Traffic Generation Techniques for 2016 https://t.co/ecL96zIUWJ
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) August 1, 2016
from Twitter https://twitter.com/goviralnow
Traffic Generation Techniques for 2016 https://t.co/ecL96zIUWJ
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) August 1, 2016
(to get a few extra, secret traffic tips that are either very new or have new technology making them easier and faster to use, download my free ebook: Explode Your Traffic in 2016 – sign up for the newsletter or on my welcome mat to receive this eBook for nada).
1. Buzzstream: What’s the buzz about BuzzStream? BuzzStream is a platform that allows you to (as they say on their homepage) “Build Relationships. Build Buzz.”
2. StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon is very useful for getting content ideas and spreading your own content. However, be aware that traffic that is generated through StumbleUpon will usually be not very targeted. You may experience spikes in traffic if someone with a large following “stumbles” your post. However, for a local business in Australia where their target customer base is also local, this sort of traffic rarely converts.
Traffic is an important signal (one of 200+) that Google looks for, so getting regular traffic is very useful for SEO. Sometimes it is worth thinking outside the box for ways to convert this kind of traffic. With the right lead magnet, you could turn this traffic into email subscribers and look at monetizing your email list through your Aweber or MailChimp account.
Emailing your list when you publish a new blog post is a great way to get some traction and social shares to the article. Once you get a few social shares and have your warm subscribers checking out your post, you will likely find this will help your rankings. Once visitors know you and have received a few of your emails and read your posts, they will usually stay on the page for longer and that will reduce your bounce rate.
2. Scoop.it: set up a Scoop.it account and share and suggest other people’s content. Set up a connection by doing this regularly (only needs 10 – 30 min a day) you can start to recommend your own content to relevant and influential people to share on their own topic page. There is a bookmarklet that allows you to save things to your Scoop.it topic. Just don’t share a whole post, the idea is to encourage users to go to the article website.
When you share content on Scoop.it and use the suggestion engine, you need to be strategic and share content that is relevant and is well liked. Make sure you are properly curating the story by adding something. Take a short phrase or statement and comment on it. This gives you some authority and shows that you have knowledge on the subject. When you are ready to share a similar or related topic, the followers who read your comment or followed your link to a high quality article, are more likely to trust that your own content is also worth a read. This is one way to generate some authority and a brand name, even when you haven’t been around for long.
Just make sure the content you are sharing is useful and worth the share.
3. Viral Content Buzz:
Viral Content Buzz is a great way to not only generate traffic but to get more social shares and spread your message. It is free to sign up and you can earn credits by sharing other people’s content on your own social media networks. You must have good standing and your social accounts have to be well used and followed but even one account will allow you to earn enough credits to share your blog posts. You can only share good quality blog post content so keep this strategy for your best.
It is not only a great place to find and share great content for your social media platforms, but you know that your own content is being shared on quality social accounts. I’ve also had a lot of new and relevant followers added to my own social accounts because I only share content that would interest my target audience so it gets shared and retweeted among my own followers. This gets me a steady stream of targeted followers. It has been by far the best and easiest strategy for me to get high quality, targeted Twitter followers.
*** For a hot tip on how to use VCB to really explode your traffic, make sure you’re signed up to my newsletter. This and other great tips will be shared with my subscribers. We’ll send you the extra tips via email. ***
4. Quora: while Quora has been around a long time and the whole concept of using Q&A websites is also pretty old school, it still works. There is no better way to show people your knowledge and expertize than by answering questions and providing useful information. Don’t look at Quora as just a place to get backlinks, in fact, don’t spam them and add links unless they can genuinely help the person asking the question.
If your piece of content is going to be really helpful to the person asking the question, it’s adding value to provide a link. If you can help someone with a question but don’t have a piece of content to share, assist anyway because this will boost your authority and people will see you as not only being on Quora to spam people with your links.
5. Twitter –
Have you ever wondered why people always talk about Twitter?
