Whether you’ve just launched a new startup, or you’re an owner of an established site, or are preparing to freelance when you get older, content marketing is the key to driving more traffic to your website.
Adding to that, publishing killer content is one of the easiest, most affordable, and effective ways to get people to take action once on your website.
Not to mention, a study by HubSpot shows that those that focus on content marketing and publish regular blog content experience 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.
In other words, great content can drive traffic, boost conversions, and increase sales.
Today we’re going to share with you some of the best content marketing strategies any website owner can take advantage of to get more customers and grow their business.
So, let’s get started.
1. Organize Your Content
People come to your website because they think you have something of value for them.
Whether it be an informational blog post, a service they’re in need of, or a product they just have to have, your site visitors wouldn’t be on your website if they thought you were going to waste their time.
That said, don’t think for one minute that a site visitor lands on your website and has a tough time finding what they’re looking for that they won’t leave immediately.
The key to creating an organized website is to view your site’s structure through the eyes of your customers.
If you explore your site and find yourself getting stuck while poking around, it’s time to make some improvements:
- Make sure navigation throughout your website is consistent.
- Create clearly defined categories in your navigation menus, so people have a good starting point.
- Enable all navigational elements to be clickable to eliminate frustration.
- Add a search box to your site, make sure it works, and even consider auto-fill functionality.
If you want to dive into a cost-effective lead strategy, and see how people navigate your website, use a free tool like Hotjar.
Not only can you see where people are clicking on your website, but you can also check out how they move and scroll too.
And when you see areas on your website that people seem to love (or get lost on), you can add more of what they like and fix the problems, so more people find what you’re selling and buy.
2. Optimize Your Site for Increased Traffic
If the end goal is to get more people on your website and buying what you sell, you’ll have to make sure your website can accommodate that additional traffic.
After all, it won’t matter how many people come to your website if they don’t convert.
And since 40% of people will abandon your website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds, optimizing your site for increased traffic is a must.
Here are some of the best ways to optimize your website for an increase in site traffic:
- Compress images into smaller file sizes, so they load quicker.
- Use a reliable hosting provider to reduce downtime.
- Minify CSS, JS, and HTML files.
- Enable browser caching of all static content.
- Clean up your database of unnecessary data.
And lastly, utilize a CDN to deliver site content fast to those around the world.
Using a content delivery network (CDN) is the best way to ensure your website loads quickly for people, no matter where they are in the world.
That’s because CDNs use servers that are also positioned around the world.
When a site visitor clicks on your website, the server geographically closest to the site visitor will serve the site content.
This reduces latency, increases loading speeds, and provides a top-notch user experience.
And, we all know the better the user experience, the more likely a site visitor is to finalize a purchase once on your website.
Not to mention, site speed and performance is a Google ranking factor and can help your website rank higher in search results, which will also help drive more traffic to your site.
3. Create Better Headlines
On average, 80% of people will read your content’s headlines, but only 20% of people will read the rest of your article.
That’s a problem if you’re relying on your killer content to encourage people to convert.
Luckily, there are many ways you can create better headlines for your content.
To start, try using the SEOPressor Blog Title Generator to get ideas for your headlines.
You can also use Visual Contenting Blog Title Ideas Generator for more headline ideas.
These free online tools will start by giving you some headline examples to get you started. If you don’t like what the tool generates at first, you can just ask it to generate more for you.
From there, take your top headlines and put them into the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.
This free tool will give you the following results:
- Headline score based on word balance.
- Headline type.
- Length analysis including characters and number of words.
- How readers will skim the headline in search results.
- Keywords in the headline.
- Headline sentiment.
- Google search results preview.
- Email subject line preview.
You take the information found in the headline analyzer to make your headline pop for those that find you in search results and those navigating your site looking for good content to read.
4. Make Content Shareable
So, you have amazing headlines to complement the killer content you’ve been regularly publishing on your website for site visitors to read.
But how do you get people that have never visited your website to see this content and convert?
Making your website’s content shareable is a great way to expose your brand to a broader audience, drive new traffic to your site, and acquire new customers.
And to do this, you have a few options.
If you use the popular blogging platform WordPress for your online business, making content shareable is easy.
All you have to do is use one of many social sharing plugins, such as Social Media Share Buttons.
This plugin not only lets site visitors share their favorite content with their family and friends, but it also gives them a chance to follow you on your own social media accounts.
You can also use a neat plugin called Better Click To Tweet, which lets you create content snippets throughout your content that people can tweet.
Another strategy for exposing your content to your social media followers is to use solutions such as Hootsuite or CoSchedule to post social media messages to your followers automatically.
Again, this stirs interest in your content and what you’re selling, drives traffic, and ultimately helps you get more customers.
Final Thoughts
Driving more traffic to your website and getting people to convert as customers is tough for anyone.
Whether you’re a newly established online business, or a seasoned professional looking to grow, there is always room to improve your content marketing strategies.
So, use some of the tips from the above-mentioned strategies and see what happens. If you do it right, you’ll see more people coming to your website than ever before looking to buy from you.
And all the hard work that comes with developing a solid content marketing plan will be worth it.
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Jimmy Rodela is a Freelance Writer and a Content Marketer. He is the Founder of the Guild of Bloggers.
He is a contributor on websites with millions of monthly traffic like Yahoo.com, Business.com, Monster.com, Business2Community and SocialMediaToday.com.
Follow him on: Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google +,Read more about me
