Author: Shane Barker

Creating high-quality content is not always enough to get you the desired reads and shares. In fact, a lot of times, good content just disappears into a sea of content, because no one finds out about it.

That’s why you need an optimized content promotion strategy to increase the reach and visibility of your content. It can also help you boost the ROI of your campaigns.

But, how can you optimize your content promotion strategy?

Well, that’s what this post is all about. In this post, you will find seven of the most effective ways in which you can optimize your content promotion strategy and expand your content’s reach.

Ready to get started?

Here you go.

1. Make Social Sharing Easy

The first rule of optimizing your content promotion strategy is to let your audience share and promote the content that they like. No matter how many people you hire for content promotion, it can not compare to when your actual audience promotes your content.

But, what can you do to ensure that your audience shares your content?

Well, you can make it easy for them to share your content by adding hassle-free social-sharing options. The first thing that you need to do is to add social sharing buttons to all of your content pieces. This way, anyone who likes your content can share it on social media.

It is even better if you use a floating bar with social sharing buttons so that users don’t have to search for it and can share anything they like instantly.

You can also use the “click to tweet” option for your website design which allows people to directly tweet any line (usually quotes) from your content. Adding quotes to your content also increases the chances of people sharing it on social media.

2. Use Keywords for Organic Promotion

While it is important to promote your content aggressively, you cannot underestimate the importance of organic search traffic. SEO is a sustainable way to promote your content organically to maintain a steady flow of traffic.

So, optimize all of your content for the right keywords to get a relevant audience to your website, directly from search engines. For this, you will need to do thorough keyword research and choose the most relevant keywords for each piece of content.

You will also need to create high-quality, relevant content for your target keywords, to make sure that people like your content over other similar content. This will further improve your SERP rankings.

Use tools to create good content for your website or hire qualified writers to create SEO-friendly content that ranks.

3. Add Shareable Visuals to Your Content

Adding to the previous point on making your content shareable, you can also add shareable visuals to your content. Since most social media platforms prefer visual content, adding shareable visuals is a great way to allow your audience to share your content.

You can include infographics, charts, graphs, quotes in a visual format, and more to enrich your text content and make it more engaging and shareworthy. Make sure that your visuals are the right size to be shared on most social media platforms.

Also, ensure that the file size is not too heavy that it takes time to load and share. Basically, add easy-to-share images and other visuals to your content that people will like to share.

BuzzFeed, for example, adds social-sharing buttons below each image in their posts, to encourage people to share them.

Image via BuzzFeed

4. Use Internal Linking Effectively

One neat trick to promote your content is to direct your website visitors from one piece of content to another relevant one using internal linking. Most of the time, people visit your website, read an article and just leave.

But, what if there were more similar content pieces that could be useful for them?

Well, internal links can provide them with the opportunity to read similar content and direct them to the right resources. This is not something that you do in retrospect but should be done right from the beginning when you launch a new blog.

To do internal linking right, just make sure you link only to related or similar content and use a relevant anchor text.

5. Create Videos to Promote Long-Form Content

Videos are the holy grail for your content promotion strategy because they are the most engaging form of content. With videos, you can deliver tons of information, without it being boring.

But, how can you use videos for content promotion?

One of the best ways to use videos for content promotion is to distill your long-form content into snippets and key points that you compile in the form of a video. You can share this video on social media to generate interest in your content and then direct users to your long-form content.

If you have quotes from industry experts or influencers in your content, you can make a video of them saying those quotes. This is an excellent content promotion strategy that you can use to get more people to read your long-form content.

6. Send Regular Newsletters to Your Subscribers

If you want to optimize your content promotion strategy, you cannot ignore the power of email marketing. After all, marketers have been using emails to send updates about their latest content for decades.

Newsletters are a great way to inform your existing audience about your latest blog posts. Make sure that your newsletters are visual and engaging, and have clearly visible CTAs.

You can use good email platforms that provide newsletter templates and make it easy to run email campaigns. 

7. Advertise

Last but not least of these tips to optimize your content promotion strategy is to simply advertise. Advertising does deliver quick results, at a price of course.

Paid search ads are a good way to promote your content and get visitors to your website. To create brand awareness about your website, you can even place social media ads. Social media advertising is highly effective and targeted, so you will get complete value for your money.