I did too for a long time. But with some of the strategies below and using tools like Viral Content Buzz and Social Buzz Club, I have found ways to get targeted, high authority followers and traffic to my blog. Because the traffic is in my niche, it has a very low bounce rate and people tend to stay on the site for quite a while and read other posts while surfing around.
Twitter is a great source of traffic. There are several ways you can generate traffic from Twitter. Free methods include tweeting from your account and alerting relevant people by using an @username. Make sure you use an image, gif or video to really get people’s attention.
Hashtags are also important but make sure you keep the number not much above 2 or your tweets will just look spammy. Use hashtags that are being searched or trending to get the most benefit from Twitter.
Leave enough room in your tweet so people can easily add an @username retweet within your blog posts.
Set up important points or tips and offer these in exchange for social shares. If your blog is built on WordPress there are plugins that you can use to create a social media share or tweet gate.
Here are 2 free plugins that you can try on your blog:
Tweet This
Click to Tweet
To get the most out of Twitter you need to not only promote but learn, listen and participate. Be social and make sure you retweet, comment and connect with other Twitter users and followers.
Try Staged to get the most out of your Twitter marketing. Staged promises to help you build targeted followers and generate more leads. They offer a free account with no credit card required for sign up. I haven’t tried it yet but I’ve heard good things about it.
Make sure you use images on Twitter so your tweets stand out above the crowd. Images convert far better and with tools like Canva and Pablo around, there is no reason not to create awesome memes and images to promote your content, product or service.
Twitter also allows you to share videos and gifs so mix up your content and to keep your tweets interesting. Make sure you post relevant content for your audience and you’ll see your following grow quickly and with high quality and targeted influencers.
To connect with influencers, start sharing and liking their tweets. Make sure you get their attention at times by using the @symbol and comment on their posts for an added connection. They are more likely to remember you if you decide to contact them in future about something (you are promoting) that might be of interest to them. Make sure you give a good amount of value and don’t do anything with the expectation that you will get the favor returned. Just be happy to be social to have a new connection.
Try to keep your Twitter follower count about the same as your follow count. If you are following thousands of people but no one is following you, you are seen more as a spammer. There are free unfollow tools around that will allow you to find out who you are following that hasn’t followed you back. Unfortunately, most of the free tools have a limit on the number of unfollows you can get so you may have to sign up to a few to fully clean up your Twitter account.
Connect your Twitter account to your WordPress blog through an IFTTT recipe so that every time a new blog post goes out, your Twitter feed is automatically updated. Recipe URL: http://ift.tt/1kA58Je
You can also share your Tweets to your Tumblr, WordPress, Facebook and other accounts automatically through IFTTT. Just go and play around with their recipes and find some that work for you. Very likely you already have a lot of accounts and can quickly and easily connect them to your WordPress blog.
6. Facebook Groups and Pages: Spend 15 – 30 minutes every day sharing, liking and commenting on relevant (with some influential) people in your industry or that might be interested in your product or service. Don’t just try to sell them anything at first. Make a connection and be helpful. Do this by sharing their posts, liking and commenting to give their own content some authority and visibility. This will get their attention and you can even send them a private message to make a more personal connection.
– Try the PM idea after you have shared, liked and commented on their content and liked their page. Make sure you have made quite a few connections and then share something like a free ebook or ask if there is anything you can help them with. Try to be helpf8ul first and then they will probably be happy to promote your content and blog posts. This can be a great way to find guest blog post connections too. If you like their blog and think you can not only gain a relevant (and preferably local if you are a B2B or B2C business) links back to your site, you also need to be able to contribute something to it.
– Facebook Ads: While not a free option, you can make the most of Facebook traffic by keeping it very niche targeted and make sure you know what you want the traffic to do. Do you want more likes and Facebook followers? Do you want people to sign up for your email list? (In this case make sure you have a great lead magnet to give away in exchange for their email address. Set up and email autoresponder such as MailChimp or Aweber to keep these subscribers in the loop. Make sure you don’t send too many emails (try once a week or so) and make sure that at least 4 out of 5 contacts are providing quality information and recommendations and the other 1 can be a promotional email).
