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Content marketing has always been a stumbling block for website owners. Even if it seems that you produce high-quality content, your efforts might not reward you with a long-awaited traffic boost.

Why does it happen?

It happens due to one simple reason – your content promotion strategy moves in the wrong direction.

Likely, this guide will show you 10 powerful ways to drive more traffic to your blog that will help you have the situation changed significantly.

Shall we begin?

1. Forget About Covering the Topics That People Are Not Interested In

The introduction to this post mentions that even high-quality content can bring you zero traffic.

It is not your fault. You can write interesting and engaging content. But if you cover the topics that your target audience is not interested in, your content marketing is doomed to failure.

Likely, thanks to the “evergreen” content and “newsjacking” technique you can generate some traffic to your website even if the topic is not a hundred percent related to your niche.

For instance, every 4 years there is a World Cup championship that is a huge event in the world. This topic is hot and almost every business niche tries to get their benefit from it.

Since it is a “newsjacking” type of content, it brings lots of traffic. Unfortunately, the technique is short-term and lasts while the news is topical.

“Newsjacking” and “evergreen” content could be an additional source of traffic but not a primary one.

Therefore, you must focus on finding topics that would resonate with your audience to a full extent.

How to find the right topics?

Go to Google and start typing a niche-related query. Google will suggest to you what people are searching for within your niche:

Google Niche Related Query

However, you can never know if suggested topics would drive more traffic to your blog. Fortunately, you can use different SEO tools that can provide you with this option.

For instance, if you use the report “Questions” in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool, you will get a list of potential queries that people search and base some topics ideas accordingly:

Keywords Explorer Questions

You can see that the report suggests a keyword volume that indicates the number of searches that a specific keyword gets during the month.

By following this scheme you will be able to target only traffic potential topics. Eventually, it will boost traffic to your site.

2. Keep in Mind the Importance of Search Intent

Content must go hand-in-hand with search intent. In other words, you must create content that people search for.

To give you a clear idea of what type of content your audience wants to read, you should review what other sources suggest on the same topic on Google:

Search Intent

From the screenshot, you can see that the topic “content optimization” could be covered via “guides”, “suggested strategies”, and “how-to” tutorials. These types of content resonate with a specific target audience best.

This simple but actionable trick will help you find the most applicable type of content for a certain topic.

3. Focus on Writing In-Depth Content

One of the biggest advantages of comprehensive content is that it can rank for many different keywords that belong to the same “family”.

You know that people use various queries to find the exact topic. Let’s say, one general topic “how to bake a cake” could include the following queries like “bake cake”, “baking cake”, “how to cook a cake”, etc. They are under one topic category.

If you want to create comprehensive content, you must know the topic you cover in detail. Furthermore, the idea of writing in-depth content is having an opportunity to update it in the future. Hence, the best decision for you would be to focus on “evergreen” topics and “lists” type of content that you can always refresh with some new ideas.

The strategy works like a charm. If you want a proven case of how it works, read our guide on coworking spaces in the US. We get the notification from other US-based coworking spaces that want to be included in the list. As a result, this huge chunk of content gets updated pretty often.

Here is another example of in-depth content on how to optimize your Yelp page and also includes the ranking factors, this content drives a huge amount of traffic to our site because it is covering all the details on Yelp optimization and rankings.

4. If You Mention Some Brands in Your Content – Let Them Know About It

Another benefit of long-form content is that you can feature different brands there. It allows you to get in touch with the brands’ representatives and introduce your piece of content that features their service or product.

What will you get in return?

  1. You boost brand awareness for your own company.
  2. You have a great opportunity to build business relationships.
  3. You can get your publication shared across social channels and earn a backlink.

Here is an example of a brand mention:

Brand Mention Email

You should implement this tactic in your overall content marketing strategy.

5. Let Bloggers Write for You

If you are struggling with filling your content plan for the future month, you should accept guest publications on your blog.

What’s more important, guest contributors can provide you with high-quality content that can drive more traffic to your blog. Plus, don’t forget about the social buzz that guest authors can give you after their posts go live.

Among the other additional benefits, you can get backlinks from third-party websites and build brand awareness.

6. Promote Your Content Across Communities Within the Niche

Content promotion must embrace all possible channels where you can do it. Consequently, you should stick to content promotion across communities and forums where your target audience might hang out.

Let’s review a few sources below.

Drive more traffic to your blog with:

Reddit

Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Here you can search for topic-related subreddits where your target audience discusses different subjects. You can participate in these threads and add links to your content where appropriate:

Reddit Marketing

Quora

Quora is a Q and A online platform where people ask questions and get their answers. You can also give your answers to the questions providing the links to the sources that could acknowledge your arguments:

Quora Link Building

Moreover, you can use the questions on Quora as the topic ideas for your content.

Designer News

If you are in the design industry you should defiantly give www.designernews.co try, it can send you a huge amount of traffic and is also good for showcasing your work and getting feedback from the community.

Designer Niche Traffic

7. Boost Your Content With the Help of Ads

Sometimes it takes time before the content starts to get traffic. Likely, you can speed up the process by applying online advertising.

Online advertising can drive more traffic to your blog in the blink of an eye. But it costs you money. You can run online ads on Google and Facebook boosting the posts published on your blog.

