If you are having a hard time attracting visitors to your blog, then it means that you have to step up your content marketing game. The majority of bloggers and online business owners out there will tell you that coming up with unique content that makes people want to read to the end isn’t always easy.

But luckily, there are some hacks that you can implement into your strategy to enhance your content marketing efforts and increase your traffic exponentially.

Using these tactics will also help you in achieving the following:

• Attracting more customers
• Increasing your email list
• Generating more valuable comments on your site
• Encouraging repeat blog visitors
• Building your personal brand
• And a whole lot more…

The best part is that it doesn’t even take long before you start to see the results from any one of the tactics listed below. So, without further ado, let’s get you started on creating a solid content marketing strategy for your business or blog.

Tip #1: Brainstorm Some Viral Ideas

What is it that makes some ideas go viral, yet others go unnoticed?

Take a look at your own niche, and I’m sure you will find that the content that gets the most shares is practical and useful content that arouses emotions such as laughter, anger, fear, and so on.

If you can manage to evoke these emotions in people, or if you leave them feeling entertained, they are more likely to share your content on social media.

The days of creating content to please Google and the other search engines are long gone, and they’re never coming back.

Now, if you want your content to be effective, you have to focus on making it emotionally resonant and packed full of value so that your audience will benefit immensely from it.

Once you achieve that, the rest is easy and they will even help you to spread your message.

While you won’t be able to nail viral ideas each and every time you create content, you only need a few viral ideas each month to drive tons more qualified visitors to your site.

Answer these questions to help you brainstorm some ideas for your content marketing:

• Can you think of any trending ideas that your audience would want to know about?
• If so, are any of them funny?
• Would those ideas elicit controversy in your niche?
• Would any of them evoke an emotional response from your readers (for instance pleasure, anger, pain, surprise, and so on)?
• Is it possible to add infographics, videos, or some eye-catching images?
• Which of the posts already on your site receive the most shares on social media?
• Which types of content pieces do your readers prefer – short or long?
• Can you ask industry influencers to share your content?

Keep in mind that content marketing strategies with a positive flavor to them perform much better online.

If you’re eliciting positive emotions from people on a consistent basis, they will naturally be drawn to you.

Also, don’t reinvent the wheel. Simply identify those content writers, industry bloggers, and website owners who seem to be dominating with the content they create.

Once you have that list, look for their best-performing pieces of content and then leverage those topics and headline styles in creating your own content (but yours will obviously be more enticing and powerful…).

Here is a simple step by step method for finding viral content in your niche:

• Go to Buzzsumo and type in your keyword (eg. Content marketing)
• Click ‘Go’
• Check the results to see which headlines got the most shares on social media

It’s important to remember that the majority of those topics that went viral did not get there overnight.

It takes time to gain the kind of momentum that is sustainable over time. After all, you don’t want content that has a viral surge one day only to disappear the next.

Craft Better Headlines

Go back to your list of headlines, and then model your post headline after one of those viral ones.

Take a few minutes to study the headline and come up with a better one for your content. For instance, if the original viral headline read:

‘5 Content Marketing Tips To Increase Your Blog Traffic’

Then you could come up with fresh, clickable new headlines off of that, such as:

• 13 Insanely Simple Content Marketing Hacks that will boost your traffic
• 15 Foolproof Content Marketing Tactics You Should Be Using in 2019

Tip #2: Write In-depth Articles

Google just LOVES in-depth content pieces – and so do your potential customers.

When we say ‘in-depth’ here we’re talking about carefully considering all the details and the aspects of your subject and then extensively researching your topic before crafting a well-written 2,000+ word article.

Studies over the years have shown that articles of that length tend to do very well in search results.

This means that if you publish in-depth articles on a consistent basis and make that a part of your marketing strategy, you will eventually be able to improve your rankings on the search engines and also get a lot more social shares.

Things to Keep In Mind When Creating Long-form content:

• Pick broad topics (eg. Internet marketing, blogging…) and then dive deep into the subject
• Your headline should target a long tail keyword (eg. How to Get Started in Internet Marketing)
• Do your homework and find accurate, current data to back up facts
• Make your content readable and interesting for your audience
• Include relevant graphics, images, videos, or slides in your posts
• Use content upgrades to collect email leads from within the article
• Find relevant authority sites to link out to
• Always include a call to action within your content (eg. Opt-in to our newsletter, buy something, or download a free report, and so on).

Tip #3: Craft Headlines That Are Clickable and Shareable

Your headline is responsible for the majority of the post’s success when it comes to converting readers into buyers, so if you want to grab your readers’ attention, then you should pay attention to the headlines you use in your posts.

We’ve already touched a bit on this, but it’s worth saying it again because it’s so vital to the success of your content marketing strategy.

