Let’s face it. Competition for online traffic can be fierce. With over 1 billion websites live today, it can be increasingly difficult to secure your spot at the table. How do you rise above them? How do you attract traffic when you’re only a fraction of the size, have a fraction of the budget, and lack the accolades that your competitors may have?
Believe me, your competitors are not going to give up without a fight either. Who wants to give up a piece of the pie when they could have it all to themselves?
Luckily for you, most internet marketers are doing the bare minimum. Once they hit “publish” they set it, forget it, and begin working on their next blog post. Unless you have a massive team of writers willing to work for pennies, this probably isn’t the most efficient business model.
It’s very likely that your competitors are NOT using their time wisely.
What’s the point of spending countless hours creating content if your posts are just going to get buried somewhere in your archives, never to be seen by anyone?
Cranking out outstanding content is an important aspect of engaging your audience, but it’s only the first step in a chain of events that need to take place in order to gain the recognition and admiration of your target market, especially among the countless other sites that have already established a foothold within your niche.
That’s why I’ve created this checklist of additional steps that will allow you to maximize the potential of every piece of content that you produce and inevitably, crush your competition.
1. Create content that people want to share. You don’t even need to come up with the ideas yourself, just simply aggregate the information that is already out there and present it to your audience as one massive resource.
2. Use plugins that allow for easy social sharing. In previous posts I’ve promoted the plugin call Sharebar that provides social buttons. Since then, I’ve stumbled across Digg Digg, which in my opinion has a much cleaner look to it.
3. Quote key influencers within your niche. Then reach out to them via email or social media and tell them about it. You never know. The influencer may just alert his audience about your post, driving massive traffic directly to your site.
4. Use Social Network Auto poster (SNAP). This plugin will save you a lot of time and energy by auto posting new content to your social media accounts as soon as it is published.
5. Email your subscribers. People sign up to your list because they enjoy reading what you have to say and will likely want to receive blog post updates.
6. Article Syndication. Yes, it is still ok to syndicate content to other platforms as long as it appears on your blog first. Make sure that Google has already indexed your content prior to publishing it somewhere else so that you receive credit for having the original. Here’s a MASSIVE list of possible sites to syndicate to Buzz Blogger.
7. Social Bookmarking. Sites like StumbleUpon, Flipboard, Tumblr, Alltop, Blog Engage, Scoop.It, and Reddit all provide quality sources of traffic. This will allow you to be seen where your target consumer hangs out.
8. Post on well know Facebook pages and groups. This does not mean spam. It means increasing exposure by providing helpful information to those that need it.
9. Join niche groups on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is slightly more professional than Facebook and may allow you to better connect with many of the influencers within your niche.
10. Share with your circles on Google Plus. A short time ago, the face of Google’s Webspam Team, mentioned that social signals do NOT play a role in influencing search rankings. However, many speculate that this will soon change in regards to Google + because it is the only social media outlet that Google has full control of. Plus, it’s an outstanding place to build an audience!
11. Pin your content to Pinterest. Pinterest receives 2.5 billion page views monthly. You’d be crazy to not tap into this amazing resource.
12. Post on niche forums. Again, it’s important not to spam as it provides little value and will likely piss off the regulars. Instead, provide insightful posts on your topic to build your reputation as an authority within your niche. If you can find a forum that allows for a link to your site within the signature, then that’s great. However, it may be best to wait until you’ve secured the trust of the other forum-goers. This is a long term strategy and may take some time, but it can easily turn the people you socialize with regularly into consumers.
13. Change your posts into .PDF format. Then upload them to document and file sharing sites such as 4shared, Yudu, Slideshare, Issuu, Scribd, and DocStoc. Be sure to add a clickable link to your site.
14. Reformat your .PDF into a slideshow and upload it to Slideshare. In Q4 of 2013, Slideshare received over 60 million unique visitors a month. It is currently ranked 121 in the world on Alexa.
15. Reformat that slideshow into a video and upload it to Youtube and Vimeo. All it takes is a screen capture software like Camtasia, Miscrosoft Powerpoint, and a microphone to create an outstanding lesson for your audience. OR, you could have a short teaser video created on Fiverr.com that promotes each post individually.
16. Use the key information in your posts to create an infograph. Infographs spread like wildfire on social media. Just be sure that your url is noticeable.
17. Form relationships with other influencers. With the right game plan,a network of authorities can literally dominate a niche through cross promotion.
18. Comment on relevant blogs. This is another technique that gets a bad rap because of spammers. Blog commenting should not be an automated process that leaves a generic message followed by a link. Instead, the blog comment should actually reference the material in the aforementioned blog. This can be done tactfully so that the blog owner doesn’t simply erase your comments. An even better idea is to comment regularly without a link. This will help you build trust with the blog owner and they may not mind you posting links as long as they are relevant.
19. Use Google Alerts to notify you when new content is published pertaining to your keywords. This can also be done to find forums where your specific topic may have come up, allowing you to jump in and provide relevant answers.
20 Find sites that have linked to your competitors and reach out to them. If you find a site has linked to your competitor’s post about “widgets”, perhaps they’d be willing to also link and share your more advanced version “widgets 2.0”.
If you follow this checklist for every blog post that you’ve created, you can easily double, triple, quadruple, or more, the amount of traffic that your site receives in a short amount of time. Stop wasting your time cranking out blog post after blog post in the hopes that traffic will come to you. Instead, go out there and get it.
If you have any other tips or suggestions that others may find useful, feel free to leave them in the comment section below.
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