What’s Inside this Guide:
The Impact of Content Shock
TIP 1 – Increase Reach by Re-Purposing
TIP 2 – Polish Your Website’s Appearance
TIP 3 – Don’t Forget Email
TIP 4 – Brush up on SEO Skills
TIP 5 – Don’t Be Tricky
Growth Hacking to Build Your Website and Blog Traffic
Is there just too much content today? According to Wired, users are uploading videos to YouTube at the rate of 400 hours of video every minute! People on Instagram post 80 million photos every day! If everyone stopped right now, we probably still couldn't consume the existing content in our lifetimes.
That's where website growth hacking tips can help. It's an ongoing process because algorithms change, new tools are created, and the ways audiences access content evolves.
In terms of growing your website and blog traffic, the basic premise remains the same. Beyond developing an optimal website that will scale easily, marketers need to produce valuable content that people want to consume and share. When I asked the question, "What is Content Marketing?", I identified "value" as anything intrinsically useful or helpful for your audience.
In the past few years, as the importance of quality content has been recognized, the amount of content being produced has increased. As more and more companies churn out content, we are fast approaching content shock, as defined by Mark Schaefer, a situation where the sheer volume of content overwhelms our ability to consume and process it.
The Impact of Content Shock
Schaefer says the amount of content consumed daily averages 11 hours, a gain of two hours a day in the last three years, due in a large part to the increased use of mobile devices. As people struggle to sort through the massive amount of information available today, it becomes harder and harder for a business to be noticed.
Simply producing more content, even top-quality content, is not going to be enough. The keys to effective growth hacking are in refining your message and focusing your approach. Now is the time to get to know your audience better and produce content that speaks directly to them, that they find valuable enough to share. In doing so, they will become your greatest fans, and spread the word about your business. In essence, becoming a de facto part of your marketing team.
TIP 1 – Increase Reach by Re-Purposing
Here’s a scenario. You’ve created an outstanding blog post and you’re ready to promote. You have shared it on your social media sites, yet haven’t seen much response. It’s frustrating because you put a lot of time and effort into the original material and it’s not getting traction.
Time to set it aside and begin again, right?
But wait! What if you are missing people who would be interested but don’t like reading blogs? Take that excellent content and repurpose it. The truth is, not everyone consumes content the same way. Every post you write has the potential to be reworked into several different forms and will attract a different audience even when shared on the same channels.
What can you do with your written content? You can turn that research into a white paper and offer it as a bonus. If it’s timely turn it into a press release. Make a slide share presentation. See if it could be reworked into a video. Take the material and create a podcast.
Once you have a collection of quality posts, you can gather the most popular ones and publish them in an eBook.
Since visual content has a big impact explore the possibility of making an infographic or meme. According to Hubspot, content with images get 94% more views than content without images. Even cartoons can present your message in a fresh way.
What about going to your audience directly? Using Google Hangouts on Air you can broadcast presentations and host live discussions worldwide around the topics you address in your content. This personal real-time interaction is an excellent way to find and connect with your audience and build a relationship.
You can apply the same concept to any form of your content. Transcribe that podcast interview into a blog post and put it on your website. Take a slide share presentation and turn it into an infographic. The idea is to take your quality content and make it work for you by offering it in many different ways, allowing a new audience to discover you in the format they choose.
TIP 2 – Polish Your Website’s Appearance
A growth hacking tip that people often overlook is the look and feel of their blog and the quality of the user experience. Give your website a review, examining it with a critical eye as if you’ve never seen it before, and ask yourself if the elements on your pages are effective or distracting. Everything on your site should have a purpose, and the purpose should serve the visitor in some way.
Make sure your branding is consistent and clear. A visitor should be able to recognize and understand what it is you do immediately when they arrive on your site, as they spend only seconds deciding whether to stay or go. Navigation should be easy to find and use. Simplify where you can and let your blog content be the main attraction.
Google likes it when people stay on your site so make sure you link within your posts and optimize your images or graphics. Slow-loading sites result in click-offs because visitors don’t like to wait for large images to load.
TIP 3 – Don’t Forget Email
If your growth hacking goal is to get more business, the best thing you can do for yourself is to have an email sign-up box prominently displayed on your home page. Contrary to the rumors, email is far from dead. It’s alive and well, an important marketing strategy if you want to increase your business.
Marketing Sherpa says 72% of consumers prefer to stay in touch with the companies they do business with through emails. Even though it’s been around for a while, there are ways to hack email marketing and improve effectiveness.
First, make sure you have a visible sign-up invitation on your home page. You’ll get a better response if you keep it simple. Ask for an email address and name, or just the email address, if that’s all you need.
Next, give an incentive for people to sign up. Here’s your chance to give them a sample of your knowledge and expertise with something that will benefit them. A white paper, checklist, or booklet are popular choices.
Then, replace the default response emails with your personalized content. Most email services allow you to customize the emails that go out as part of the subscription confirmation process. Don’t overlook this opportunity to reinforce your brand and offer something more than what’s expected. These follow-up emails are a great place to invite social media connections, too.
Finally, do some research on your subject lines. The better your subject line is, the more likely it is to increase the open rate, which gets your content in front of more people. By the way, a subject line with the word “video”, “sale” or “new” in it has high open rates, but the word “newsletter” decreases open rates by nearly 20%.
TIP 4 – Brush up on SEO Skills
In an earlier post, I talked about ways to improve your search engine results. Proper use of keywords is crucial to good SEO, and the days of cramming dozens of possible search terms into your content are over. Too many keywords, or inappropriate use of keywords, will get you penalized. The best approach, as I pointed out, is to choose the right keywords for each page, and use them only for that page, because to get ranked, each page must have unique primary SEO keywords or phrases.
TIP 5 – Don’t Be Tricky
This one should be obvious but the temptation to find shortcuts remains. There are certain techniques that are simply off-limits, and I recently wrote about them in my post “Just Say No to Clickbait- 10 Content Marketing Tricks People Hate”. "Clickbait" and "bait and switch" are two you’ve probably seen and possibly fallen for and the others are well worth a read. Both use misleading headlines with the goal of getting you to click through. You’re expecting one thing only to discover something completely different, resulting in the inevitable disappointment and annoyance. This is one of the fastest ways to lose your audience and earn a bad reputation.
It’s Common Sense
Treat people online the way you would treat them when you’re face-to-face. Be honest, give worthwhile information, respect your audience and offer solutions to the issues that concern them.
Effective internet marketing is a moving target and growth hacking tips evolve as changes develop, but one truth stands out. Produce valuable content that is useful or helpful, that educates, entertains or inspires your audience and your growth will continue.
Leverage an Content Marketing Agency to Help You Jumpstart Growth
If you’d like to learn more about how VERGE can help you grow your website and blog traffic, check out our website and development services or take advantage of our free website analysis. You’d be surprised at how quickly we can help you jumpstart your website and blog growth.
Learn how we helped a construction technology startup grow organic website traffic by over 900%.