People’s attention span on the internet is ridiculously short and if you want to capture their attention before you lose them to your competitors, you should pay more attention to the headlines on each and every piece of content that you craft.

All the content that you create has one single purpose – and that is to keep the reader engaged from one sentence to the next.

For this reason, the headlines are vital because they are the first sentence that your readers are going to see, and that will determine if they bother to read the article at all.

You want to craft interesting, compelling headlines that make your audience want to click on them to find out more.

Tip #4: Make Use Of The Area Above The Fold

‘Above-the-fold’ refers to that area on your site that is visible when the page loads. It’s the area that the reader sees before they start to scroll down.

Studies have shown that people spend more time above the fold than they do below on average.

This means that you should ensure that your most important elements for attracting potential customers are always placed above the fold. These elements include the menu bar, content headlines, opt-in forms, call to action buttons, and excerpts.

However, you shouldn’t use sliders above the fold if you can avoid it. This is because they disrupt readers and prospects and they don’t perform well anyway.

People don’t want to have to spend a lot of time looking for information that they need on your blog, If you offer services, for instance, make sure that your ‘services’ page is prominent on your site and easy for your prospects to find.

The bottom line is that whatever information you place above the fold will get more views, so it’s up to you to decide what’s more important to have there according to your content marketing goals.

Tip #5: Take Guest Blogging to the Next Level

When it comes to content marketing, you basically only have two ways of building an exceptional audience for your blog.

You can do that either by publishing long-form articles on your blog and then letting the right audience know about them, or, you could write content for other relevant blogs in your niche.

Guest blogging can help you build authority links, but that shouldn’t be your main focus right now.

Some bloggers can actually add ‘no follow’ tags to your link making it invisible to Google and therefore useless for getting all those SEO benefits to your site.

To make your guest blogging more effective for your overall content marketing strategy, focus on building an audience as opposed to getting links or trying to improve rankings.

You will naturally benefit from increased brand mentions and organic rankings in the process.

You could actually have a successful content marketing strategy based solely on guest blogging. With guest posting, you have the opportunity to provide immense value to a whole new audience and inspire them to visit your site.

Use the content marketing strategy outlined below to advance your guest blogging game:

First, research relevant blogs in your niche. These could simply be blogs that attract the exact type of audience that you want.

Next, gauge the level of social influence that the site has. Remember, just because a page ranks well in Google doesn’t mean that it’s going to drive lots of search traffic to your site.

It’s important that you know how likely you are to get social shares of your post.

To do this just plug the blog’s URL into Buzzsumo to see the number of shares of their most recent posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

The third step is to search through the archives of that site for any older posts that cover your topic.

Look for ones that were well received, and if you find one – hack it! Come up with a better headline. Improve on their ideas, and write a post that goes into more detail, and leverage the content upgrade strategy.

After that, craft a few outreach emails to connect with some of the influencers in your industry asking them to promote your guest posts.

Using this advanced marketing strategy involving guest blogging will help you achieve and sustain improved search rankings, which will bring tons of qualified traffic and attract new customers to your business.

Tip #6: Get more comments via A.I.D.A.

As a blogger, you’re aware that leaving comments of a high value on other authority blogs in your industry can actually drive loads of qualified traffic to your own site and help you acquire new customers.

They can also help you to establish relationships with certain bloggers.

You can also turn that around by allowing others to leave comments on your blog posts. Use the AIDA strategy as a quick growth hack to boost your comments.

AIDA stands for:

• Attention – Capture attention
• Interest – Build Interest
• Desire – Create a strong desire
• Action – Call to action

Using this strategy will help you to get valuable comments on your blog that actually work to motivate those ideal customers to contact you, and it will also help you get improved rankings in the search results from all the added text.

So how exactly do you use the AIDA strategy on your blog?

Capture Attention

Your overall blog design and your headlines are the two most crucial places to focus on when trying to capture the attention of your audience.

Build Interest

Start off your blog posts with a strong and persuasive introduction that makes them want to keep reading.

For example, you could start your introduction with a question that gets people interested in the content.

Create Desire

This can be done through the effective use of subheadings, quotes, bullet points, etc. These elements make your posts easy to digest and makes your ideal customers fall in love with your content.

Call to Action

Simply give your readers a gentle nudge telling them what to do when they’re done reading your post.

Whether your goal is to turn readers into customers or subscribers, you need to make it clear to them what step to take next.

In Conclusion

A lot of marketers out there struggle when it comes to generating and acquiring new customers.

But if you use the tactics listed above, you will be able to boost your content marketing efforts to consistently grow your business and bring a flood of visitors to your site.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published August 9th 2018