What Next?

Use these tips to optimize your content promotion strategy and increase your audience base. These will help you increase the reach of your content and encourage your readers to promote your content on social media.

Most of these strategies do not require much investment and can be easily implemented right away. So, get right to it and optimize your content promotion strategy right now. All the best!

As a result of the current pandemic, most B2B marketers have had to adjust their content marketing strategies. They have optimized their strategies for better audience targeting, personalized messaging, and powerful distribution of content.

But why?

Because they want to attract, acquire, and retain customers while boosting their B2B content marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

The question is: 

Did marketers achieve success after optimizing their strategies?

In a study conducted in 2020, 31% of B2B marketers said they were significantly successful with content marketing. The majority, 54%, considered themselves moderately successful.

Image via Content Marketing Institute

What is preventing marketers from generating better results?

In the study mentioned above, marketers stated that content creation and distribution challenges, strategy issues, and challenges with measuring ROI have been the major drawbacks.

If you don’t know which factors to track and measure, you will not be able to identify areas that need optimization to improve results.

That’s why the first step towards boosting your B2B content marketing ROI involves tracking the performance of your current strategies and content.

Let’s take a look at a few ways to optimize your B2B content marketing ROI.

1. Analyze the Performance of Your Existing Content

You should make it a habit to monitor how your content is performing after publishing. You can use analytics tools to figure out whether or not your content delivers the expected results.

Which metrics should you track to figure this out?

You can track:

• The amount of traffic driven by your content
• Time users spend on your page
• Bounce rate of your website
• Engagement rate
• Lead attribution
• Navigational behavior of users

You should use these insights to gauge how your B2B content marketing efforts affect your target audience. Do they like and interact with your content? Does a certain content format attract them better than others?

Analyzing this can help you create content that has greater potential to drive engagement and conversions.

But what if you have just started your B2B business?

Then, you may not have enough content and user data to analyze what works best for your audience. You need to first focus on publishing high-quality content and promoting it through multiple channels.

Once you’ve got enough data, you can analyze the impact of your marketing strategy and improve it.

2. Document Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

One of the top challenges marketers face is failing to create content that generates leads, attracts more traffic, and resonates with their audiences.

Image via SEMrush

How can you overcome these challenges?

The easiest way to overcome them is to document your content marketing strategy and process to boost efficiency. You should create a plan that offers you a 360-degree view of your B2B marketing tasks, activities, and deliverables.

You can use a chatbot to get good traffic on your blog posts. Chatbots are great options for your content marketing strategy because they can connect 24*7 with your customers and provide quick replies, thus gathering leads and generating sales.

It should include details about:

• The goals and metrics you will use to track the performance of your content.
• Your audience, what they need, and how you can solve their problems.
• The channels your audience uses and how they search for information.
• The type of content to create, formats to use, topics to cover, and keywords to include.
• The tools you will use during each stage of your B2B content marketing process.

You should then create a content calendar that outlines when and how to create, publish, promote, and track the performance of each post.

But why is it important to document your plan?

Documenting your plan can help you visualize your strategy. You can get a complete picture of where it’s headed and which areas need improvement. It also allows you to map out deadlines, keep your tasks organized, and identify opportunities for meaningful collaborations.

3. Don’t Skimp on Research

Successful B2B content marketing requires that you understand who your target audience is and what they need. You can’t just rely on guesswork or write on topics that you find interesting. 

You need to research your competitors and target audience.

Conducting audience research enables you to understand who your audience is, their needs, problems, and what motivates them to buy. 

It helps you identify phrases that your audience uses to look for information, brands, and products and understand their search intent. You can then include these phrases in your content to attract and nurture leads.

Conducting competitor research, on the other hand, can give you insights into the strategies other marketers are leveraging. You can find ways to run your marketing campaigns differently.

While conducting competitor research, you should check:

• Their domain authority
• Their backlink sources
• Their posting frequency on various channels
• Promotional strategies
• Keywords they rank for

With this information, you can discover areas to focus on and new ways to boost your ROI.

4. Optimize Your Content for Better Performance

As a B2B marketer, your goal is to create content that offers value while keeping your audience engaged. You need to ensure that it helps you attract qualified leads, drive conversions, and boost your campaign ROI.

But how can you get there?

