Attract New Leads Like a Magnet

Make sure your content gets seen where it’ll do the most good

You’ve got a blog. Now what? For starters, congratulate yourself! Businesses with blogs see 55% more visitors to their website. You’ll see an increase in leads. You’ll grow your business.

Content marketing is an important activity for your business. It creates more opportunities and better brand positioning. It’s obvious logic. Increased views of your blog will create even more website visitors. How do you get those extra views? Let’s count the ways.

For starters…

1. Feature your blog prominently on your website’s home page. Give it a preferred place on your interior pages, too. This shows visitors you’re current, that you have things going on, that you have something to say. It gives them reasons to come back to see what’s new.

2. Make sure to have a strong opt-in. If your blog’s content resonates with someone, they’ll sign up to get more. For the rest, give them a reason to sign up. What’s your offer?

3. Share your blog content on social media channels. Keep on sharing! We’ve found that a significant amount of traffic comes from content on our blog that’s many months old. One reason for this is because we keep sharing it.

Another way to extend the power of social media is to add social sharing buttons on your blog. Look for ways to take that content on your blog and repurpose it for other platforms. Did you create a slide show? Turn it into a video or a podcast.

Remember that many social media sites have audiences that don’t overlap. Find ways to share on each one, and make it relevant to the specific audience.

4. Get everyone who’s involved with your website to share your blog content. There’s nothing wrong with having your own people upvote, share, and comment on posts. Members of your team should also have a link to your blog in their email signature.

Make it a constant practice for everyone to send out links to the blog. Get in the habit of asking everyone to let you know what they think. If someone has something to add, update the post. Then use your social media to promote the addition. Don’t forget to give a shout out to the contributor. You’ll increase the possibility that contributors will share your blog with their networks.

5. Share blog posts with your LinkedIn groups. You are a member of these groups, aren’t you? Be careful of looking like a spammer. You can’t just post. You need to watch for responses and act on them. Be proactive. Ask for feedback.

Don’t stop there. Head on over to Google Hangouts and repeat the process. Look for other forums and evangelize on them, too.

6. Send content out to your subscriber database in a weekly, bi-monthly or monthly newsletter as an email update. Why is email so important? There might be over a billion Facebook accounts. But there are over 4 billion email accounts.

7. Make sure your blog is optimized for SEO. You’re writing for people, not search engines. But, people use search engines to find you. So you do need to understand and use keywords.

When you optimize a blog, you can and will be found. We’ve had blog posts that weren’t getting much traction. We’ve gone back and revised the keywords on blog posts that were just sitting there. The SEO tweak got them traction and now they’re some of our best performers. This is a very important piece of your overall content strategy.

After you’ve mastered these tips…

1. Use high quality backlinks. Validate what you say by getting others who write about your subject matter or industry to link to your blog posts. It increases your authority, but more importantly, search engines love backlinks. You’ll get better rankings.

2. Tag other influencers in your posts and on social media. Send the post out to your peers and ask them to share it. You’ll want to do the same for them. Use social media to thank these people for sharing.

3. Submit your posts to blog listings. Look for blog communities where you can submit content to gain exposure, backlinks, and social media shares. There are free resources to help you with this. One of them that we use and recommend is Buzzsumo.

4. Offer to do guest posts on industry blogs. This is a powerful way to build traffic for your website.

5. Submit your blog, and your website, to industry resource pages.

6. Pay for traffic by sponsoring posts on social media. You can also syndicate your best blog posts. You can start out with a budget for as little as $5 to $10 to boost a blog post on Facebook.

A blog post’s work is never done

Whew! This is a lot of work.

It is, but the effort pays off. If you get into the habit of integrating these steps into the process of each blog post, you’ll see that most are easy to accomplish and take only a little bit more time. Other steps do require planning and research. The reward for this additional effort is more views for your blog, which will create more visits to your website.

Some of these steps for increased views are complicated. For more insight, send us an email and we’ll reward you with a detailed checklist.

We practice what we preach. This blog post was originally a webinar, which then was posted to YouTube. Check it out if you have about 45 minutes to spare. We give some actual examples of how we’ve used these tips to generate more views for our own content, as well as for ContentBacon customers.