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10 Tips for Getting Long-Term Traffic to Your Content

This article was published on: 07/24/15 4:30 PM by Kimberly Aris

Creating content is a time consuming task that we all put a lot of effort into, only to see the posts go from their peak level of generated traffic, down to nothing, in no time. All the time we invest into making the content SEO friendly seems like a waste, when the new traffic attracted has a very short life span.

Doesn’t feel fair, does it?

The good news is that there are ways in which you can turn each one of your posts into long-term traffic generating pieces. Check out the 10 quintessential methods that will give your posts a constant popularity level!

10 Ways to make your content generate traffic constantly

1) Research evergreen subjects

An evergreen subject will include content that will always be of interest. Every skill set is at one point new to a beginner, so he will research the web for that particular subject. “How to” topics are typically evergreen topics. Shedding light on the basics of a particular domain is a post that’s easy to update, if needed, and it will certainly generate traffic, since there will always be people that want to get into a new business field.

Finding out what the evergreen subjects of your business are, is a matter of going through your older published posts, and seeing which ones have constantly generated traffic.

This type of analysis is easy to do. You just have to look at the traffic report of the past 30 days and discover which posts are generating considerable traffic, without being published recently. The next step is to use those posts as evergreen models that can help you create new posts that follow the same principle. This process also gives you the opportunity to update those posts, and make sure that they are turning visitors into conversions.

If you don’t have a research base within your own content, you can use other sources of inspiration. The most popular source is Google Trends. You just have to input keywords or key-phrases that are relevant to your business and this tool will show you how popular those terms are.

The Google Trends graph is going to show you the upward or downward popularity trend of the keywords, helping you choose the most popular option. After you’ve decided on which keyword to use, you can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to discover similar topics that you can convert into new content.

The use of relevant and popular keywords is important because they will increase the traffic coming from organic search. That’s why you need to pick the keywords that are most likely to be searched constantly.

2) Use content that you can advertize

Using the right keywords will increase the traffic generated from organic search, but that doesn’t mean your efforts should stop there. Your content still needs constant traffic boosts that you can get only by advertizing it. There are methods of finding out if your evergreen topics are worth advertizing.

You can start by running your main keyword or key phrase through BuzzSumo. This will show you the popularity of content that uses that term. The most popular topics can be used as inspiration sources for creating efficient evergreen ideas.

You can also determine the link-back quality of your evergreen subject. You just have to use your main keyword in a search and find content that already has good ranking. You can use SEMrush to find the pages that rank well in organic search, that use your keyword.

After making sure your content is optimized and that it has good quality backlinks, you can go ahead and research ways of directly advertizing your content. You can use websites, like Quora, that show you what questions does your keyword usually answer, when people do a search.

You can use the questions as guidelines of what your content, regarding the evergreen topic, should include. Signing-up on Quora and answering questions with your published content is a great method of direct-advertizing.

3) Make your content shareable and use mixed-media

While researching ideas for your evergreen topic, you should make sure that your content will be shareable. Firstly, you should create images that are relevant to your post. Tools like Canva will create images that your visitors can share on social media, along with your post.

You can then go the extra mile and use Google Forms or HARO to find interesting quotes, from people that are popular in your field, regarding your chosen subject. You can also use CoSchedule’s Click to Tweet tool to make tweets look awesome, making the quotes even more shareable.

Another popular tool is Ivy by Filament, that lets readers highlight certain parts of your content and then share it to social media networks or through email.

4) Find out who your targeted audience is

After covering all your bases, in terms of social media and direct marketing, your next step should be determining who you’re writing the content for. The so called outreach strategy will help your post get directly to the people that are most likely to like it and share it.

You can use BuzzSumo to find the people that have tweeted content similar to yours before, but this tool only goes so far. A more efficient method is to use ContentMarketer.io. This tool uses the URL of a topic similar to the one you’re creating, and it gives you the email addresses of users that are expected to share your content.

Finding the precise audience, that you are most likely writing for, before publishing your post will give your content a head-start.

5) Create the promotional part of your content

Now that you’ve made sure your content will be seen, it’s time to make it extremely attractive for the potential reader. Your promotional content relies mostly on coming up with the perfect headline. You can use Upworthy to generate up to 25 alternative headlines that will potentially make your post go viral. Choosing the most ingenious ones that come up will help you with an A/B test of the headlines that you can do through emails and social media posts.

If writing headlines is not your strongest ability, you can use HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator. It uses your keywords to come up with 5 headline idea, or you can sign-up and find hundreds of them.

Choose the headlines that you find most attractive and turn them into social media posts. You can use different headlines, and even change their formats. The next step is to reach out to the targeted audience that you found on method #4. This outreach process includes: the initial outreach, the reminder (if the influencer doesn’t share your content), and then the thank you message when your content gets shared.

6) Pick the right time to publish and advertize your post

The first stages of advertizing your post have timing as a crucial element. You’ll find a lot of statistics that tell you when the perfect timing for publishing and promoting is, but this is a factor that varies a lot. You’ll have to discover what works best for you.

The easiest way to find out the perfect publishing timing is to study your traffic reports. You can use HubSpot and get a Sources Report that shows you which day works best for your business, or you can use Google analytics reports.

You can use social media management tools to see when your readers are online, making it easy to determine when is the best time to share your post.

SocialBro gives you information about your followers. You can see when they are online, and when do your posts get the most attention.

Using email analysis can give you information regarding the best days and times when your emails are opened. This makes reaching your subscribers easier and more efficient.

7) Complete your promoting strategy

Your promoting strategy should be organized in a step-by-step format, with exact times and deadlines of promotion and publishing, along with the individuals responsible for each specific task. You can use Trello to lay out your strategy, making it easier to follow.

8) Take full advantage of the publishing day

The day that brings the most promotional opportunities is the day that your post gets published. That’s the day when you’ll get social media posts to go live, and when the emails to your subscribers and your influencers will be sent.

The first stage of the promotion will give you lots of opportunities to interact with the readers. This stage will mostly require you to thank readers, to respond to their comments, and to reply to every single email. At the same time you’ll want to continue the outreach process, if your emails have not been opened.

9) Start your direct advertizing campaign

This is the follow-up action that is related to the #2 item on your long-term traffic generating list. You’ll want to go back on Quora and answer the questions using your post. Other direct advertizing methods involve staying active on forums and communities that are relevant to your field. You’ll find interested users on Slack, BizSugar, Inbound.org, Reddit, and so on.

You can also use the search feature of social media groups, on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, where you can find questions about your topic. This helps you expand your audience further.

If the users are interested in the topic, and they are asking questions about it, it will make it easy for you to promote your post without getting spam reports.

10) Redesign, reshare, and republish.

The 3 R-strategy includes the most important steps of keeping a post alive for a longer period of time. You can use these three steps to make your content look and feel fresh, and be rediscovered in other formats.

You can use the main ideas of your content to create a slide and put it on SlideShare, and then turn the slide into a slideshow that’s perfect for Youtube. You can even go audio, and turn your content into a podcast subject. The list goes on and on! The best thing about the 3 R-strategy is that you can always link back each format to your original post, and make it generate traffic constantly.

Using these 10 methods will make your posts work for you, long after they’ve been published!

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