7. Pinterest Pins: Creating shareable graphics is well worth your while and exposing those graphics to a targeted audience on Pinterest can mean a lot of shares, clicks and links to your website. While you may receive a fair bit of traffic that isn’t targeted to your business, just the backlinks themselves will help your website. Infographics, maps and other clever graphics such as memes can definitely get your message out to the wider world.
– Use Canva.com for your social media images. They have a free version and there are lots of social media template/sizes for you to quickly and easily create shareable graphics for your social media posts.
– The Buffer app called Pablo is also a fantastic resource for creating shareable social media images and memes.
– Both Canva and Pablo allow you to add text with a wide variety of fonts over the top of your images. Just make sure you don’t use copyright images.
8. Spread your content to a wider audience of journalists and media through the site Journalisted. Find journalists who are interested in your topics or products and start a database of potential sources to send your content out to. You can also use HARO (Help a Reporter) and receive their email alerts. These outline topics that sources are needed for articles a journalist is looking to write. This can get you a fair bit of publicity and backlinks. However, it’s not easy to get picked and you may find that you don’t get a lot of replies. If you write something for HARO that doesn’t get picked up, just add it to your own blog as fresh content. No content should ever go to waste!
9. Guest Blogging: guest blogging is a great way to get your message across. While it might be hard to get published on sites like Forbes and Hubspot, you can very likely find blogs within your niche or local area that need fresh content. If you can write relevant, high quality and unique content for these blogs, they will often allow you to gain 1 -3 backlinks in return for your post.
Here is a list of search terms for finding guest posting opportunities. This comes directly from Brian Dean’s Backlinko post that really is the Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging: (I highly recommend you sign up to Brian Dean’s email list. I don’t recommend this lightly knowing how much “stuff” everyone gets in their email box every day, but Dean’s content is always amazing and well tested. He has created some awesome link building and SEO methods that are as white hat as you can get and definitely bring in a lot more traffic and visibility for your website.)
From the Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging:
Looking for something besides the typical “keyword” + “write for us”?
I’ve got you covered.
Here are 40-ish search strings you can use to find guest blogging opportunities with ease:
Your Keyword “guest post”Your Keyword “write for us”Your Keyword “guest article”
Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”
Your Keyword “contributing writer”
Your Keyword “want to write for”
Your Keyword “submit blog post”
Your Keyword “contribute to our site”
Your Keyword “guest column”
Your Keyword “submit content”
Your Keyword “submit your content”
Your Keyword “submit post”
Your Keyword “This post was written by”
Your Keyword “guest post courtesy of ”
Your Keyword “guest posting guidelines”
Your Keyword “suggest a post”
Your Keyword “submit an article”
Your Keyword “contributor guidelines”
Your Keyword “contributing writer”
Your Keyword “submit news”Your Keyword “become a guest blogger”Your Keyword “guest blogger”
Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
Your Keyword “looking for guest posts”
Your Keyword “guest posts wanted”
Your Keyword “guest poster wanted”
Your Keyword “accepting guest posts”
Your Keyword “writers wanted”
Your Keyword “articles wanted”
Your Keyword “become an author”
Your Keyword “become guest writer”
Your Keyword “become a contributor”
Your Keyword “submit guest post”
Your Keyword “submit an article”
Your Keyword “submit article”
Your Keyword “guest author”
Your Keyword “send a tip”
Your Keyword inurl: “guest blogger”
Your Keyword inurl: “guest post”
allintitle: Your Keyword + guest post
Here are some more easy ways to find guest blogging opportunities in your area:
– Twitter: do a search on Twitter for “keyword” + guest blog; “keyword” + write for me/us;
– Google search: find blogs in your niche and contact the blog owner. Ask them if they take guest posts and provide a synopsis of your topic and post. Make sure to check if they have a guest blog/post guidelines page. Some want you to send in an article and don’t want to waste time on discussing topics. If your post resonates with them and they think it will work for their blog, then this can be a great way to get your content out, your brand more visibility and some high quality (as long as their blog has good metrics) back links to your site.
