Transform Content Into Blog Traffic
By CJ Powell, Writer
Effective content marketing campaigns rely on valuable, helpful information that engages the customer throughout the purchase.
If you understand your audience and tailor your message to speak to them directly, the idea is that your content will help educate and guide them toward a business relationship. That’s content marketing in a nutshell.
How will your customer find your content?
As it turns out, there’s an overlooked strategy that we used to get 20% more traffic to our blog, but first let me cover the basics of distribution.
Targeted email campaigns or posting to branded social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are a good place to reach current or interested customers and fans.
Likewise, paid digital campaigns via SEM or social advertising are successful in reaching new readers.
If there’s newsworthiness, you can send it to reporters and editors you have relationships with. This can lead to earned PR opportunities to reach new readers. The same is true for like-minded blogs that offer and publish guest writing opportunities.
Of course, you can also reach new readers organically (sometimes, accidentally) by optimizing for your search terms. In a perfect world, all traffic would be organic, direct traffic.
But sometimes the most effective way to reach your audience online is to simply roll up your sleeves and go and find them yourself.
Seek out the customer.
Start with industry forums. Speaking from experience, there are a handful of tried and true, very supportive community forums in the COHN verticals of real estate, healthcare, lifestyle and B2B. When we at COHN write a blog post related to B2B marketing, for example, I know exactly where I will go and re-post the blog for that online community to read, engage and enjoy.
Many industry and trade associations have an online group you can join through membership. If not, there are plenty of groups that don’t require paid membership. Invest some time into searching for these forums via Google and Twitter, and you might be surprised about an online community you didn’t know about.
Don’t forget to search LinkedIn and Reddit!
And here’s where that 20% comes in. Let’s say you just wrote a compelling piece on, say, new cannabis marketing regulations. There’s a subreddit for that. (Actually, there are many subreddits for that.)
Or what about that sweet new infographic your team made about real estate financing. There’s a LinkedIn Group (probably many!) that would love to see it.
Go put your focus keywords into LinkedIn (Groups) and Reddit search bars, and start bookmarking the community results for later distribution.
You really wouldn’t believe how niche some of these communities can be, and it’s not hard to join and participate in the conversation. Tactfully post your blog and a few conversation questions to the group, and respond to any feedback you get.
These two communities are engaged.
In the last month alone, Reddit and LinkedIn Groups accounted for about 20% of our monthly blog traffic. I’ll be happy to email you a screenshot of my Google Analytics dashboard as proof.
When you tactfully re-post your blog in these groups, you’re likely to get a reaction. That’s because these two communities are very engaged and niche. You might even spark a conversation that, in turn, educates the community.
Is it more work to manually post your article in Reddit and LinkedIn Groups? Yes, but to increase your blog traffic by 20% is worth the effort, and it will augment your killer content marketing strategy by speaking directly to your audience.
Wait, wait, there’s more!
Actually, I lied. There’s not. I just want to give a quick plug to my agency COHN, who can do all of this (and more!) for your business. We’re good at what we do. Just ask the Denver Business Journal.
If you read this and learned a little something about content marketing, give us a call and we can teach you more. In fact, if you call right now, I can personally guarantee a wild marketing tidbit in the first conversation.
And if we have additional conversations, like in a formal client relationship, get prepared to have all your marketing challenges solved. Just. Like. That. I’m serious. Mostly. Shoot us an email, and we’ll take it from there. Thanks for reading!
