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Even if you have very little traffic, you can still leverage content marketing to make a positive impact. Here’s how.
Content is a staple of effective digital marketing, but how can you make it work for your business if you have very little traffic?
It might seem too daunting to even try when there are so many other, bigger brands out there producing content that resonates with its target audience brilliantly. It might even seem like successful content marketing just isn’t on the cards for you.
But that’s simply not the case.
Even if you have very little traffic, you can still leverage content marketing to make a positive impact. Here’s how.
Take Advantage of Infographics to Boost Engagement
Infographics are hugely popular, and with good reason. They’re a great way to convey data in a more digestible way, as 90 percent of information sent to human brains is visual, as is 93 percent of all human communication.
If you want to provide the reader with a list of tips, for example, an infographic offers more value, as people given directions through a combination of words and images do more than 320% better than those relying on text alone.
On top of all this, infographics can increase web traffic by as much as 12%.
But what if you feel you have nothing to say in building your own infographics? What if you have no research to include, no clear idea how to offer practical tips?
There’s good news. You can take inspiration from other blog posts or articles and use them as a springboard for your own infographics.
One way to get started is to think carefully about the topic you want to cover in an infographic. For example, let’s say you want to share the top benefits of content marketing. It’s nice and simple.
Just start by searching for posts on that very topic using a tool like UberSuggest. Check out the highest-ranked results, those which have strong social shares and backlinks (which indicate that the content offers real value and has earned a good readership).
Ideally, the blog post or article will translate well to an infographic format, with potential to include thematic visuals and condense the key points. The site responsible doesn’t have to be targeting the same audience or keywords as yours.
Once you’ve found the right post, it’s time to create the infographic. If you don’t have an in-house design team, you can either hire a designer for a one-off gig or leverage a tool like Canva or Venngage to try it yourself.
The next point is crucial: credit the original blog post or article and its writer, with a link for readers who want to check it out. But by presenting the main points in a more accessible way, your infographic is likely to capture (and hold) their interest.
Add the infographic to your site and share it across all of your social media channels. Consider reaching out to high-authority sites for guest-posting opportunities to reach a wider audience and earn valuable backlinks.
In short: the aim of this tip is to fuel your own content with a piece which has already proven popular, and use it to increase traffic.
Create Round-up Posts Collating the Best Resources
Another simple technique for leveraging content marketing when you have little traffic is to build round-up posts compiling links to the best pieces of content out there.
Let’s rewind a little bit.
Go back to Google. Search for content on a particular topic, such as web design or SMM, and scour the most popular results. Make a list of all of the posts, articles, infographics, and videos that provide the highest value to the target audience.
Your next step is to include the full list of resources in a round-up post, with links to the original pieces. But that’s not all. Write a paragraph or two about each resource, explaining what it covers and why readers should give it a try.
This takes time and work, but it’ll pay off when you have a long-form post targeting anyone searching for information on the relevant topic(s). It’s a valuable solution that brings all of the most popular resources online together for their convenience. They’ll likely keep your post open while they explore the pages you link to, which may encourage them to take a closer look at your site before leaving.
Share your round-up lists on social media, using hashtags and tagging followers or publications you believe may find them interesting. And send an email to the sites which published all of the posts you linked to originally, and invite them to share your content.
Having their content celebrated in a post at another site is a strong signal that they’re producing valuable stuff, so there’s no reason for them to not share your work. If they do link to your site, that brings extra traffic.
Leverage Q&A Sites to Answer Key Questions
Q&A sites, such as Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and LinkedIn Answers, are fantastic places for users to gain insights from others. And you can use them to create quality content that actually provides the information people are looking for.
First, head to Quora and search for questions related to your target topic, such as developer tools. You’ll see results like “what are the most useful developer tools?” (see below) and “which browser has the best developer tools?”.
This shows which areas of your target area generate the most interest, and which sort of answers gain the most votes.
Next, go to AnswerThePublic and enter “developer tools” to find an exhaustive breakdown of the most popular questions people ask. These are categorised in a streamlined, user-friendly way that makes it easy to identify the right questions to address in your content.
For example, common “how”-themed questions include “how open developer tools in Chrome” and “how to open developer tools in Safari”, to name just a couple.
If you wanted to create content based around developer tools, you’d now have a long list of questions to focus on and incorporate into your post(s). Include them as your headers, phrased exactly like — or as close as possible to — users’ search terms.
This process works for any type of content you want to create, on any topic. It maximises the relevance and value of your posts, and helps you tailor them to reach the right audience. Over time, if you can keep producing content with this level of relevance, your traffic will improve significantly.
Just make sure you’re building your content to address questions in an organic way. Don’t shoehorn them into every paragraph and bombard readers — everyone will know what you’re trying to pull, including search engines. And this could lead to penalisation.
These three strategies have the power to take your content marketing to the next level and drive more traffic to your site. It might seem like a challenge when you’re starting with such low traffic and perhaps little to no experience in content marketing, but you’ll see real results if you commit to the process.
Working with professional content marketers is a simple and effective way to build your online visibility through high-quality, custom content targeted to the right people. Want to find out how our experts can attract and engage your audience? Get in touch to learn more now.