• Google search: “keyword” + guest blog opportunities; “keyword” + write for us/me; “keyword” + guest post keyword “submit a guest post”; keyword “guest post”; keyword “guest post by”; keyword “accepting guest posts”; keyword “guest post guidelines”
– My Blog Guest: while My Blog Guest has had some issues in the past with some less than quality offerings and sites, they have apparently cleaned up their ability to check these metrics and there are many bloggers who rely on My Blog Guest to find and post great guest posting opportunities.
– Check out the Ultimate List of Blogs that Accept Blog Posts
– For tips on how to do guest blogging better, check out this Kissmetrics post: http://ift.tt/1DsBdZb
Buzzblogger: for even more places to syndicate your content, check out BuzzBlogger’s 500+ Places to Syndicate Your Content.
Buzzblogger is another excellent place to go for traffic and blogging tips.
10. Forum Posting: Join relevant forums and, don’t spam, but if it’s relevant and useful, share your blog post. Try to join a few high authority, relevant industry forums so that when you post fresh content you can easily share your URL as a trusted forum member.
For a great post on finding do follow forums to post to check out the Shout Me Loud blog post by Harsh Agrawal that gives an excellent list of forums and methods to use these to your best advantage.
No follow links are also good because they give your website a more natural link distribution as all sites have both no and do follow backlinks. On top of this, if it is relevant and local, it will still carry some weight in Google’s eyes even if it doesn’t transfer any link juice directly. It is still a vote for your site and more importantly, one on a relevant and quality site.
Do a Google search for your keyword + forum or Use a site like Drop My Link to find more forum opportunities.
11. QuickSprout: this blog always has incredibly useful insights about blogging and content creation. It is well worth checking out from time to time to get some inspiration – it is particularly useful to see how they merge multimedia graphics, infographics and video to create a very visible and identifiable brand. This blog started out small and has grown into an industry giant in the last few years.
Check out this #SocialMedia guide for 50 expert tips and examples! https://t.co/7MI1JelTIk RT @BuildYourBrandA
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) August 1, 2016
Want to know what to post online that will engage your followers? https://t.co/xu0123Mcag RT @BuildYourBrandA
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) August 1, 2016
Wondering which images bring in the most engagement on Instagram?https://t.co/Na2QEbAZ2i
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) July 31, 2016
What are the best practices for email marketing? Check out this infographic: https://t.co/h0olrJkSYd RT @BuildYourBrandA
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) July 31, 2016
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) July 31, 2016
Witty Email Personalization Examples For Brands To Boost Sales @emailmonks https://t.co/x59GMKI2nm RT @blogengage
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) July 31, 2016
BOOST YOUR BLOG TRAFFIC https://t.co/LrGCeJfniC
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) July 31, 2016
‘SUP?
You have a great blog full of informative, entertaining content – and you’re confident that once people start reading it they’ll be keen to sign up for your book, service or product, yes? If the stuff doesn’t get your audience enthusiastically swiping along, there may be a problem with the message itself that a content marketing guru can fix.
Except that many a great blog has disappeared without trace because it never got picked up and widely read. It’s absolutely crucial to get your message out there: getting your blog found and promoted. As Jon Morrow explains vividly, most of the great traffic techniques being promoted – like ‘on-page SEO’, directories, videos for YouTube, are quite useless when you don’t have an audience in the first place [3].
There is no one magic answer to increasing your blog traffic, and numerous helpful sites will suggest 50 top ways, or the 100 best traffic promotion methods. That’s potentially a lot of your precious time and effort going into trial and error, until you find out what’s working for your blog. So in this quick course we’ve boiled it down to 7 – just SEVEN – crucial areas where you can ramp up your website following.
The overarching thing to remember when trying out ways to maximise your reach: QUANTITY, as in, maximising views of your site, is less important than QUALITY: as in, maximising conversions of those views into clients.
1. THE LOOK
Content and presentation are both crucial. A good looking site is at least half the battle – with so much competition out there, people just don’t have time to labour through bad editing, jumbled graphics, tiny fonts and repetition. Pay attention to detail, and you will reap the reward! This is not to say you need to pay for an exclusive design – the WordPress templates are mostly fine.
