Great content is only so if it is being read and shared. It needs to have an audience that sees it as valuable to have any impact on your SEO and content marketing strategy. From there is has to be shared beyond your network to channel more traffic to your site and increase your brand exposure. This is achieved through a number of techniques, each an effective way to get more eyes on your content and grow your brand.
Comments on other blogs
Reading and commenting on blogs within your industry, as well as related industries, is a common tactic for building an audience. It is a good way to build a rapport and mutually beneficial relationship that will increase your online presence and help you become a key influencer yourself. It will also gain you a valuable backlink to boost your site’s authority and relevancy on search engines,
Your comments must be well thought out and useful. Simply putting “Good post!” or “I agree!” is clearly a way of just getting the link and exposure and people see through this immediately. Write something interesting and illuminating, related to but not necessarily agreeing with the blog you are commenting on. Often a different point of view is more interesting and will ensure that the person who wrote the blog will be intrigued to see what you have to say. As long as you present your counter points respectfully and calmly, you might trigger a discussion and engage with the blogger as well as their audience.
Guest blogging
Bringing in a person to write a blog for your site can expose your site and brand to an entirely new audience. The guest blogger will be keen to share the link to their work with their followers, bringing together different audiences and more diverse traffic to your site.
On the flipside, if you are offered the chance to guest blog, it is a great way to showcase your ideas, writing and brand to an audience you may not have had a chance to engage with the past. Accepting and excelling at one guest blogging assignment may open you up to further opportunities with other sites, which makes it a valuable exercise that can pay dividends with future conversion, sales and brand recognition.
Always make the very best content
The odds on way to ensure your content is getting shared and noticed is to always make sure it is exceptional. 10x content is how it is commonly referred to now and this means that it is 10 times better than anything that currently exists. It is a time-consuming type of content to create, but if done right it will set you apart from the competition and establish you as an authority. This in turn will bring more traffic to your site and establish a level of respectability that can be hard to come by online. Neil Patel of Quick Sprout is the ideal example. His commitment to always producing blogs that bring new or more in-depth points of view to topics has slowly but surely placed him in the upper echelon of content creators. This means that when the online marketing community wants the best information, or even confirmation of something they have read or heard elsewhere, they head to his site.
Content strategy is as much about branding as it is about SEO. Creating an aura of authority around your website and its content is a long-term strategy for sustainable brand results. Once your brand is associated with a certain level of authority, it increases your relevance and search engines, as well as users, take notice
Ensure it is easy to share
While this may seem obvious, it is always surprising to me how many blogs and sites fail at this. It shouldn’t require any special knowledge for a user to put your work on LinkedIn or Facebook, and usually this can be achieved through the presence of the standard social buttons.
However, your blog should also be shareable simply through cutting and pasting the link, which means you need to make a permalink for every blog you write. Different people like to do things different ways and attempting to force them to use your content a certain way will only restrict your blog’s chances of reaching a wider audience. It doesn’t matter how your content reaches the big wide world, so long as it does.
Email outreach
This is the most time-consuming and closest to a shot in the dark out of all the tips. It can often yield great results, but you must be prepared for constant rejection and sometimes hostility. It involves sending key influencers in your industry-targeted emails requesting that they share your content. Sometimes this is dressed up as an attempt to inform them or build a rapport through mutual interest in a topic, but its essence is asking for a favour.
The key to getting the breakthroughs without ruining the chances of it ever happening, is to build a relationship beforehand. This is usually through sharing their content, commenting on their blogs, liking and re-posting their tweets and Facebook updates, and all the little things that will eventually make them notice you. This is why it is important to start at a realistic level. You should aim to share content and build relationships with bloggers and influencers at the same level, or a slightly higher one. Look for people with similar audience sizes, as they will see the most value in forming a symbiosis. Neil Patel might have a much larger audience, but sharing your blog won’t give any value to his site, so the chances of him dong it are very low. It is better to get your content across a few smaller audiences than hope to land a big one.
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