The answer lies in leveraging the right content tactics to boost your marketing ROI.

These include:

• Repurposing content: Find ways to use each piece of content in various ways.

For example, you can republish an article as a podcast episode or video. You can also compile multiple blog posts that talk about a broader topic into a resourceful ebook.

• Updating old content: You should update old posts by adding the latest strategies, statistics, and examples to it. This will help you keep all your posts fresh and relevant.
• Promoting content: Promote your newly-published and updated posts on channels that your audience visits frequently to increase its reach.

For example, you can share links on social media, cold pitch to your blog subscribers or republish your posts on article syndication websites.

• Personalizing messaging: You should personalize your brand’s messaging and offer custom solutions to different audience segments.

Here example, you can send personalized email copy and offers to prospects, depending on what stage of the buying funnel they are at.

• Leveraging influencers: You can find influencers in your niche who can promote your brand. You can turn them into your brand ambassadors or have them review your products and ask them for referrals for your products and services.

Using these tactics can help boost your content marketing ROI over time.

You can use them to improve your search rankings and become a go-to resource for people who are looking for similar information. Great content can translate into increased traffic, reduced bounce rates, higher engagement, more conversions, and better marketing ROI.

Ready to Boost Your B2B Content Marketing ROI?

These are just some of the ways you can use to boost your B2B content marketing ROI.

You need to create valuable content, use it strategically to attract potential buyers, monitor how your audience responds to it, and offer them more value.

Do you have any questions about the strategies mentioned above? Share them in the comments below. I’ll be happy to help!

When it comes to website traffic, no one can rely entirely on referral or paid traffic. Generating organic traffic is the most sustainable way that works in the long run.

That is why, in this post, the focus will be entirely on ways to generate organic web traffic. This is not one of those long lists of tips and tricks, but a solid 5-step approach that can almost guarantee results.

Are you ready to learn more?

Here are five tried-and-tested tactics to generate website traffic organically. These tactics will not just work one time but will show results over the long term. Let’s get started.

1. Create Targeted and Useful Content

The most important advice anyone can give you for increasing organic website traffic is to write for your target audience.

Before you create content, you should have a good understanding of who your target audience is, what they like to read about, etc. You need to do thorough audience research to understand who you’re writing for and then create content that your audience will love.

Your content should be current, relevant, actionable, and accurate. There is no substitute for good content if you want to drive organic traffic to your blog.

2. Optimize Your Website Content for Keywords

This is a tactic that everyone knows about, but few do it right.

Optimizing for keywords does not mean keyword stuffing. It means that you need to maintain a good keyword density to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERP), but not so much that it is flagged as spam.

So, what should you do?

Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Use a keyword research tool to find and select keywords that you want to target.
• Also, do some competitor research to see which keywords and topics they are targeting.
• Create a separate list of keywords for your landing pages and your blog.
• Make a content calendar with publishing dates, topics, and keywords targeted by each piece of content.
• Maintain 1-1.5% keyword density for blog posts and slightly higher for landing pages.
• Start posting SEO-friendly content and track the results.

An additional tip is to use more long-tail keywords that have decent volume and are more targeted. This will help you generate more relevant organic web traffic.

SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand and these keyword optimization tips are useful for both. Use these tips to make your website more SEO-friendly to generate more organic traffic.

3. Choose Trending Topics in Your Niche

Just like keyword research, topic research should also be an integral part of your SEO strategy to increase web traffic organically.

There are two important aspects to this. First, you should find the most popular and trending topics in your niche that people will love to read about. Second, your content titles should be able to grab the audience’s attention and get them to click on your search result link.

You can find hot topics using any good SEO tool and by checking on what your competitors are doing. To choose an appropriate title, search for that topic on Google, and check the first few results.

This will give you an idea about what kind of topics rank and what the user intent behind those searches is. It will make it easier for you to create content that is in-line with audience expectations.

4. Create Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is something that stays relevant over the years and continues to drive organic traffic on its own.

This could be something like an exhaustive resource on a topic covering everything a beginner would like to learn. It could also be a checklist, cheat-sheet, or any other type of actionable content that tells people how to do a certain thing.

Take this exhaustive glossary of terms and definitions created by the Search Engine Journal. This is the type of content that will never become outdated and will continue generating traffic.