Presentation is key to getting your site noticed, but the content has to stand out too. If you’re not confident with the written content you can outsource it, but to be honest, if you can’t write, you might want to question your career as a blogger?
Long-form blogs of over 750 words are more likely to get shared, have a lower bounce rate & more inbound links: they will also really help build your presence as an authority figure (see below). A free eBook from your site can be a good sweetener to attract people to another product. As with your blog, you’ll need to pay attention to detail, making sure the presentation is attractive and immaculate, with lots of graphics.
2. THE HOOK
Images (and audio and video) go along with presentation: they add interest and immediacy to your site [8]. You can leverage the popularity of Pinterest, where people check out each other’s favourite images and themes. Pin up a good image from your blog with the title of the blog visible, plus keywords.
Dubbler is a phone app where you can record up to 60 seconds of an audio introduction (voice filters available). Just add a cover image with a link to your blog and share with the Dubbler community, Facebook and Twitter.
You can use the iPhone app Vine to create a 6 second video teaser and tweet with the blog link – tweets with Vine videos have been shown to be shared 4 times as often as those without.
SlideShare is another option, through making a cross-promotional overview in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Slideshare has 51.6 million monthly visitors.
And then of course, Instagram has 100 million monthly users, which you can leverage by sharing the same post as you used on Pinterest. Instagram is very hashtag friendly; your image can then be on shared more widely on social media.
3. LINKING UP
Just about every successful blog is connected to most of the uber successful social media sites: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, maybe Instagram, Foursquare and a few others. You’ll need to create a presence on the usual suspects because that’s taken as an indicator of your cyber presence – unless your agenda specifically objects to mainstream sites and/or you want to stick with a niche audience and market. In fact Reynolds [8] argues that you will get a competitive advantage from sharing content on smaller networks that often have active, focussed audiences and less competition for attention. Good examples are Quora.com (community-based, Q/A format), Tumblr (‘hip’ microbloggers) and Empire Avenue (uses gamification to broadcast across all networks).
There are protocols around how much you put on these sites – QuickSprout suggests that you only promote a new blog once on Google+ and on Facebook, compared with several times on Twitter, where you should also make 80% of your tweets non-promotional. You may need to bear in mind circles of followers in different time-zones as you plan your awareness campaign. During the next week you can share messages across sites, respond to feedback and add comments about how well the blog is being received… just don’t overdo it!
Morrow [3] maintains that a social media following on the big social media sites is a waste of time for building traffic until you cross 1,000 blog subscribers, however in terms of your image and expectations it’s still worth keeping the links.
4. GET THE WORD OUT – EMAIL LISTS
As a content marketer you should have an email list that you are continually building. If not, there’s no time like the present to start one! When you have a new blog, put the word out through your lists, preferably in a personalised form rather than a computer-generated message that will tend not to engage people. You can put the article in a newsletter, or give links to it. Alternatively if you are launching a long form article or report, you can send a promotional email with a landing page leading to the piece, and a share button to try and expand on your list of followers.
Promotion isn’t all about increasing your numbers. It’s about finding and connecting with a community. And true promotion is reciprocal. So if you mention others, they may start mentioning you too.
[2]. Therefore it helps to have something of a strategy to develop a community. Technorati.com is a great resource for finding bloggers in your area: use this, Google, Alltop, Buzzsumo and your own channels to build up a list of a hundred or so influential bloggers, and then select a dozen or so to actively target. List these bloggers with their brand/website and look up their social media profile; find their email address preferably, or if not, their Google+ or Twitter handle. FollowerWonk.com is useful for finding Tweeters in your space. The dozen that you pick to target should be influential and accessible, sharing links to good content and responding to mentions.
QuickSprout recommends that you then record all your interactions, or use a VA (virtual assistant) hired from a resource like ODesk/Upword or Freelancer to do it for you if you don’t have time. Depending on the nature of your business, you may find all this creepy, irritating, or really, really useful: the idea of recording the interactions is to make sure you don’t send too many and come off as a stalker/spammer. The idea is that through developing name recognition and credibility with these influential bloggers, they will start promoting your content.
