Take a minute and try these three simple traffic-driving strategies you can use to attract more readers to your featured article of the day
When you’re writing an article for your blog, or you’re re-posting an article from your print archives to be viewed digitally, why are you doing it?
Sure, content is king, and the more content your website has, the more excited Google is to index it and the higher your blog ranks. But more importantly, you want someone to read it.
In fact, you probably want many people to read it.
So for starters, this new article you’ve posted will automatically be seen by:
- Everyone who subscribes to your RSS feed,
- your email subscribers (if you’re repurposing the content for email)
- and web surfers (if you’ve done a good job at SEO)
But how else can you get your articles read and distributed with a quickness? Unlike a new white paper or complimentary product, you can’t distribute a press release for every article you write. So how might you tell others about your new article?
Here are a few ways that you can get your articles distributed to the masses with little to no effort:
- Comments. Do a Google search and find blogs that are talking about a similar topic. In the comments, leave some valuable feedback on their article including a link to your own article. DON’T leave comments like “Great article, read mine!” (it’s tacky), but DO offer a paragraph or two that adds to the existing discussion and offer your article as a secondary reference that compliments the article you are commenting on. This method builds an inbound link to your website and it also gets your article read by the blog owner and other readers of the blog.
- Twitter. One of the fastest ways to spread your article around is to carefully construct an interesting teaser that describes the article, and post a link on Twitter. This can cause other people for re-tweet (forward) the link onto their own followers. Leave at least 20 characters in your tweet so that people have room to add the re-tweet lingo. Twitter is our second largest driver of incoming traffic, and it didn’t take anything more than posting valuable content and links.
- Bookmarks. Add the article link to your social bookmarks. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious are a good set for your starter pack. Submitting your articles to these sites is like distributing an online press release . Your article is live and people can choose to read it or not. If you want to have a more valuable following on these types of sites, try linking to sites other than just your own.
A more global approach (and not necessarily something you can get done today persay), is to include ways for people to share your articles. By adding buttons for people to Twitter, Digg or Facebook your article, you’re leaving it up to your existing readers to spread the word. It’s a hands-off approach but it works well for many publishers.
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If you have something more important to pass along, like a free book, webinar or other type of product, you can try incorporating “Tweet This” buttons on your website.
Every Friday we have something called Free Report Friday. We promote it via email and also in our Twitter feed. Not surprisingly, a good majority of our new email signups come from these Friday tweets that introduce our followers to a new white paper on our website.
You’ll notice on our 13 Best Email Subject Lines white paper landing page, we have this button. It’s easier than you think to implement because you can get one from Hubspot. All you have to do is enter the link to the report, and the text you want people to say in their tweet.
For example, when someone clicks that button, they will tweet ” Great free white paper from @mequoda – The 13 Best Email Subject Lines – http://bit.ly/bQ5sO“.
It’s no effort on our part, and many people click the button before they’ve even read the report because (1) they think the topic is interesting and of value to their followers and (2) it’s easy.
So, what can you do today to drive more traffic to one of the articles you posted?
