According to a recent study, marketers who use blogging as a part of their strategy see 67% more leads as their counterparts. That is too huge a number to ignore. It is also well known that consistent publishing of fresh content improves a website’s search ranking.
4 solid reasons why blogging is great for business
1. It helps you establish expertise in your industry
2. It helps you build relationships with your target audience
3. It provides opportunities to market your brand
4. It lets you educate your audience about your products and services
But content creation is just the beginning. You also have to build a loyal community around your blog for it to bear any benefits.
Here are five content marketing hacks to blow up your blog traffic.
Run influencer interviews
Influencers are experts in your niche. They may be entrepreneurs, popular bloggers, journalists or celebrities. By involving them in content creation, you can build relationships with them and connect with a large audience through them. Influencer marketing is all set to trend in 2017 because it works.
Related: How to Create an Expert-Fueled Post That Can Start the Viral Effect
Create a list of important questions in your industry and request experts to answer them for you. You can create an expert interview series out of the answers that you receive and feature them on your blog. Make sure you notify featured experts when you publish their answers. Most of them will help you promote your content. You can also locate the experts on social media and tag them on your social media promotions.
Curate content on social media
Avoid over-sharing your blog posts on your social media channels. Being self-promotional can be a terrible thing for audience building on social media. Instead, you could assume the role of a curator and provide your audience with a selection of the best content in your industry.
A loyal social media audience can be an invaluable asset for your blog. You can drive traffic from your social media pages to your blog pages. To attract the right audience, you can use content recommendations from a content aggregation tool like Flipboard or a content curation app like DrumUp. You can also increase visibility for your social media content by using hashtag recommendations from a hashtag analysis tool like Keyhole.
Ride search trends
Write about what people are seeking on the internet. In ever industry, there are popular keywords with search volumes that can boost your blog traffic. It is important is keep a track of the keywords and changing search trends.
There are multiple ways of finding search trends/ trending content types to use for your blog.
You could use Google Trends or AdWords to track search volumes. You can also refer to trending content on BuzzFeed, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Create useful content for your readers along the lines of topics that are trending. For instance, when Pokemon Go trended between June and August 2016, many marketers wrote about how businesses could use the trend to grow their sales and the brand.
Nurture niche communities
Instead of focusing your content on a large audience, you can make more of an impact by choosing a niche community to nurture. Twitch is a great example of this tactic. The live-streaming platform was super-focused on the gaming community and used marketing content specific to that audience to grow their massive user-base.
Create in-depth content that benefits a specific community. You will not only earn backlinks from top blogs in the community, but also a loyal audience who follow your posts. You can also reach out to communities on social media groups or internet forums where topics related to that niche are being discussed, and drive that traffic back to your blog. Remember to add value to conversations and refer back to your blog pages where it is relevant.
Optimize your headlines
59% of the links posted on social media may never have been clicked on, according to a recent study by Columbia University and the French National Institute. Many bloggers spend hours of creating brilliant posts but fail at getting them any attention. Hook people on your headline and you can convert them into blog traffic.
There are several tools that can help you craft compelling headlines – HubSpot’s Blog Traffic Generator and Portent’s Content Idea Generator being two good examples.
You can also use one of these headline formulae to create the perfect headlines for your blog posts.
Example 1: How to [Do something]: Number + Promise
How to Blow Up Blog Traffic: [6 Steps to Build a Loyal Audience]
Example 2: The [adjective] Power of [Keywords] for [Target Audience]
The Undeniable Power of Data Mining, Visualization and Infographics for Business
Avoid click bait-y titles and deliver what you promise in your headlines as much as possible, or your audience will start ignoring your blog.
This post was written by Disha Dinesh, a content writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. Her interests include social media and content marketing. When she’s not writing, she’s on the hunt for social media trends and inspiration.