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Creating good, influential content is not as straightforward as “build it, and they will come.” Without a massive ad budget, the best results come from having a solid (and at some times sneaky) content strategy. Here are three things you’re probably not doing that can help boost free traffic to your digital content and help you become an influencer.
Egobait Influencing
Egobait influencing involves including influential people in your posts in some way, hopefully encouraging them to share your content. One of the big problems small companies have when they start with content and social media marketing is that their few followers limit the reach of their posts.
This tactic effectively captures more established accounts to spread the word for you. You can find influencers in the same way that you found people to follow on Twitter. One way is to contact your influencer for an interview. This is best for ensuring they’re engaged with your piece, but you have to be aware that many may not have the time to answer your questions.
Alternatively, you can mention influencers in the piece without previously contacting them. This cuts down on the groundwork, but there’s less chance that you’ll get a share. The best tactic is to target as many influencers as possible in one piece, as this makes it more likely to get shares. The best way to do this is through a list, for example, this post on the “(BLACK) WOMEN IN TECH YOU NEED TO FOLLOW ON TWITTER.”
Outreach
Outreach can take many forms, but it’s mostly just telling people about your content. This may seem like an obvious suggestion, but there are certain tricks and free tools to make it much easier and more effective.
Use outreach as part of your influencer strategy to make sure your targets know about the post. These people are often busy, and contacted by hundreds of people a day, so a simple email or tweet may not be enough to get noticed.
Therefore, before your content is published, make sure you engage with these influencers across as many social media platforms as possible. Follow them, like their profiles and their pages, and share their content where relevant. This gets you on their radar before you follow up with the email or call once you’ve posted. You should also submit links to your posts on aggregate sites like Reddit and use Twitter to share your post directly with people whom you think might be interested. Get your content in front of as many eyes as possible.
Finally, there’s guest posting or offering content to another site intending to get a link back to your own. Always make sure to target sites with a wider reach than your own as well as a higher Domain Authority– search engine ranking score developed by a comapny called Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages You can use Moz’s free tool Link Explorer to check a site’s Domain Authority.
Getting Traffic to Your Content
Everyone likes to get free stuff, so competitions are a great way to get people through the door. The trick is to make sure you’re getting value for the prize. Anyone can give away a bunch of free stuff and get loads of entries, but what are you getting from it? It would be best if you found a way to harness all that attention.
Consider the method of entry. What can you get people to do that will get traffic to your content? Here are some suggestions:
• Get them to enter by sharing an article
• Get them to respond to a question, gathering data for an exciting blog post
• Get them to submit photos or videos, which you can then collate into a post
• Get them to provide an email address so you can add them to a newsletter
Jeff Shuford
Jeff Shuford is a nationally syndicated columnist whose monthly column appears in more than 44 regional newspapers. Shuford is one of fewer than five millennial African-American syndicated columnists in the United States, and one of the country’s youngest syndicated columnists overall.
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