The surefire way to drive traffic to your website is to publish highly shareable and engaging content. Not only does this help enhance your SEO rankings, but also the higher social curation — provided it’s being shared — means that more people will see it. In turn, this will naturally increase your traffic, leads and sales.
The problem is, while shareable content might as well be a guaranteed method to increase traffic, there are no guarantees that the created content will become viral. You will never know just how engaging your content really is until it’s out in the wild. That’s not to say you can’t maximize its potential. On the contrary, there are several things you can do to increase the shareability of your content. That’s the ultimate goal, at least when it comes to increasing traffic.
While you can’t exactly predict whether or not content will go viral, you can certainly do your best to increase its shareability and engagement factor. Here are some tips that will help you do that.
Add Native Social Sharing Buttons
Ensure that you have native social sharing buttons available for visitors, whether they are part of a floating menu, or simply embedded in the content feed.
This small trick will increase engagement and traffic by simplifying the sharing process. Without sharing buttons, the process is time-consuming and that means most won’t bother doing it. If there’s a share button, things are as easy as clicking it and the content is shared automatically to their feed.
Use High-Quality Media
Visual content has taken center stage in the world of marketing, because it resonates with consumers. Always use high-quality images and do your best to find something that really matches the rest of your content. In some cases, visitors may share the images and media over anything else. That’s why infographics, video commercials and simple adverts are most effective. People really like sharing visual content with one another.
It’s also why hundreds of mobile apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Vine and YouTube have grown into powerhouses, aside from the fact that mobile use is growing exponentially. That brings us to our next point.
Adapt Your Content for Mobile Users
According to Bloomberg, global smartphone use will reach 2 billion by the end of 2015. In other words, there are billions upon billions of users browsing the Web via their mobile devices at any given time. To add some insight as to what they’re doing while using their mobile devices: Smartphones are most often used during travel – 72 percent – in restaurants – 64 percent – and in stores – 63 percent. To put it bluntly, mobile users are always on the go. They want to get in and get out quick.
In that respect, long-winded and excessive content is not ideal. Mobile users want bite-sized chunks of information that they can digest quickly during their travels. The great thing about this is that content tailored for mobile users can also be delivered to desktop users — it doesn’t have to be exclusive.
Make Your Content Useful
Useful content is extremely effective in the social world, because people are more willing to share it. Those who specialize in a technical industry could benefit from this point considerably, in particular.
For example, McCall Handling Co., a forklift dealer, created a forklift inspection checklist that can be referenced and used by customers or anyone in the industry. This leveraged their expertise, engaged customers and provided them with useful content that is highly shareable.
To provide useful content, you can consider offering user guides, tutorials, FAQS and how-tos that deliver something valuable to the consumer. Having content that explains the importance of your product to those considering a purchase as well as useful content for previous consumers will entice them to return to your site later for more information or additional purchases.
Become a Thought Leader in Your Niche
Piggybacking off the idea above, you could invest in becoming a thought leader and authority in your niche. This means you’re essentially the go-to expert for a topic. When someone wants to learn something, ask a question or research a subject, they often turn to thought leaders for help.
Thought leaders are people, communities or sources that can provide valuable information about a subject. Becoming a thought leader of your particular niche will not only ensure that people flock to your website for information, it will also mean they’ll come to you for advice and be more willing to purchase goods and services from you.
Guest Blog
A great way to reel in new traffic and grow your online audience is to either host a guest blog, submit your content to another site or do both. Allowing other writers and marketers to post on your site will bring in plenty of traffic from their usual channels. Adversely, posting a guest blog on another site will increase the visibility of your name and brand, which will also result in more traffic. Either way you look at it, guest blogging is a great way to boost the shareability and engagement ratings of your content.
Remain Socially Active
It’s not enough to just post content. Sure, it could go viral on its own, but if it does you miss out on so many opportunities. The idea is to have your name and brand visible when – and if – that happens. It helps if you remain socially active, by posting viable content across multiple platforms and engaging with the big players in your industry.
Try to incorporate your own content into your social game. Of course, we’re not just talking about sharing your content in your feed. We’re talking about using your content to spark discussions or reply to ongoing ones. Be creative and inventive about it and you should do just fine.
Solve Problems With Your Content
Use your content to improve your marketing by addressing consumer pain points in your industry. The main idea is that you’re taking action to solve an issue that causes a customer annoyance or inconvenience. In order to do this you’ll need to spend time researching all the elements in a problem, including demographic behavior and interest, industry or brand impact, and potential solutions.
Become Invested in the Social Community
In order to truly make an impact in the social community, you need to become a user yourself. Keep in mind, this means concentrating your focus on one or two social networks instead of spreading yourself thin trying to cover all of them at once.
Don’t just invest time sharing your own content and engaging with users on your brand page; branch out. Seek out users discussing your brand and products and reach out to them first. Interact with the competition and post comments on their wall and content feeds. Reply to consumers who ask questions or indicate interest in a particular topic. We could go on all day with this list, but hopefully you get the gist of it.
Be Consistent
This is the most important point in this entire list. No matter what you do, where you decide to keep your focus or which one of these points you rely on most, be consistent. Keep publishing blog posts and helpful content. Continue to schedule social posts that pose questions to the community. Once you’ve solved a problem or consumer pain point, find another.
Quite simply, do not stop doing what you’re doing. Unless you’re lucky, there are very few things in this world that happen overnight. It takes lots of invested time, patience and a laser focus to become successful. Don’t ever forget that.