Image Source: Search Engine Journal

Think about such topics from your industry and create an exhaustive resource like this that will not only rank but will also continue generating traffic for years. Also, don’t forget to optimize your content for SEO.

Some common types of evergreen content include lists, how-to guides, case studies, lists, encyclopedia-type entries, checklists, etc.

Pro Tip: Keep adding more information to your evergreen content from time to time, to make it more exhaustive. This will help you promote content through multiple channels and drive consistent traffic. Above all you don’t have to just depend on organic search traffic.

5. Leverage Structured Data and Rich Snippets

Getting more organic traffic is as much about higher SERP rankings as it is about getting people to choose your link over other search results. While the tips for generating more traffic mentioned above focused on the ranking part, this one tackles the latter.

What exactly is structured data and how can it help you get more organic traffic?

Structured data is basically a coded form of data that helps search engines understand your content better. Not just that, search engines also use it to display your search results in a better way using Rich Snippets.

Search results with rich snippets appear differently than other results and users are more likely to click on them.

Here’s an example of search results with (the first one) and without (the second one) structured data.

Image Source: Google Search

The one with structured data has a picture, rating, and other details that regular search results don’t have. Search results that appear in the form of rich snippets have a higher likelihood of getting clicks.

So, use structured data to get featured on the SERPs as rich snippets and generate more organic website traffic.

Ready to Increase Your Website Traffic Organically?

These are the most effective ways to generate organic traffic for your website and improve your search rankings. Use all five of these to see tangible results in terms of a steady increase in your website traffic.

Also, conduct a website audit periodically to understand which pages are generating more organic traffic for your blog or website. You can use these insights to create more such content for your target audience.

Overall, remember that the key to generating organic traffic is good content. All the best!

Are you tired of trailing behind on the search engine results pages (SERPS)?

I get you. Nobody likes losing out to competitors. But what should bother you most is when you invest effort and money in SEO but don’t get the desired results.

If that sounds familiar, you’re reading the right article.

Your SEO efforts may be failing if you are investing in outdated SEO techniques, like targeting short, popular keywords.

You need to revamp your SEO strategy and start focusing on long-tail keywords.

Sound weird?

Actually, it’s a sound strategy, backed by research and successful use cases.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can take advantage of long-tail keywords to top the SERPs.

But first, let’s talk about what long-tail keywords are and why they matter.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords and Why Do They Matter?

Long-tail keywords contain three or more words. They are very precise but unpopular search terms. By “unpopular,” I mean they generate fewer searches than corresponding shorter keywords. Then, why do I recommend using them?

That’s because long-tail keywords convert exceptionally well. They closely resemble the actual search queries that people type in search engines. Since they match user intent so precisely, they get more clicks and your website gets more targeted traffic.

Need evidence?

One of my blog posts about Instagram Spaces is getting a lot of traction on Google. I compiled the keywords it’s ranking for, and here is what I found:

Note that “how to space out Instagram captions” (a long-tail keyword) beats its shorter counterpart (“Instagram spaces”) in most aspects. It’s generating more clicks, click-throughs (CTR) and gets me to position two on the SERPs.

Though it’s lagging in impressions, that doesn’t impact my website traffic as much as the other parameters.

If you’re still not convinced about the efficacy of long-tail keywords, take a look at their main advantages below.

1. Long-Tail Keywords Have Low Competition

There is fierce competition to rank for short keywords. But their targeting is not as precise as long-tail keywords.

Fewer marketers target long-tail keywords, though the trend is changing after Google’s Panda update. Lower competition means more opportunities to rank as well as more cost savings (more on that later).

Image via Instapages

To verify the low-competition claim, I did some keyword research of my own.

I compared the keyword difficulty (KD) of three semantically-similar keywords (LSI): “lose weight,” “how to lose weight,” and “how to lose weight fast.” Take a look at the results:

Image via SEMrush

The longest keyword had the lowest difficulty score (KD%). That means you can reach the top of the SERPs faster if you build your content around longer keywords. That’s good news as moving up one spot on SERPs can improve your CTR by nearly 30.8%, according to Backlinko.

2. Long-Tail Keywords Help Drive Qualified Traffic

I already mentioned how content that is optimized for long-tail keywords satisfies user intent.

