7 Content Growth Hacks to Help Drive More Qualified Traffic

Paid campaigns, recirculating popular content, being location-specific and developing mutually-promotional relationships are a few steps toward using content to drive more traffic.

Author
Date published
July 20, 2015 Categories

Everybody wants maximum growth out of their content marketing efforts, but not everyone knows how to get those types of results. Sure, tweeting blog posts and emailing relevant resources as part of an outreach campaign are good first steps to getting some traction and exposure. But there’s much more you can do to unlock exponential growth opportunities for your content.

Here are seven growth hacks I leverage every day to get the content I publish to drive even more traffic, reach even more users, and get even more prospects into the sales funnel. And so can you.

1. Freshen Up Your Content

We see every day that Google gives more weight to fresher content. Content that gets updated tends to perform better in the organic SERPs than dormant content. If you look at it from a user perspective, older information is often seen as outdated, potentially less accurate or irrelevant, and can be perceived as having less value.

I recommend routinely updating any content on your site that:

Here are some tips for freshening up this content:

If you’re skeptical about the impact of freshness, follow the above recommendations, update 10 posts on your site that have lost traffic recently, and see what happens.

2. Promote Other People’s Work

A great way to amplify the reach of your content is to promote the work and the wisdom of others. Including the thoughts or writings – or even the products – of others in your content adds a layer of “built-in distribution.” Anyone featured in your content is incentivized to help share it because promoting your content, they’re promoting themselves, too.

You can feature others in your content by:

Make sure you let the person, website or company know that you’ve featured them on your site. Shoot them an email or a Tweet to get on their radar. Compliment them, but don’t explicitly beg for anything in return. Let the reciprocation happen naturally.

You’d be surprised how effective this technique is for increasing the reach of your content. What’s more, if you’re active in nurturing these relationships, it can lead to even more growth opportunities.

3. Buy Some Traffic

One surefire way to get more traffic to your content is to set up a paid campaign on StumbleUpon. You can also buy paid placement on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (more info here), but I find StumbleUpon to deliver the most predictable results, and be the easiest to work with.

StumbleUpon can generate instant exposure for your content at scale, and quickly: you can launch a new campaign – which has a range of audience targeting options – in 30 seconds. You can plug in your URL and go, without creating and testing ad copy, and “engaged visitors” only cost 15 cents.

The flipside to buying traffic is that you’re not “earning” it by actively building relationships and a community. So the traffic is generally of lower value and engagement scores aren’t ideal, with less time spent on the site, high bounce rates, and no deeper visits. What’s more, once the budget runs out, the traffic does, too.

However, those critiques don’t negate the power of using paid discovery as a tool to amplify exposure and distribution opportunities for your content. This is particularly true for new sites or publications that haven’t built an audience yet.

4. Go Local

Including a regional or local angle in your content lets you harness the awesome power of parochialism. People enthusiastically share and distribute content that touts their city, town or state as “tops” or “best” at something, even if the source is dubious.

These lists serve as a point of pride for residents and reinforce their decision to live in a particular area. They’re effective click bait because they pique our curiosity. What parent doesn’t want to know if their child’s school made the list of “top public schools” in their state?

Examples of content with a regional angle include the most Googled brands in each state and a Business Insider feature on New England slang. When it comes to promotion, target local journalists and radio station websites. They frequently feature this type of content, so it’s a perfect angle to pitch when doing outreach. You can buy ads on Facebook and leverage geo-targeting, as well.

Localism works even for the most obscure niches. No matter how boring your industry, you can still find ways to work in a regional angle to appeal to a local audience.

5. Recirculate Older Content

Most content has a relatively short lifecycle. It gets published and promoted, and then disappears into the dark archival abyss as new content gets rolled out. It’s rare for older content to get recirculated and re-shared, which is a major missed opportunity for getting maximum value out of your content assets.

If content is successful, you should continue to share it even if weeks or months old, so you can:

For content to recirculate, I recommend you target anything that’s already been successful, such as articles with high share counts; high engagement metrics, such as pages-per-visit and time spent on page; and a lot of comments. Finally, if you’re like me and you aim to scale your efforts, set your social recirculation efforts on autopilot.

6. Publish on Popular Topics

One sure-fire way to drive more qualified traffic to your site is to target popular topics. Audiences have already demonstrated that they want and value this type of information.

To find popular topics, you can leverage keyword tools (here’s a great list); look at competitor content that’s already generated a high degree of engagement; pull an internal site search report in Google Analytics and audit your existing content to see what people are searching for and engaging with. There’s also a range of sources I detailed in a previous column.

7. Amplify Your Referred Visits

Referred traffic, or traffic sent to your site from other domains, is one of the most overlooked segments of traffic. In many cases, referral traffic can comprise a sizeable percentage of your visits, as well as generate leads and conversions.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could increase the amount traffic these referrers are sending to your site? You can. Here’s how.

  1. Start by gathering a list of top referrers to your site from your analytics report. Make sure to drill down and determine the specific URL/page on that site is sending the traffic.
  2. Drop those URLs in a tool like SEM Rush and discover which keywords that page ranks for, and which of those terms yield the most traffic to help inform anchor text strategy.
  3. Build links to that page to help it rank higher for the traffic-generating terms you pulled in the previous step.

When building these links, be cautious. If you’re too aggressive, you risk getting the page dinged by Google’s Penguin algorithm. Not only will this kill the stream of referred traffic to your site, but it would hurt the domain for the site you’re targeting.
Resist the urge to fire hundreds of commercial anchor links to the page, using an automated backlink generation tool.

Instead, try the following approaches:

By building links, you can improve the visibility for that referrer’s page in the organic SERPs. This leads to more traffic to that page, which, in turn, increases the potential for more referred visits to your site.

Exit mobile version