Content Marketing Strategy: 8 Steps to Get More Traffic and Customers

today I'm going to show you exactly how to use content marketing to get more traffic more social shares more backlinks and most important of all more customers in fact these are the same strategies and techniques that I used to get two million people to visit my site last year so if you want to get better results from your content you'll love this step-by-step guide let's dive right in when I launched my first blog way back in

2009 I've read the same advice again and again you know the stuff I'm talking about published short 500 word blog posts make sure to keep your blog updated with fresh content and you need to publish a new post at least once a week that stuff might've works back in 2018 but it doesn't work today in fact I grew my blog into one of the most popular marketing blogs on the planet by doing the exact opposite of

what these so-called experts recommend instead of short blog posts I only publish long-form comprehensive guides instead of keeping my site updated with fresh content I only publish a new post every four to six weeks and instead of publishing something because it's Tuesday I only release content if it's world-class stuff with that let's get into the specific steps starting with step number one find a proven topic your first step is to find a topic but not just

any topic a topic with a proven track record here's exactly how to do it first check out content from one of your competitors that's done really well in other words go to a competing blog and keep an eye out for posts that have lots of social shares comments or both for example I'm in the SEO niche and one of my main competitors is Moz calm and a while back I was looking through some of their latest

content and I noticed that blog posts about site audits tended to do really well so I created a post called the ultimate SEO site audit and because this post was based on a proven topic it quickly racked up social shares and backlinks plus my new post ranks on the first page for my target keyword next look at podcasts in your industry this is just like the approach we just talked about but instead of looking at your

competitors blogs you look at other guests so if one of your competitors has a podcast and let's face it who doesn't these days check out their episode list on iTunes this can reveal some amazing topics that you'd be hard-pressed to find any other way finally get topic ideas from online communities for example let's say that you run a blog about the Paleo diet well when I look at paleo threads on reddit I noticed lots of questions

focused on dessert which shows me that there's a lot of demand for dessert related content in the paleo space you can use this exact process on Quora or on forums where your target audience hangs out and if you want to scale this technique I recommend trying out a tool called answer the public it's a free tool that hands you popular questions that people have around your topic which leads us to our second step find a keyword

for SEO so you've found a topic that your target customer is interested in and now it's time to find the exact keyword that they use to search in Google here's how first use YouTube and Google Suggest this is an old-school keyword research strategy that I still use all the time to use it start to type in one of the topics you found in step number one and then write down keywords that Google suggests and you can

repeat the same process in YouTube Bing Amazon and more next use searches related to to find longtail keywords do you ever notice that there is this searches related to area at the bottom of Google search results well I didn't either until recently and I quickly realized that it's a goldmine of keyword ideas for example if you search for Paleo diet and scroll to the bottom of the results you get a list of these awesome keywords the

best part these keywords aren't from some third-party tool they come straight from Google moving right along to step number three choose a content format personally when I hear the word content I automatically think blog post but blog posts are just one of many types of content formats that are out there besides blog posts there are YouTube videos native videos lead magnets ebooks infographics podcast quizzes and more of all those is there one format that works not

really the key here is to choose a format that works best for you are you an awesome writer focus on blog posts do you love getting in front of the camera then make a video or maybe you're an amazing designer in that case you'd want to create a piece of visual content in fact you don't even need to stick to one format you could take the same topic and cover it using several different formats for example

a few years ago I published this link building guide and that post did really well so I decided to make a youtube video on that same exact topic in that video brings in 8,000 views every month the big takeaway there's no perfect content format for any topic so choose a concept format that you can crush and move on to step number four which is publish an amazing piece of content let's face it it's harder than ever

to get your content to stand out in fact according to WordPress there are two point five million blog posts published every single day and they also report that page views are down for the first time in 12 years that's the bad news the good news is is that it's still totally possible to create awesome content that stands out but for your content to stand out among the millions of blog posts that come out every day and

needs to be amazing here's how to do it first publish insanely actionable content it doesn't matter if your site is about cars or cats people want content that they can use right away for example when I was doing research for this video I watched a bunch of other videos about content marketing and they were mostly full of fluff and filler advice for example they tell you to create a process for creating content but they never showed

you how to create that process that's why I worked really hard to make every technique in this video super actionable next use lots of examples in your content when it comes to content there's one thing I found to be true people love examples in fact research shows that examples make learning significantly easier which is why I include lots of examples in every post now do examples take a little bit more work than just saying do this

yep is it worth it absolutely finally I recommend focusing on your con you X when most people think about user experience they think about things like software but as it turns out content has a user experience - for example look at this post the text is all squished together which makes it really hard to read that's bad content UX on the other hand look at this blog post it has big font and lots of white space

which makes the post easy to read and skim that's good content UX to be clear content UX isn't just for blog content if you have a podcast content UX is the quality of your audio and if you're making a video content UX is that videos production value in other words when you make it easy for people to consume your content it has a much better chance of driving targeted traffic to your website and now it's time

