Do you know content marketing is going to be a $300 billion industry in 2019? We aren’t saying it, but the data gathered by MarketingProfs. Today’s digital marketing arena is filled with many ideas and strategies to boost your site’s traffic; content marketing is one of them.

Want to know how it works or drives traffic? Here are 10 content marketing strategies to get you started.

1. Ask your audience what they really want

If you don’t know what your audience really wants is the reason you lose traffic. You need to figure out their needs before it’s too late.

Here are some ways to identify your audiences’ needs.

Ask email-subscribers: With email auto-responders, you can reach out to your subscribers and ask what they want. They gave you their email address, which means they put their trust into you.

Make them realize that you respect their trust. Do this by asking them to reply and explain what would excite them to click your emails.

Run popup surveys: Amid many ways, this is perhaps the simplest one. You can ask your readers or audience through a survey what they want. Put up questions like — “What do you want to learn as an entrepreneur?” and “What are the challenges you’re facing with your business?”

Implementing a popup survey will ask these questions to every visitor to your site.

Analyze your competition: Don’t have an audience base? No worries. Research the market to know what’s working for others in your niche. Analyze Google’s search results to get an idea of the same.

For example, enter — content marketing tips. Analyze the top 5 results and see what’s working for them. Analyze their posts and you will start getting clues and ideas.

in fact, knowing your target audience is not just important for creating content but also to have unique visuals such as a logo, which is the face of your company. So, make sure that you have an insight of your audience.

2. Create evergreen content

According to MarketingBuddy report, content creation is the most frequently outsourced content marketing strategy. To outdo your competitors and boost traffic, you need to create evergreen content. But what is it?

Evergreen content is the content which gets search engine traffic even long after its publishing. You need to pay close attention to this strategy as soon as you kick your marketing ideas off the ground.

But how would you ensure that the content you created is evergreen? Here are some tips to identify.

Create content that stands the test of time: Okay, you created content but will it be relevant after 5 years from now? So, write content that will be important even after it’s been published.

Take an example — an insurance company creates content on topic “10 Tips For Retaining Agents.” The content will get traffic every day even after it has been published a long time ago. But the content “Why It’s Dangerous to Hit the Roads during Memorial Day Weekend?” will remain relevant for a short period of time.

It clearly shows the first content being evergreen.

Eliminate publishing dates from posts: Marketers often debate over whether they should include the publishing date or remove it. But it’s been found that eliminating publishing date is a smart move. Consider the scenario in which a reader searches for a particular topic and your post appears on the top but with an old publish date. Will the reader click it? Of course, not!

3. Be a storyteller

Consider a scenario in which you tell your audience to buy a product five times a day by flashing in their news feed, email inbox, through SMS or other channels. That’s enough to scare them away. That’s why marketers have inclined towards indirect marketing approach through storytelling.

The art of storytelling is getting popular these days. The reason is that people want to expand their connection more than focusing on buying or selling something. Now, here comes the question, how would you do that in your own content? Here are some quick tips to master the art of story-telling.

Know the psychology: Storytelling helps people remember something for a long time than a plain content. There are many scientific studies that prove it. It helps people forge connections between the things they know and the content you present to them.

Include real-life examples in your content: For every concept you put in front of your audience, include an example. Go on, tell them a story. From serious to a funny one, craft a story for them.

Build relationships: Many marketers may think that it has nothing to do with content marketing. But that’s not the case. When your target audiences read even a piece of content you posted, it means that they want to build a relationship with you. Give your content a personal, human touch that they can relate to.

4. Make your keywords research effective

Publishing your content and depending on God for ranking isn’t going to work. If you want to boost your traffic, you need to work harder right from the start. You need to create content with keywords that are relevant to your business.

Don’t depend on the guessing work, in fact, formulate a strategy. Use different keyword research tools to make your keyword research effective.

Google Keyword Planner: Google’s keyword planner is the best tool to start keyword planning. Just write a couple of keywords or phrases and get planet of options.

Buzz Sumo: Another tool is Buzz Sumo. Use the keywords you got from the Google Keyword Planner to find articles or blogs performing well on these. Do the research and shift through the results to find some great ideas.