What exactly is “user intent” or “search intent”? It is what triggers users to turn to devices (the web, in this case) in search of information. User intent can be transactional (buying-type), informational (educational-type), or navigational (locational-type).

If you understand a searcher’s intent, you can present them with content they are looking for, which can push them down the sales funnel.

Long-tail keywords help you align content with user intent.

When a searcher types a query like “affordable camping gear in Texas,” (a long-tail keyword), you know they are ripe to convert. You can serve them listicles of top suppliers or tools to search for vendors, or to your own product pages (if that’s relevant).

For doing this, you can create SEO pages with exact-match keyword anatomy. You can include the long-tail keywords in the page copy, meta-tags, and images so that Google crawlers don’t miss your page. You can create an SEO friendly landing page using the best landing page software.

If your content is insightful and high-quality, there’s a good chance that the searcher will engage with it. Being broad terms, shorter keywords don’t have scope for such precise matching. That’s why long-tail keywords are more effective in driving targeted traffic organically.

3. Long-Tail Keywords Are Cheaper

Now, we come to the best part about long-tail keywords.

What’s that?

Long-tail keywords have lower cost-per-click (CPC) compared to their shorter peers.

Image via Instapages

CPC is the actual amount you pay when you invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you build your Google ads around long-tail keywords, you incur lower advertising costs since these keywords have a low CPC. As a result, you can draw more mileage from your advertising spend.

Refer to this image from the “lose-weight” example we saw earlier.

Each click on Google ads that target “how to lose weight” will incur you a cost of $1.21. The cost goes up as the target keyword gets shorter.

In short, long-tail keywords can help you excel at organic as well as paid searches.

How Can You Use Long-Tail Keywords to Drive Website Traffic

As you can make out, long-tail keywords can help you win the coveted top position on Google. No matter how often Google algorithms are updated, targeting long-tail keywords remains the preferred strategy of experienced content marketers.

Yes, long-tail keywords are the secret weapon to win more website visitors. But that doesn’t mean that you should stuff them in your landing pages and other pages. After Google’s RankBrain algorithm, such marketing ploys can get you a red flag.

Here are five ways you can use long-tail keywords naturally in your website content.

1. Write Keyword-Rich Headlines

Your page headlines grab the attention of Google crawlers first. So, front-load your long-tail keywords in your page titles.

If you’re wondering how to write catchy headlines, use Google’s Keywords Planner, Just insert your target keyword and hit the “Get Ideas” button.

Image via Google Keyword Planner

Google will list variations of your target keyword.

Next, identify the search intent of the keyword variation you select. Simply, copy-paste the keyword into Google’s search bar and click on “Enter.” Analyze the kind of pages ranking on the SERP. You will learn what kind of content Google indexes for the keyword.

Image via Google

In this example, I can see that service pages are topping the charts for the keyword “affordable search engine optimization.” So, I can either create a new, optimized service page or keyword-enrich my existing service page.

Whatever format you select, ensure that the keyword should fit naturally in your headlines and sub-headings. You can try LSI keywords in the Related Search section or auto-fill suggestions.

2. Write Long-Form Content

When we compare long-form and short-form content from an SEO perspective, longer content wins, hands down.

Why, you ask?

Because longer content offers more opportunities to add long-tail keywords. Your page’s keyword density increases. Plus, they allow you to deep dive into the topic and deliver value to consumers. All these factors add up to make your page attractive to search engines and visitors.

Since our key concern today is attracting website traffic, you need not worry about losing social audiences who don’t have the patience to read lengthy content. You can also use tools like LinkedIn automation tools, Facebook tools, etc to get best results for your social audiences.

3. Optimize File Names

Lastly, don’t forget to add long-tail keywords to your page URLs. Enrich your image URLs as well. The Backlinko research I cited earlier shows that if your page URL perfectly matches your target keywords, the organic CTR soars.

Image via Backlinko

Even Google recommends this. Their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide says that  site URLs should resonate with the page content, which is molded around keywords.

Image via Google

Are You Ready to Be a Long-Tail Pro?

Long-tail keywords are effective but underrated. However, seasoned marketers vouch for their effectiveness, especially for driving organic traffic. Today, I’ve explained how they can help you excel at PPC marketing as well.

Do you have any questions about SEO for website optimization? Leave them in the comments below. I’m always happy to answer.