Using content to drive traffic to your site or offer is still the number one best way to attract quality traffic. It might not be as popular as Facebook in terms of people promoting it but it’s still the best when it comes to the results. Just look at what the big successful companies do!
If you think about it when you use Facebook to promote your business you are in fact putting content on there! So even Facebook is content marketing! 🙂
Anyway, using content to drive traffic on whatever platform, has one purpose – to get people to click through to your webpage. Whether you have a link in a resource box, at the top of your Facebook page, at the bottom of your guest post, underneath your You Tube video, etc. – you want people to click!
How To Increase Your Clicks
Ideally you will want people to read through your article or watch the whole of your video or be intrigued enough to click on your Facebook update. Whatever content you create you need to engage your audience enough so that they go through all of your content, build a connection with you and want to find out more.
Here are 3 critical aspects you need:
A great headline
Your title needs to be engaging and spark interest with your target audience. It needs to be concise and inform people what your content is about.
- eye-catching
- funny
- emotion pull
- curiosity
- outrageous
- bold statement
Using words such as how to, tips, advice, secrets, benefits, top 10 list, how to avoid – these are all words that point towards a reason why reading your content will help someone in a specific way.
Attention grabbing opening paragraph
You only have a few seconds to draw your visitor in. If you lose them at this point they will click away from your content. So make it clear what benefits your visitor will receive from going through your content.
Be clear as to what they will learn and why they need to learn it!
You can get some good ideas from reading newspaper headings! Mind you, some of them are poor examples! Be careful of those sensational openers that don’t quite tell the truth or at least the whole story.
A clear call to action
Make sure that you know exactly what your call to action is. What do you want your visitor to do? Then provide a good enough reason of why they should take that action.
I recommend using content to drive traffic to a squeeze page so that you can build your email list. Therefore your call to action needs to be a free gift that is relevant to your visitor so that they will sign up to your list.
Sometimes you will notice marketers using the call to action section as an opportunity to sell themselves! This doesn’t work. People aren’t interested in you – they are interested in what you can give them! What value you can provide.
One great way to discover compelling call to actions is to see which types you respond to yourself. Keep a spreadsheet of the words that are used and see which ones might work for your business. Don’t copy, just use them for inspiration.
Testing Testing
Make sure that you test your results so that you know exactly what is working. Then create more of that type of content. Test each traffic source too. There is no point in spending time creating content for sites that are not generating traffic that converts to buyers!
- What does your target market want and what does it value?
- What emotional triggers could you use to motivate action?
- Is your free gift relevant?
- What headings are working better than others?
- How long are people spending on your site – are they engaged?
- Keep a spreadsheet of compelling headlines and call to actions that you can use for reference.