Google Ads: Taking keyword inspiration from Google Ads is also effective. When you search for something and find related terms in ads, it means marketers are using those keywords to target their audience and paying good money for that.

Google Analytics: You can find every keyword or phrase visitors used to find your website. You may find some that you aren’t even targeting or paying attention to rank for those keywords. However, you can create a new post using them.

Suppose your visitor wrote a phrase saying ‘content marketing hacks.’ You can create a post surrounding the phrase with title ‘content marketing hacks for local businesses.’

5. Create catchy and attractive titles

You created a post with relevant keywords — creating effective content for marketing. It appears in top search pages, but audiences don’t click it. Have you thought of why? It’s because the title lacks magnetism which could pull readers and entice them to click.

Your title is the first impression that can make or break your whole content strategy. Without a compelling title you cannot attract your audience or persuade them to read further or click.

According to Internet Live Stats, over 5 million blog posts are written every day. It’s a huge number. To get yourself stand out, you really need a magnetic headline.

Here are some quick tips to write a catchy and attractive title.

Keep your title short: Search engines show headlines up to 60 characters. Anything above it will be chopped off. So, keep your title short.

Make it relevant: Don’t use a misleading headline. If you trick your audience to get something which isn’t relevant, they won’t come back again. Also, search engines will downgrade your ranking.

Include keywords in it: To give your title more punch, add keywords at the beginning or anywhere in the center where it fits.

6. Create simple, easy-to-read content

Visitors spend a median average time of about 37 seconds on an article. To make sure people do not switch over another site because your content isn’t readable, optimize your content well. Here is how you can do it:

Keep the paragraphs short: To make the content readable, keep the paragraphs short. Add not more than three to four sentences in a paragraph.

Add an attractive headline: Add a relevant and attention-grabbing headline. It should compel people to click and read your content.

Add images and videos: Don’t create content with plain text. Add relevant images and videos that drive user’s attention.

7. Optimize your post

It’s SEO that makes your content get found when people search for certain keywords in Google. Many bloggers highlight the fact that the best way to get traffic to your website is to optimize your SEO. WordPress plugin such as Yoast SEO makes it easier for you to optimize your post.

Here is how it works:

Focus keyword: Enter the keywords in this section. You will be guided to how to optimize focus keywords in your post.

SEO title: It appears in the Google search result pages. Make it good for the readers to click. You will get instant feedback whether your title is too long or it includes keywords.

Meta description: just below the SEO title, the Meta description appears. Make sure you add keywords in the description. It shouldn’t be longer than 160 characters.

Page Analysis: Here you can identify whether your post is well optimized using color codes. Red, yellow, and green are three color indicators. You have to fix your content until the indicator turns green.

8. Add share buttons

A well-optimized content starts driving traffic after some time. People like to share popular or relevant content. Make it easy to share by adding share button. But when you add sharing buttons, don’t overdo it.

That means, do not add too many buttons but a few.

Social sharing: Add sharing buttons for social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Reddit.

Click to tweet: This button makes it easier for your readers to share your content on twitter.

9. Create content that gains you back-links

Do you know the top two factors accredited to top Google searches? The first is content and the second is link. The more links you get the better chances you have to rank higher in Google.

But getting backlinks isn’t something that comes easy. It’s tough and takes masterpiece content and many social shares to attract a few links. But you can tackle the situation by generating content which is of link-magnet type. It could be a simple infographic.

As 65% of people recall information visualised easily, it’s a great idea to create an infographic-focused content.

Besides, E-books, Videos, Whitepapers, and Case Studies are also link-magnet content.

10. Repurpose your content

Creating content takes time. It isn’t something you do frequently and create tons of content at a time. In general, it is a labor-intensive strategy. It not only involves writing but also editing, publishing, and more.

It’s also challenging to come up with new ideas again and again. So, what should you do then? There is only one simple formula to ease the entire process and it’s to start repurposing your content.

Turn your blog into video, email campaign or other strategy you can think of. Reuse your content in the best possible ways to drive traffic.

Conclusion

Boosting your ranking is challenging, but not impossible. Content marketing is the best bet to drive traffic. Stick with the ideas shared earlier to make the most out of it.