Are you looking for creative ways to improve your content to drive traffic to your blog? Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas and are seeking new, improved ways to engage your audience and increase readership.
Is anyone swarming for your blog like ducklings?
The beauty about marketing is that there are several tactics and techniques you can employ to get your audience to swarm your blog, well, almost like ducklings.
The goal here is not to think up funky new blog topics for your content but to highlight different content formats you can leverage that drives traffic and captivates readers. We’ll focus on multiple ways in how you can deliver your content, how to ensure it’s working for your audience, and our secret sauce to driving insane traffic to our content.
6 Best Types of Content to Drive Insane Traffic
#1 Listicles
Did you know that lists are shared on social media more often than any other type of article (Source: HubSpot)? Listicles (lists+articles) provide readers with valuable, actionable content that is easy to digest and implement. Your viewers know exactly what to expect with each numbered posts, making it more enticing to read. Lists are also simple to put together during your creation.
Consider tips, tricks, strategies and tools within your niche that will benefit your audience. Take this post for instance. You can even curate content, putting together the best articles relevant to your industry and sharing them in list. Be sure to offer suggestions and information about each item so readers can leave your post having learned something of real value.
#2 Product Releases or Updates
Promote your new product launch by publishing a well-written blog article that shares the details, features, benefits, and release date to keep your audience in the know. The beauty about this strategy is that you can create a stream of blog posts as a “countdown” to the product launch. Each week, share something new about the new release that keeps your audience tuned in. This is a great way to build buzz around your launch.
Don’t forget to share these blog posts with your subscriber and email lists. Email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources…another tactic to drive incredible traffic to your content.
#3 How-To’s
How-to blog posts are a great way to provide readers with actionable instructions to accomplish their goals…maybe even using your product or service. It establishes your authority as you help viewers solve a specific problem. What are some of your most frequently asked questions from prospects and customers that you can convert into a how-to post? What keyword phrases is your audience searching for that can be used as a how-to? These answers will give you a great start for your next article.
Be sure to keep content simple and easy to follow. Outline it as a checklist or a step-by-step guide that gives clear directions to completion.
#4 Industry News
Sharing breaking and industry news can catapult traffic to your blog while positioning your brand as the go-to source. Tools like Feedly can help you stay on top of relevant news that appeals to your audience. The key to is ensuring that you tie the event to your brand messaging in your blogging so it resonates with your followers.
Industry news can include product updates, events, conferences, changes or new trends. Leverage current events to your advantage by blogging on them quickly to ride the momentum of these trending topics.
#5 Interactive Content
Creating quizzes, surveys and polls that gets your visitors involved is highly encouraged to boost engagement and traffic to your content. According to BuzzSumo, quizzes are content marketing’s most secret weapon. An average quiz gets shared a whopping 1,900 times!
Imaging the influx of traffic you’ll create just by putting together a quiz. The good news is that you can re-use the same quiz multiple times for maximum impact.
Posting interactive content is a powerful double-edged sword; not only are you engaging your readers, you’ll also glean golden data that you can use as market research, for further content ideas, and to generate leads to grow your subscriber list.
#6 Elect for Long-Form Content
A blog post that has more than 1,500 words, on average it receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes than a post under 1,500 words (Source: HubSpot). Also, the average word count of top-ranking content (in Google) is between 1,140-1,285 words. It’s safe to say that longer blog posts perform better on search and social media.
Long-form content provides time for you to delve deep into a topic, offering immense value to your readers. It allows you to naturally incorporate more of your keyword (improving SEO), give insight, and reveal your expertise in a subject matter.
Create a schedule that supports 1,500+ word count in your blogging. Incorporate images to give your readers a “visual break” and divide it into short sections for easy reading. Use an editorial calendar tool like CoSchedule or Verblio’s (formerly BlogMutt) editorial calendar that helps you plan, organize, and schedule your content. As always, you can leverage services like Verblioto help enrich your site.
Test, Measure, & Analyze
Understanding which types of blog content best resonate with your audience is vital to being effective with your blog marketing. You want to test and gauge your results to discover what’s working…and what’s not. When you’re clear on it that connects with your readers the most, you can feed them more of it to boost traffic and conversions.
Testing, measuring, and analyzing engagement gives you solid data to adjust your strategy towards achieving your business goals. Here are a few simple questions you can ask to measure your content type success:
- What type of content is read the most?
- What type of it is shared the most?
- How many page views does it receive?
- How long are readers staying on my site to read?
- How many leads did my content generate?
- Are people clicking through from my content to the relevant pages (i.e. opt-in forms)?
Your results will serve as a measuring-stick in revealing what format engages your audience most. Knowing this will allow you to focus more on creating that type of content.
Use your content to drive traffic to your blog like…
How Verblio Uses Content to Drive Traffic
One strategy Verblio uses to drive traffic to our content is through new product releases and company updates. You see, a great tactic to attract followers and prospects is post about the latest happenings occurring in your business. People want to be kept abreast of recent changes particularly if it affects their experience of your product or your services.
Whenever we launch a new feature (like when we rolled out the monthly posting plan for our agency customers), we generate massive views from our followers. This content type is also perfect to highlight in newsletters and posts on social networks. The readers who engage with product updates also tend to be ideal customers to who would benefit from your products. We take that into account when matching a call-to-action with our product update posts so we can keep engaging with our target audience beyond the blog post itself.
Writing the same type of blog posts gets boring for you, your creators, and your readers. Spice up your blog posts by changing up the format. Share a list of the best tools to use in your industry, post a fun quiz on your site, or by create a top 10 list that you can share with your social followers. The advantage to this type of marketing is that you can get creative and see what connects with your audience. Once you discover what your audience loves, you can give them more of what they want…positioning you as THE go-to source.
