Content Is King, Haha That’s Adorable
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This post was originally published on 2012. As it is now several years old, please be aware that some of the links and references may no longer be active or relevant. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding.
You know what’s hilarious?
Content is king, build it and they will come, write great stuff and the rankings will appear. Haha, that’s adorable (LOL)…
I thought that’d be quite an appropriate title for the people who still believe that content really is king. The reality is that content is only king in some respects.
Content is king in the respect of gaining repeat visitors and loyal subscribers. However; you can’t just write great content and expect interesting people to flock towards it.
That my friend; is a fallacy. Over the course of this blog post; I’m going to talk about why content isn’t exactly king and some of the steps you need to take to get your content out there and reel in visitors.
So ultimately we all want lots of traffic, subscribers and customers. The first step is to create content, then to attract visitors to the content, then to convert the visitors into leads and finally into customers. It’s a long winded process that I’m not going to cover in this post.
All I want to talk about is creating content and getting traffic to it. Content is king if you already have as much traffic as you want. Unfortunately most people have this misconception that if you build a frigging website; visitors will just appear out of nowhere.
In fact I just finished a book that showcased 50 case studies of entrepreneurs who started websites that magically attracted visitors. The book would talk about how he “put up the website and after getting over his fear of failure, he added a payment button and boom, woke up the next day to a sale”.
The fact is that shit doesn’t happen very often, rarely, but you can count on it never happening. So if you want lots of traffic, you need to first write great content. Content is the cornerstone of a successful website or blog. But once you’ve got great content; you need to promote it.
Here are 5 quick steps to promoting your content:
1. Syndicate It Across Social Media And Micro Blogs
Right after you publish new content, you should syndicate it. Syndicate it across your social profiles and any micro blogs you may own. A great tool for doing this is LinksAlpha, an alternative to the previously free Ping.fm. LinksAlpha allows you to connect all of your social profiles to your LinksAlpha account, then syndicate content/links across them at the click of a button.
You should at the very minimum syndicate your content onto your most active social profiles i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and any others. LinksAlpha and services alike allow you to connect dozens if not hundreds of accounts to one dashboard.
The more accounts you connect the better. Upon publishing new content, login to your LinksAlpha account, enter the title/description of the content, the URL and hit the submit button. It’ll syndicate (post & promote) your content onto all of the social profiles/accounts you have connected. Of course; LinksAlpha is just an alternative to doing it by hand.
The point is to share your content with your followers/community via social networks and generate some rapid traffic.
2. Submit A Press Release
Press Releases have always been furiously powerful ways to generate traffic, buzz and authority backlinks. Submitting a press release every time you publish new content is a bit much. I wouldn’t advise publishing more than one press release per month, only to announce your best content/new features etc.
3. Social Buttons Everywhere
Sharing is key to your content’s success. You need to make the most out of every visitor your content receives; they are precious. You can do so by adding social sharing buttons to the most prominent areas of your content. To the right of the content, at the top and at the bottom. The three social buttons you should feature most are: Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus; Stumble Upon is also very powerful.
By adding social buttons and encouraging readers to share your content; you make the most of every visitor, gain social signals (backlinks) and referral traffic. Plus on the rare occasion your stuff can always go viral.
4. Contextual Backlinks
Contextual backlinks are the main priority of SEO’s. They are contextual links pointing towards your content from another piece of content on another website. Backlinks are when another site links to yours. Contextual backlinks are when another site links to yours by linking a word, phrase or keyword directly to your content. Like I am linking this to my home page.
Whatever word, phrase or keyword you use to contextually link to your site; Google will boost you for in the search engine results pages. That’s why it’s crucial to do your keyword research before and after you’ve written some content to target a few keywords on-page.
Research on the Google Keyword Tool for search terms related to your content that you can target. When you find the keywords you want to target, optimize your content to rank for them by including them in the body, title, tags and headers. That’s basic on-page optimization which is all you really need.
Contextual backlinks are the key to ranking well on Google and driving lots of search engine traffic. The types of links you want are: web2.0, article directory, bookmark, wiki, blogging platform, guest posts, directory and social.
5. Blog Commenting And Guest Posting
Blog commenting and guest posting are the important strategies for building a blogging community. For a full explanation and guide to blog commenting, click here. To learn how guest posting can explode your traffic; read The Ultimate Guide To Excellent Guest Blogging.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right more for more traffic generation tips, tricks and secrets.
Comments
RCONNORIII, August 23, 2012, 19:20
Some great points you made about quality content not always being king, makes sense. Have a nice day on purpose…
Tyronne Ratcliff, August 23, 2012, 19:20
A good time to submit a press release would be when you’re first launching your blog and just getting started out, I think you can get a good one over at PRWeb for like 60 bucks or something like that, but you’re right, a press release isn’t something you should be doing regularly, only when you have really good, unique content that’s worthy of one. Awesome post by the way.
Liss, August 24, 2012, 10:00
This is so true! I used to believe that content alone would bring in traffic, but now I know the importance of promotion. Thanks for the tips, David!
Laura N., August 24, 2012, 11:30
Excellent advice on using social media for content promotion. I’ve seen a significant increase in traffic since implementing these strategies. Keep up the great work!
Alice Johnson, August 25, 2012, 09:15
Great post! The step-by-step guide to promoting content is very helpful. I’ve already started using LinksAlpha and it’s been a game changer for me. Thank you!