Keep in mind that when you stop using paid ads, the traffic fades away shortly. Hence, make sure your budget allows you to play with paid advertising often.

Facebook Boosted Post

8. Build Links on a Regular Basis

Link building is an integrated part of any SEO campaign you run. Backlinks work as a signal for Google that tells about content worthiness.

Nowadays there are many link building techniques you can use. We can split these techniques into two types – “Black-hat” and “white-hat” link building.

Black-hat link building includes link purchasing, getting links from not niche-related websites, and an aggressive link-exchange. If you want to stay safe with your website, you should avoid practicing this type of link building.

White-hat link building is all about legally acquiring backlinks. It includes guest posting, broken link building, updated content link building, commenting, and outreach.

Let’s review each of the white-hat techniques one by one.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is the best way to build links and the most secure one. The main idea of this technique is that you search for other websites related to your niche on the web and suggest your content. In return, you get a backlink to your website.

To find guest post opportunities, you can use Google and a few search operators:

  • [topic] + ‘write for us’
  • [topic] + ‘guest post’
  • [topic] + ‘become a contributor’
Guest Posting

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is a technique when you find websites with broken links, reach out to websites’ owners and suggest a link with the same content to replace it.

You should find outdated content and suggest replacing those backlinks with your updated content.

Relevant Blog Commenting

Leaving your comments on niche-related blogs is a great way to earn backlinks. It allows you to promote your content, use different anchors and build brand awareness. However, make sure you leave your comments on trustworthy resources but not spammy ones.

Email Outreach

Email outreach is the second step you should take to promote your content after it goes live. It goes along with an email newsletter that embraces an existing audience you have, while outreach targets newly-discovered people.

To make your outreach efforts successful, you should work on creating personalized email templates, find the correct email addresses of the recipients, and don’t forget to send follow-ups.

To sum up, if you are armed with these link-building techniques, you can be sure that you will drive more traffic to your blog easily.

9. Build Internal Links

Internal linking is a wonderful way to breathe a new life into content that fades away on your blog.

For example, you see that a blog post “X” gets lots of traffic during a few months, while a blog post “Z” is under a “flatline of nope” curse. You can draw people’s attention to this post by adding a link to it within the body of the “X” post.

Just for the record, only the first 3 top results in Google get around 70% of clicks. Positions 4-5 get a bit less traffic but the rest 6-10 positions for some specific queries won’t get as much traffic as they are supposed to.

Your purpose is to boost these pages that are placed after position 3. And to find these pages you need to use Google Search Console.

Go to a “Performance” section and review a “Search results” report. Make sure you apply the “Position” filter and specify the “Greater than” ‘6’ value. Review the results and make a note of those posts that you should boost:

Old Content Traffic Boost

By applying a “Position” filter with this distinction, you will get the list of the pages that have an average ranking position of higher than 6.

When the list with the posts that require boosting is ready, you need to prepare the same list but with the posts that get tons of traffic.

To find these posts you can use the “Top pages” report on ahrefs or a similar SEO tool of your choice that will let you filtering positions “1-3”:

Top Pages Report

Now you have a  list of the pages that seat the top 3 positions in SERP.

Use these content suggestions for internal linking.

For instance, our blog post on the “15 Google Search Operators” topic was not ranking that well. To boost it, we are adding a link to it in this post with relevant anchor text.

By following this strategy you will increase traffic to the outdated posts and lift up your ranking positions.

10. Content Repurposing

Speaking of outdated posts, let’s repurpose our old content to attract more traffic.

If your content generates lots of traffic, you should use this advantage for your benefit.

In this case, content repurposing would be the best decision.

Here are a few arguments on why you should do it:

  • It helps reach a new audience. Tastes differ and some people prefer infographics over blog posts or video content over written materials. Therefore, you should adjust your content marketing efforts to this rule.
  • It helps remind of old content that people don’t review anymore. Let’s say, you published a piece of content two years ago. This post covers the topic that people are always interested in. You update this post with some new information, repurpose it into an infographic or a video. Finally, your target audience experiences exploring fresh interesting content.

What content needs to be repurposed?

  • Evergreen content is always in trend. Thus, update it with the new data, repurpose it into video, infographics, and cover these topics on podcasts.
  • Long-from-type content. Comprehensive guides can be split into individual topics and covered in separate posts. Just like we do with our On-site SEO checklist and Off-site SEO checklist.
  • Outdated content. Revise your blog and find outdated posts that you can combine in one guide that would cover a certain topic in detail. For instance, if you have two posts that cover “How to create long-form content” and “Content marketing tips”, you can unite them in a single post like “A comprehensive guide on content marketing”.

Content repurposing has already helped lots of bloggers to drive more traffic to their blogs. And you must use this technique by yourself.

Conclusion

In this post, you have reviewed only those actionable strategies that don’t require any money invested (almost). It goes without saying that if you have enough budget, you can pay for traffic and back on it.

Nevertheless, your budget has a limit and when it reaches the end, your traffic will decrease.

That’s why you must focus on using traditional methods of driving traffic to your website. And these ten strategies will help you out.

If you think that this guide misses some other techniques, feel free to share your suggestions in the comments.

Don’t forget to share it across your social channels.

Written by:

Sergey Aliokhin, a Marketing Manager at andcards.

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