5. GET YOURSELF OUT THERE
As a beginner without an existing audience you will need to get out of the box to bring traffic to your site, however awesome the content is. Some good ways to do this are:
– Guest blogging on a popular site [3];
– Interviewing influential people and getting them to share the podcast;
– Advertising: obviously the downside is that it costs money, but with an effective advertising strategy, ‘you can save yourself months of effort in attracting your first 1000 subscribers’[3].
And finally, following from the relationships you have built from your lists of top bloggers and content creators in your area, take it a step further with ‘Outreach’ [3]. Brian Dean details how to use your list of influencers to promote your content through ‘blogger outreach’: ‘instead of sharing your content on social media [and hoping the influencer notices it], you put your content directly in front of the movers and shakers in your niche’ [3].
Dean explains in detail how to go about this and how it can pay off with backlinks, shared content and guest blogs, as well as eventually building offline relationships.
6. BECOME AN AUTHORITY
You can get other mileage out of your list of bloggers and content creators in your area, such as by running an annual Top Ten or Top 100 (and letting them know about it). You can also create an annual benchmark report on your area, via a survey, which if it’s helpful, well thought out and produced, could make you an instant opinion leader in the field.
You can even go a step further and develop a certification program for your space! This will take a lot of time and effort to be credible, but if it is you will gain a lot of clout as an ‘authority’ in the area. Back this up with a print or digital textbook to seal your status as an expert. All of this is not directly related to your blog traffic, but the authority you gain with Google, peers and followers translates into promotion. Both direct promotion through emails and social media, and indirect promotion from relationship building and credibility will build your business, especially if you keep them up regularly.
7. WHERE POSSIBLE – AUTOMATE
Use services like IFTTT (If This Then That) to automate link building and cross promotion throughout your branded properties. Use already established IFTTT recipes to send your RSS feed with newly published blog posts (with proper attribution back to the original article) to get your content out as widely as possible.
Viral Content Buzz (VCB) will help your content get shared by real people with solid social media accounts. You can gain free credits through sharing on your own social media platforms (they must have some authority or they won’t accept your network). If you don’t have a social media network with enough authority or you don’t have time to share the content on VCB, you can buy credits to share your posts. Make sure your posts are worth sharing.
I never publish a post without adding it to VCB. I have always found I get a good number of social signals, traffic and backlinks as a result of shares on Viral Content Buzz. I’ve also had new social media followers as a result of shares both of my own posts and of other people’s great content on my own networks.
Social Buzz Club (SBC): Similar to Viral Content Buzz but this one has a minimum $9.97 monthly fee. Membership benefits include access to a network of social media pros who will tweet and share your content across their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. This helps traffic to your blog and will increase your Klout score too.
As with VCB, you can schedule your posts to go out from there or send them immediately. However, with SBC you can request social bookmarking on Digg and StumbleUpon. There is also a forum that allows you to connect with major networkers who are involved with SBC.
This article is a brief run through of what is needed to write some great content and get it out. For more thorough and detailed on the best tools, tips and tricks for producing awesome content, download our eBook: Building Killer Content from Start to Finish.
2. http://ift.tt/11Qv0Df N. Patel, K Aragon
3. http://ift.tt/1t3x1rI J Morrow 2014
8. http://ift.tt/108gB7T K. Reynolds 2013
11 Unique Ways To Get More #Snapchat Followers https://t.co/SO9MzEkfcR RT @IkePazz
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) July 31, 2016
Latest Google Search Quality Rater's Guide: Mobile Rewrite https://t.co/vy6TadrZHb
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How To Stay Focused On Your Business Goals https://t.co/Q8KJ3q7cji RT @BiznessCreator
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How to Conduct Actionable Social Media Analysis http://pic.twitter.com/1Za6dwOePK https://t.co/bCWbEhFagy RT @mavsocial
— Tess Robinson (@goviralnow) July 31, 2016