10 STEPS TO GETTING YOUR CONTENT SEEN
How can I get my content more visible online?” is a question many content creators seek to get the best answer to. And rightfully so, because what would be the point of investing your valuable time and assets to create useful content that will not reach or benefit anyone?
While doing my research on this, I came across a powerful video, 10 steps to getting your content seen by Neil Patel. This video is a goldmine! What I loved best about it, is that it shares simple, yet actionable steps that you can implement today and see a tremendous improvement in your business.
Let’s get to it! Below are the ten steps to getting your content SEEN online:
1. Write Really Good Content.
This comes first because it is the most important of them all. To this day, it is true what google used to say back in the day that “Content is King”.
Really good content is content that people can read a year or two from now, implement it in their business and get results or make more money.
Podcasts, how to guides and lists are some of the best content you can write. Why? Because it’s ACTIONABLE.
“As long as you can produce good, high quality content, you will do well in the long run.”
2. Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that will be valuable for a long time. It’s content that is always relevant and does not get dated, just like the way evergreen trees retain their leaves throughout the year.
News articles and reports, holidays or seasonal articles, and articles that include numerical reports and statistics that may change frequently are not usually evergreen. They have a limited window of usefulness as they are likely to become outdated. For example, who is searching for Osama Bin Laden today?
But articles on, for example. how to save money on airline tickets, how to differentiate your agency from all the rest, how to generate more leads for your business or how to start an online business, 2 to 3 years from now, people are still going to search for that.
Evergreen content is really valuable. “Many people make the mistake of writing too much short term content instead of long term content.” Evergreen content may not get a lot of traffic in the beginning but in the long rum the search traffic adds up.
3. Don’t Write an Essay
Don’t put people to sleep. Many people will agree that one of their least favourite parts of college was writing essays.
Create a conversation. Write in a way that allows people to respond or share in the conversation. Actively seek to get the readers to share something back with you or to share the content.
Use simple words instead of hard vocabularies that people can’t understand. Throw in some humour.
Write by using the words ‘you’ and ‘I’ throughout the blog post. This will make the reader feel like they are having a conversation. Doing this increases the changes of your blog being read and shared on the social web and spread throughout the web.
4. Promote Your Content
“Writing content is only half the battle in content marketing. You have to promote it.”
First, with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you need to take care of the basics. For example optimizing the individual web page (On-Page SEO) and making sure your url is clean. For more information on this, check out The Beginners Guide to SEO by a company called MOZ. They break down all the basics.
Assuming the basics are done, you now need to promote the content. To do this:
a. Write down a list of 100 bloggers who write in your space. These are people who are already interested in content related to what you are offering; therefore their audience is likely to be interested as well.
b. Email them, introduce yourself and ask them to tweet out your content. Asking them to tweet is a much lower ask than asking them to blog about it. An example of a message you could send to them is “Hey XYZ, check out this post. I know you blog on XYZ. This may be relevant to your audience. If you like it, feel free to tweet it out.”
5-10% of the people will tweet it out - as long as it is targeted. If you email a food blogger and you are blogging on marketing, you will most likely not get a 5-10%, but if you e-mail other marketing bloggers, you will most likely get 5-10% tweet rate.
This way you will get traction to your content. People see it - and a portion of those people will start linking back to you.
5. Comment on Other Blogs
This is a simple strategy that works extremely well.
Go out and participate on community blogs. Read and genuinely comment on other people’s blogs in your industry. Too many people are lazy, so they don’t do it. I would recommend you make this a ritual - do it for 20 minutes every morning.
This way when you email people these people they more likely to respond. You will also most likely start getting traffic to your site and hence more readers.
When you are doing a comment, the comment section has a comment box and also asks for your name, email address and url. So you can link back to your site.
6. Mention people in your blog posts.
Who doesn’t want to be mentioned or quoted?
There’s is a big chance when you write a blog post, there are other resources that you can link to for example competitors, or other people in your industry. Link to resources that will benefit your readers.
When you do that, let those people know that you mentioned them in your blog post. This way, when you ask them to share it, you are likely to get a 20-30% response rate of people sharing it on their social media or linking to it to their website – which is huge.
7. Network with other writers
Go to wherever people are guest posting e.g. on Forbes, Huffington Posts etc. and get to know the authors in your industry.
Build a relationship with them.
How? You can do this online by reading and giving them feedback on their posts, share some of their content on your social media or website, emailing them, following them on social media etc.
When you ask them for a favor, for example to introduce you to an editor at Forbes or Huffington Posts, there is a high chance i.e. about 50% that they are likely to do so.
This is really useful because these sites can drive a lot of traffic. Many editors of these sites are stuck in their roles. And the best way to get in is not through a submission form, but to get an intro from another writer who writes there frequently.
8. Start guest posting
Once you are accepted for example on Forbes, Huffington or any other site, you can write content or a few blog posts.
Make sure it’s not promotional. It should be just a really great blog post.
They’ll give you a bio. You can link back to your site on your bio. This will start to drive traffic.
When you start to write regularly, you can throw in links to content on your site that will benefit the reader. You’ll notice that your traffic will really spike because these big sites like Forbes, Huffington posts etc. get tens of millions of visitors a month.
Even if the website is not so big, you should still go ahead and do guest posting. This is because it adds to traffic, which adds to social shares and linking back to your site which then helps with SEO.
9. Start collecting e-mails
Once you have more people visiting your site, start collecting emails.
You could do this by using WP Email capture.
When you generate new content you can blast it out to your mailing list. This will help you to generate consistency in traffic and keep people coming back to your site which will create more social shares.
The email list generally generates more social shares than any other form of traffic. This will translates to more comments, which means more text, you will be found on search engines for more long term key words which will help your overall traffic.
When collecting emails, make sure you give something for free for example a free newsletter, e –book, audio etc. This dramatically increases your open and sign up rates.
In your free offer, be specific. For example, instead of saying “sign up for our free newsletter” you will get a much better sign up rate if you say, “Get these 7 lessons to do XYZ.”
10. Create and Promote Groups.
Create groups related to whatever you are blogging on. You can do this on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter. Add people or invite people to the group. Advertise to get new group members.
When you generate content, you can easily blast it on the group because you are the owner. If for example the group has 5,000 people, you can easily generate 5000 to 10,000 visitors per blast.
I would personally recommend LinkedIn channel because the traffic is really valuable and is highly converting.
Sounds like a lot of work?
I will give you a few options:
If you have limited time and money, and you can’t hire people to help you out, just do steps one through 4; i.e. writing great content like how to lists, creating evergreen content, creating a conversation using “you’ and ‘I”, and emailing 100 people to tweet it out.
If you have money, you can go to ProBlogger jobs board. Here, you will find people to help you with content creation and you can also assign them to promote it at an affordable fee.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see quick results. It takes time. The first few months, traffic is really slow. Do it consistently, by posting for example once a week for at-least 6 months before you start valuing the results of the traffic.
Have you tried to increase the visibility of your content by applying any way mentioned above? Please share and let us know what has worked best for you.
