if you release a press release every month for its own sake. They’ll smell the lack of substance a mile away.
Use it selectively for your biggest announcements. If you still need to release one anyway, then frame it as an industry development or a paradigm shift wherever it’s feasible.
Stagger Multiple Social Media Posts (and Tag Influencers)
Only a portion of your audience ever sees organic social media posts these days—30% at most. Facebook business profiles have particularly poor organic reach, resting as low as 2% of your total followers without any paid advertising behind it on the platform (in the worst documented cases).
That’s why it’s important to repost your content strategically. A single published blog should be shared at least twice per month, if not once per week within certain channels.
However, always keep in mind the timing and speed of your social channels. You could promote the same blog twice per week on Twitter and no one would bat an eye, but posting the same blog on LinkedIn more than twice in a month would surely annoy your followers.
On top of that, tag relevant influencers in every post! You’ll increase the chances of that post being shared for instant web traffic by a wide margin. For example, construction companies should tag real estate agents and associations to promote each other.
Register for Third-Party Websites for Instant Web Traffic
Syndicated content gets read by more people, plain and simple. Registering a site with Blogorama can triple its annual traffic. It costs money, but that’s just a part of your digital marketing budget.
Not all directories are beneficial, but there are a handful of productive ones out there that can add a consistent stream of traffic every month without incurring penalties from Google. While we’re on the subject, remember to check your Google Search Console to disavow shady inbound links every month or so.
Check out these blog registry (or aggregator) sites. Remember to test them out to see which ones work for your properties in particular:
Email to Relevant Lists (But Not Everyone)
Email lists act as some of the most important assets in your digital arsenal, but we’ve put an office-wide ban on the phrase “email blast.”
We see companies desperately trying to get instant web traffic by emailing every contact in their address book, but it doesn’t work. Not everyone has the same interests, and that’s why we segment email lists from the get-go.
Customers or prospects who receive emails that don’t interest them will unsubscribe from your list forever. It also takes five times as much effort to acquire a customer than it does to retain one, so you’re leaving website traffic on the table if you ignore segmentation.
For example: Did a lead sign up for your email list to get an event planning checklist? Only email them about things related to event planning or checklist templates. Turning an email list into a reliable source of traffic only works after you’ve proven you won’t spam different buyer personas with one-size-fits-all messages.
Boost Successful Social Posts After 24 Hours
Let’s take a look at the social posts you published. Have any of them performed well? You’ll be able to tell based on their reach, hard engagement numbers, and video views.
Pick the best of the bunch and put some money behind it. This is called boosting a post, and you won’t have trouble discovering how—social networks love to put “boost now” buttons in front of page managers every hour of every day.
What makes boosted posts so valuable is their ability to reach a high number of people on a modest budget when compared to larger advertising platforms such as Google and Bing. You can assign your advertising dollars tactically after receiving some initial data on a given post to ensure you aren’t spending money on a dud.
Use those cold, hard numbers to your advantage.
Ask Content Distribution Partners to Share for Consistent Traffic
Have you developed a network of partners who can share your blogs and social posts? We hope so because it’s an important part of every distribution strategy.
Distribution partners possess some kind of overlapping quality with your organization. If you’re a motivational speaker, for example, then you could partner with life coaches and personal branding agencies to share each other’s content. This will allow you to reach each other’s audiences with that partner’s implied stamp of approval.
Small and medium businesses should promote local business associations and chambers of commerce in exchange for shares of a similar value. Everyone wants a larger audience, and you have nothing to lose by sharing someone else’s content. Even a modest dose of instant web traffic is worth it.
Get in touch with these kinds of organizations and establish an ongoing share arrangement to add reliable website traffic or social shares to your content strategy.
Appear on Industry (and Competitor) Websites with PPC Ads
Where will advertising have the biggest impact? Your ads don’t need to appear on Google’s stark, white search results each and every day.
You can try advertising on competitor’s pages, too—and why not? Instead of fighting for attention on a ranked page, you can cancel out a competitor’s message by offering something even more enticing on their own piece of digital real estate.
Any site can blacklist others from advertising on their pages, but this practice doesn’t make the top of most webmasters’ to-do lists. Capitalize on a competitor’s mistake to get twice as much value for your advertising dollars.
Talk to us about implementing these strategies and content distribution services to get the shares and traffic you need.