for step number five optimize your content for SEO there are literally dozens of ways to optimize your content for SEO but in my experience these three strategies are working best right now first optimize your title tag for click-through rate as you may have heard Google uses your site's click-through rate as a ranking signal in other words the more people click on your site in the search results the better it will generally rank that's why you want

to make your title tag super enticing to click on for example my original title for this post didn't have any brackets or parentheses but I realized that I can make this title even more compelling by adding step by step case study in parentheses so that's what I did next use your keyboard a few times in your content especially in the first 150 words for example you can see that it used my target keyword SEO audit a

handful of times in my post including the first 150 words I'm not keyword stuffing instead I'm just including my target keyword where it makes sense that way Google can see that my page is about how to do an SEO audit finally link out to other websites this industry study found a clear correlation between external links and Google rankings so whenever it makes sense link out to resources that will help your readers learn more about the topics

that you cover in your article for example in this pose I linked out to a handful of authority sites in case someone wants to dig deeper into that topic which leads us to a key step that a lot of people skip over step number six content promotion there's no other way for me to say this if you're serious about content marketing you need to learn about content promotion when I say promote your content I don't mean

sharing your content on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter even though that can help I'm talking about strategically promoting your content so it gets lots of shares links and traffic the question is how do you do it here are three strategies that are working great for me right now first up we have content roundups roundups are blog posts that curate the best content from that week and if you can get your link in front of

someone that runs a roundup you have a good chance of getting a link the best part there are roundups in pretty much every niche Under the Sun for example here's a roundup in the wine niche and because your content actually makes their roundup better you don't need to beg for a link our next promotional strategy is to promote your content in your email newsletter when it comes to content promotion I've tried it all and in my

experience nothing beats email for example I published this post on my blog late last year and to promote it I sent out an email to my email subscribers I also shared it on twitter my tweak up 1710 clicks and my newsletter 14,000 113 clicks so yeah if you want to get lots of eyeballs on every piece of content that you publish you definitely want to let your email subscribers know you just published something last up we

have boosted facebook posts over the last few months I've spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads and the number one lesson I learned from that experience is this retargeting is legit for example I recently boosted this Facebook post and because I used retargeting to reach people that already visited my website I only paid 67 cents per click which in my niche digital marketing is three to five times less than you'd normally pay nice and now it's

time for our second to last step step number seven track your performance so you just published an amazing piece of content it's based on a proven topic has great content UX you promoted it using the strategies that I just share with you the question is how do you know if all that stuff actually worked here are two metrics that I recommend focusing on the first thing I recommend looking at is traffic at the end of the

day the whole point this content marketing thing is to get more traffic so if your content isn't bringing in more traffic it's probably time to switch things up that said content marketing and SEO can take time to kick in sometimes months for example look at the traffic numbers from the early days of backlinko as you can see it took about six months for things to really take off and if I give up early on because content

wasn't working I wouldn't have seen this huge traffic spike that got me going next up we have conversions ROI business goals KPIs whatever you want to call it basically with this metric you're answering the question is content actually helping us sell more stuff as you may already know you can measure conversions in Google Analytics and if you see conversions moving up along with traffic that's a sign that your content marketing is really working that said sometimes

it's hard to measure those indirect sales that come from content marketing for example the number of conversions that I get that come directly from YouTube are really low and if I only looked at google analytics I'd probably say you know what YouTube is a waste of time but when I dug a little bit deeper I discovered that my YouTube channel is a huge source of subscribers and sales in fact lots of new customers specifically set my

YouTube channel as a main reason that they decide to enroll in one of my courses which tells me that my YouTube videos are paying off which leads us to our eighth and final step scale your content marketing so at this stage your content marketing is working you're getting more traffic leads and sales than ever before which is great but at this point you're probably wondering how do i scale this stuff before I answer that question a

quick word of warning I don't recommend scaling by pumping out a bunch of blog posts that's what most people do at this stage and it hurts them instead of continually putting out awesome stuff they start to focus on quantity and because their content isn't as good as it used to be people stop reading it I'm sure you can think of a blog that you used to follow that fell into this trap so yeah you definitely want

a scale but you don't want your quality to suffer because of it for example I've only published 63 total posts on the backlinko blog and those 63 posts bring in three hundred ninety two thousand four hundred and forty one visits every month my secret I focus on scaling quality not quantity I'll explain a few years ago I published this Google ranking factor study this post was totally different than the type of stuff I was putting out

not only that unlike a list post or a case study I couldn't do it myself I had to assemble a team in the end that study did really well it generated a huge traffic spike in its first week plus that single post has been linked to from over 2000 different domains there you have it my eighth step content strategy if you liked this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on

the subscribe button below this video and if you want exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with subscribers head over to back Luka comm and hop on the newsletter it's free now I want to hear from you which strategy from today's video are you gonna try first are you gonna try to increase your click-through rate or start scaling quality let me know by leaving a comment below right now is it okay okay and it is just

an injustice to this industry stuff can you hear that and sure yeah first four just in case now do