Everyone wants to get the best bang for their marketing buck. And everyone wants their content to achieve something, whatever that something is. Sadly, you can hear the sounds of crickets chirping on most websites and blogs. Why? They weren’t strategic enough in how to position their content or making it work in the way they want it to work.
Here are some time-tested ways to make sure your content is doing what it’s supposed to be doing.
Spend More Money on Your Content
You need to hire or hire out content writing to the best and brightest, if you’re not going to write the content yourself. And here’s your big tip – the best and the brightest aren’t going to work for a measly dollar per 100 words, unless they’re living in a developing country or with their parents. It’s like the old adage says: you have to spend money to make money. You also get what you pay for.
So make sure that you have competent and capable people on staff or as freelancers who know how to write content that generates calls to action, which I’ll get to in a second.
Link to Your Older Content
If it’s appropriate, link to other content that’s relevant on your website. You want visitors to stick around and read more because the more time they spend on your site, the more time you have to get them to purchase the product or service you’re offering.
This is also a good spot for a public service announcement about updating your older content, if it’s still useful. Not only does this help with search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, but, if the content’s still valuable, you can direct your potential buyers directly to it.
Share Your Content (And Be Strategic About It)
Have buttons, particularly on your blog articles, that allow site visitors to share it with their networks. If you’ve got good content, people will pass it around. Be sure to put the buttons at the bottom of your posts, along with a call to action to share it. Some people turn off the hit count if they’re embarrassed by low shares, but, if you’re doing your job properly, you’ll have nothing to be embarrassed about. High share counts gives your content more credibility.
Let’s talk a minute about strategy, in the event that you’re not sure how to effectively share content and get those high hit counts. How do you do it? Two suggestions:
- Don’t publish the same thing to all of your social media networks. Customize and tailor your message to each and every network that you’re on. Think about who you’re targeting, where and why. Go after those specific individuals.
- Stretch your posts beyond work hours. Let’s face it, most people who are at work are (supposed to be) working. So you can extend your social media reach by posting in the evenings and on weekends. This is when most people are using social media, so your posts will be more effective if you publish and share them then. And this doesn’t mean overtime. If you’re using WordPress you can always schedule them
Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew
Some people want their content to do everything for them: sell people on their products or services, inform people, influence the masses. Stop. You need to focus on one thing that you want your content, or a particular piece of content, to do and squarely focus on that one thing. Do that one thing really, really well. Once you’ve done that, you might want to introduce something else, but don’t try to be everything to everybody.
This is also true of social media. There are so many places where you can publish or link to published content that it dazzles the mind. If you have a capable and competent staff that can be all over the place, then you can be in many places at once. However, if you’re a small business, you might be better served on just focusing on the one or two networks where people actually interact with your content and might be more tempted to buy something.
Have a Clear Call to Action
There used to be a late ‘80s talk show on Nickelodeon, the US children’s network, called Don’t Just Sit There. That’s what you don’t want your content to do, sit there. You want users to do something with it.
It might be even something as seemingly trivial as wanting them to ask for more content or become subscribers (if you keep your very best content behind locked doors). You need a clear, concise call to action that gets a visitor to do something.
Usually, the best calls to action are to get a user to do one specific thing or task. However, this is easy in the Internet age because all it takes is a shake of the mouse and a click, and the visitor has what you want them to have — for a price or otherwise. So don’t forget to ask site or blog visitors to do something. Hopefully, not just sit there.
On that note, are there any other tips or strategies that you would recommend? If you have them, we’d love to hear and chat. Send them our way in the comment box below!
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