The Top 10 Things We’ve Learned About Driving Traffic to Our Content

How many views did your last blog post receive?

Are you happy with that number?

If you're not, you're not alone.

Whether we like it or not, we're all carrying out our content marketing efforts in an era of content saturation. This type of congestion makes it difficult to get our content seen, let alone build an audience.

Not to mention that if you're struggling to drive traffic to your content, you're probably struggling to meet conversion goals too. 

Isn't it time that somebody threw you a bone here? 

At IMPACT, we've written and promoted our fair share of content. We've seen articles take off, and we've also seen articles tank worse than Milli Vanilli's infamous MTV debacle (ohhh, burnnn.)

It goes without saying that all of this creation and distribution has taught us a thing or two about how to get eyeballs on our work. 

So we've made a list of the top 10 things we've learned about driving traffic to our content to help your business' content get the attention it deserves. 

1. Create multiple tweets

Just because you've tweeted a piece of content once, doesn't mean it's old news.

We've found that we can squeeze a ton of social media engagement out of our posts over time by varying the way we present them to our audience on social. We like to call it "remixing our tweets." 

Each time we reposition a tweet we increase the odds that our new message will resonate with someone new. This means a chance to reach a new audience or a new opportunity, every time.

If you're not already doing this (or even if you are), we suggest creating a Trello board to organize all of the different variations you create for a single piece of content. Our looks a little something like this:

Use the title, pull a statistic, ask a question, attach a sense of urgency, pick a quote, accompany it with an image, and start getting more out of the content you worked hard to create. 

2. Don't underestimate LinkedIn 

Whether you're posting to your company page or sharing content in LinkedIn groups, there's no denying the value of the professional platform.

Thing beautiful thing about LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups is that there's a lot of decision-makers hanging out there. If you come across unanswered questions that one of your pieces of content can answer, share it. It's a great way to position your business and your resources as a valuable solution, while doubling as a way to get some eyeballs on your content.

However, it's important to keep in mind that you shouldn't be sharing all your own stuff. The key is to share other's content

3. Add social share buttons

If you're not including social share buttons on your content, you're stifling the spread.

According to a study of 10,000 websites from the SEO platform BrightEdge Technologies, websites without a Twitter share button were mentioned 4x, while websites with a Twitter button were mentioned 27x. That's nearly 7x the Twitter mentions. 

Through our experience with social share buttons, we've found that the easier we make it for visitors to share something, the more apt they'll be to do so. 

We include social share buttons on our blog posts and our landing pages to ensure that we are seizing all opportunities to expand our reach, get our content in front of new eyes, and generate a steady stream of traffic back to our site.

If your share buttons display the number of shares the piece received alongside the button, even better. This tiny consideration has the ability to provide a visitor with clear, compelling social proof. If they see that the article has been tweeted over 500 times, they may be more likely to pass it on to their network. 

4. Create supporting content

At IMPACT, we like to create content for our content.

In an effort to drive traffic to our premium resources over time, we focus on creating blog articles that align with this type of content. We look at the offer at hand and try to come up with 2-3 relevant blog articles that will tie into the offer to ensure that will readers reach the bottom of the post, the CTA for the offer proves to be of interest to them.

Outside of blog content, we like to experiment with other mediums. I created a SlideShare for one of our latest ebooks to help generate a bit of a buzz around the offer. The SlideShare complimented the subject matter of the offer without giving away too much. By positioning a link at the end of the slide deck we were able to direct readers to the offer if they wished to read more on the subject. 

Think of this type of content as a support system. It's strategically designed to bolster up each piece of content we create to maximize performance, and it works. 

5. Submit content to communities

Following our trip to HubSpot for Partner Day back in April, we began experimenting with submitting content (both our own and others) to Inbound.org.

Since then we've been able to generate nearly 2,000 visitors to our site, as well as 48 new contacts. 

This type of community engagement has taught us the importance of identifying your niche and speaking directly to them. 

We know that the people engaging in this community are interested in inbound marketing related content (hence the name), therefore we know the resources we submit will resonate.

6. Send out an email notification

For every blog post we publish, our subscribers receive an email notification to introduce the post. 

In order to persuade recipients to click-through to our content, we focus on a few key elements:

• Personalization: While it may seem minute, including the subscribers name helps to humanize the email a bit. 
• Clickable title: The goal is to create a title enticing enough to interest people, and make it clickable for easy access to the post.
• Interesting visual: The visual not only helps to break up the text, but it adds an element of interest. 
• Intriguing preview text: We focus on cutting the text snippet at the right point. We want to give just enough away to make the recipient want to read more.
• Read More CTA: Speaking of reading more, we include a 'Read More' CTA that directs people to the full article. Want to add 'Read More' buttons to your email? Check out our HubSpot COS tip here.

Last month our blog subscriber email notification drew nearly 6,000 visitors to our blog. Needless to say, it's a super easy way to provide people with instant access to your content every day.

7. Update links

Let's say you just published a post on landing page best practices. Ask yourself: What posts do I already have that I could leverage to drive traffic to this post?

Dig up some related posts from your achieve and scan them for opportunities to link to your new post.

Maybe you wrote something like "10 Examples of Landing Pages That Suck" back last quarter. It's likely that people reading this post are looking to identify problems and refine their landing pages, which means a link to your new best practices article would fit just right.

We like to use this tactic to promote and leverage all of our content over time. 

8. Include and mention influencers

If you want industry influencers to share your content, include them in it. 

While it's entirely possible to get influencers to share content that they're not mentioned in, it's much easier when they are. 

When we launched BlogAbout App, we conducted a series of interviews with well-known, well-respected influencers on the topic of content creation.

When the posts went live, each and every one of them was happy to share their interview with their social network, as it helped them secure their thought leadership and authority.

Needless to say, the posts were a hit. 

9. Mention your content in a newsletter

If you have a company newsletter, start incorporating a few excerpts or teasers from your blog articles in order to drive your recipients back to your website to read more.

Recipients of your newsletter will welcome any resourceful content you’re sharing, and in turn, will improve their overall experience with your brand. 

For example, we use our client newsletter as an opportunity to promote client webinars like this:

 By the way, if you want access to the recorded version of John's webinar, you can find it here.

10. Leverage your employee's networks

While sharing your content from your company's social account is a best practice, consider the benefits of pooling together all of your employee's networks on top of that?

While it can be difficult to get everyone on our team to commit to sharing our posts as they are published, we've found a way to take matters into our own hands. 

We've invested in a tool called GaggleAMP, which allows us to distribute our content to all of IMPACT's collective audiences. 

To help you get an idea of what this means for your content, check out some of the results we've seen:

Total clicks: 115

Total clicks: 134

Total clicks: 145

Honestly, how could you say no to more views on your content? 

If their networks are there, use them.