On Monday, the 6th of June 2016, I hosted a digital marketing class online (via email), for the Digital Business Academy (DBA) for Women, powered by Tech4Her Africa. This brilliant initiative was conceived by Elizabeth Olorunleke, a Google Certified Business Manager, and an awesome entrepreneur in her own light. You can read more about her and the academy here.
I covered the topic “6 online marketing channels to drive traffic to your content”, and had a couple of female entrepreneurs in attendance. Here’s how it went:
Creating great content only pays when you can get it in front of the people that will actually read it. No matter how great the video you curate looks, or how inspiring the article written feels, without finding the most effective methods to get your content in front of the people that will really read it, you just may have wasted a lot of valuable time.
To make the most out of content curation and marketing, this article would cover 6 content marketing channels that will not only get your content in front of a lot of people, but would also help you retain some as regular readers.
See Also: Stop Guessing! Here Are 10 E-Commerce Marketing Strategies That Work
Here are the 6 content marketing growth channels in a wide view:
Channel 1: SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engines provide a ton of free traffic to websites. The platforms that benefit the most from this are blogs. With a fierce competition happening on the internet among thousands of bloggers, only a few get to make it to page one on google.
There are various ways to rank on google that various bloggers have greatly ignored in Nigeria. In the United States, so many platforms have honed these to perfection, but here, it’s still in murky waters. The major three are:
1). Meaningful Content:
Since google’s last update on their search algorithm, it has become more important to write highly meaningful content. In summary, meaningful content basically means that whatever message it’s carrying adds value to the readers.
A great content should usually be from 1,500 words and above. Although 300 is a fair minimum, a 1,500 word article would out rank you if you go with 300.
2). Keyword Research:
Keywords still rule in google. Before writing any article, it’s important you do a thorough keyword research using google’s free keyword tool.
If you want to rank for e.g content marketing, you could type in “content marketing” into the “product or service” box on the keyword tool. This would show you a couple of keyword ideas, their average monthly searches and more. What you should look for are those that have a high monthly search rate, but low competition, then base your article on that.
3). Backlinks:
Backlinks are now more important than ever. Google would rank you website higher if a lot of high authority sites are linking to you. This means that you should write meaningful content that others would value enough to link back to on their websites. You could generate backlinks by guest blogging, amongst other techniques.
Channel 2: Social Networks
After writing a great blog post, it’s important you promote it on as many social networks as possible. One great way to do this is to share your content to not just your Facebook page, but to Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups (highly recommended for business blogs). By sharing to groups, you take an advantage of their hundreds of thousands of members to get your content out there.
Be careful about the way you promote your contents on these groups, so they don’t report you for SPAM. On LinkedIn, the system automatically determines if you’re deliberately trying to spam the groups. So share content within spaced intervals, advisably every 3 days.
Other places you can share your content can be twitter, reddit (a personal favourite), youtube, and a lot more.
If your content is getting a lot of attention, you can create an infographic of the content to increase it’s reach. I achieved this with great success on an article here >>> http://startuptipsdaily.com/7-top-skills-of-self-made-millionaires/ . You can also create videos out of your popular contents, and put them up also.
Lastly, make sure your blog contents are extremely easy to share. If the reader has to figure out how to share your content, then its sharing ability is already bad.
See Also: 6 Ways Social Media Will Help Your Business
Channel 3: PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)
This channel is important for people who don’t have the patience for organic growth. Watching your website ranking rise, could take a really long time (maybe years). Sharing your articles to groups may take a while to gain some traction, but promoting a really good post, can get you where you want to be on time.
While PPC campaigns may be a good way to drive traffic, it ends up bad if not handled write. For a blog owner, the goal of your PPC campaigns should be to drive user engagement (email signups). The campaign must be able to convert a lot of users into subscribers, else, you’re simply throwing away money
Your email addresses are more important than any other thing. Acquire them as much, and as fast as possible.
Some great PPC channels are Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, amongst others.
Channel 4: Web Forums
Web forums are a great source of free and cheap traffic. Forums in Nigeria like Nairaland or Radar (from TechCabal) can be used to drive some traffic to your website. While the traffic margin generated from web forums can usually not be compared to social networks, SEO, and others, using forums at the beginning when your blog first launches, can be a way to gain some visitors.
To take advantage of these forums, post one of your articles and cut it off at a point people would want to read more. This way, they’re made to click on the link to your blog beneath to read more of it.
See Also: Top 10 Profitable Online Business Ideas In Nigeria
Channel 5: Question & Answer Sites
Question and answer websites like Quora are getting popular worldwide. Some people even prefer to term them as “social networks with a different approach”. Most random questions asked on google always pops Quora on the first page of the search results.
To take advantage of Quora to drive traffic to your website, check out a couple of questions being asked, and answer any that may have a link to a page on your website. When people find your answer meaningful, they’d click the link to learn more about it. Which subsequently increases your traffic.
One great advantage of Quora is your comments remain there forever (at least till when the site ceases to exist).
Channel 6: Cross Blogging
This final point is pretty much based on building great relationships with bloggers. When you put up a blog post you feel readers on a friend’s blog should know about, you can reach out to the person to repost your content there (with content credit given to your blog).
While this may seem as a form of building backlinks for your blog, it’s not entirely so. Here, your network’s readers would get to trust your blog because the blog they’re reading your article on trusts yours.
By cross blogging, you can build trust across various blogs and so, build your blog’s traffic.
See Also: Top 10 Mistakes To Avoid When Starting An Online Business
These are the excerpts from the online content marketing session I had with the Digital Business Academy for Women. There were also a couple of questions asked that enlightened everyone in attendance.
You should lookout for more skill acquisition sessions from Tech4Her and follow Elizabeth on twitter for more inspiration to learn how to use the right digital tools to start, run, and grow a successful online business.
What are your thoughts on this article? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
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Excellent excerpts from DBA for Women. Quite educative content marketing strategies.
Thank you for the commendation Dave.