Discover 5 Easy To Do Powerful Content Marketing Secrets

Discover 5 Easy To Do Powerful Content Marketing Secrets (That Drive Wicked Traffic!)

Firstly, let me be blunt with you; there is no single magic trick that will skyrocket your blog’s growth overnight. But fortunately for you, there are a lot of little things you can do, that when combined, will lead to steady continuous growth – the kind of growth that seems to take on a life of its own.

Here’s the mindset to have when it comes to your blog and content marketing in general… you are continuously experimenting to see what works, and constantly learning from your audience.

It’s rather simple, don’t overcomplicate things…

Experiment – did it work? And if so, how can you make it work even better?

And learn – who is my audience? What do they want? What do they fear? How can I become so valuable to them, they turn to me and my blog for advice and help? Nail this and your conversions will take off!

Now that you have the mindset, let’s get into the tips, in no particular order whatsoever:

1: Know Your Audience

We already talked about this, but it’s so important we need to go deeper.

Where is your audience coming from, both physically and mentally?

By physically, we mean what brings them to your site. Is it an ad? A blog post? A mention somewhere on the web? Social media?

Where your readers come from plays a large part in what they expect from your blog.

That’s why some marketers set up separate squeeze pages for each traffic source, so they can custom tailor it to their audience.

And where are they mentally when they hit your blog? Did they just discover they have a problem and they’re looking for solutions? Are they looking to be entertained more than informed? What are they looking for, and why are they there?

If you can, interview your readers. You might get them on Skype, send them a questionnaire, ask questions on your blog, etc.

Ask things like:

What are your biggest challenges in <your niche>? You’re looking for the pain points you can help solve.

What have you done to overcome these challenges? This will show you how determined they are.

How do you find the information you need? This tells you where and how they are looking

What content format do you prefer? Video, written, audio, etc.

You don’t have to interview a lot of people to find the answers. In fact, according to research experts you should see a pattern emerging after just 5 interviews in the same audience segment.

Your goal of course is to learn as much about your audience’s needs and desires as you can. It’s not always about building buyer personas – after all, not all of your readers will be 37-year-old college educated women with 2.4 kids and a $200,000 mortgage.

Once you have gone through this process you will have a customer avatar for your perfect customer and ALL your sales copy and content should be written with this person in mind at all times.

2: Get a Bird’s Eye View of Your Blog

Buzzstream put together a list of questions that will give you a good view of your content marketing strategy and help you identify your weak points.

You might go over this list of questions every 3-6 months and make sure you are still on track with your blog:

1. Who is your audience? <dog owners>

2. What are you offering them? <tips on dog training and care>

3. How will they find you? <through guest blog posts and social media>

4. Why will they care? <I give great tips they can use immediately>

5. How will they interact? <they will watch videos and read blog posts>

6. What will be their next step? <signing up for my dog training course>

7. Why do they share it? <it’s great info, entertaining and awesome dog photos, too

8. They might not share it if… <it’s too dry>

9. A solution for this is… <inject plenty of humor and personality>

3: Use Competitive Analysis To Find Your Audience

Finding your target audience can be difficult. But then again, who says you have to reinvent the wheel? Just find out what is working for your competitors, and you can often use the same sites and techniques to drive targeted traffic to your own site.

First, make a list of websites that are closest to yours in topic and intended audience. If you don’t know them, try searching Google using your top keywords. Or use this Google query (related: yourcompetitorwebsite.com)

Next, enter the competitor’s domain on SimilarWeb.com to see where their visitors are coming from, which social networks they use, total visits, traffic by countries, search traffic and more.

4: Use Competitive Analysis To Uncover Their Social Media Activity/Strategy

Use http://www.fanpagekarma.com and http://buzzsumo.com to find out:

What is their average engagement rate?
How often do they post?
When are they posting?
What types of posts are they posting?
And most importantly – what is their best performing content?

Discovering what’s working for others can shorten your own learning curve dramatically.

You can also use http://likealyzer.com to get metrics on likes, growth and engagement.

If you want to analyze their Twitter account, use https://www.twitonomy.com to find their average tweets per day, total retweets and favorites, as well as how many tweets contained hashtags, links, mentions and so forth.

To learn about their SEO performance, you can use https://seranking.com for backlink research and more.

5: A.P.P. Your Content!

Keep readers on your content longer by using this formula:

Agree: Begin with something your readers agree with. “These days politics are scary and unpredictable.”

Promise: Show them you have an answer, creating a contrast between what is and what could be. “But there is something you can do that will put your mind at ease and keep your politicians in line.”

Preview: Show them what will happen when they read your content. “In this blogpost, I’m going to reveal the 3 steps to easily making your elected representatives actually listen to you and act in your best interests.”

Try using these 5 “secrets” in your content marketing strategy and see what happens to your traffic, and more importantly, your conversions. I think you will be surprised 😊

I will cover more of these tips in another post, but for now, if you want to know more about converting your traffic into customers, I have a great guide for you that can give your traffic and conversions an enormous boost. And even better, it’s free 😊 To download your free copy just click here

OK, that’s it for this time. These are not the only ways to optimize your content, and I will give you some even more powerful tactics next time. Now go and put these tips into practice in your content marketing.