Creating Content To Drive Traffic One of the biggest bugbears of some more familiar ‘old-style’ traffic generation tactics was that if you wanted to optimize your site to enable Search Engines to find it (a process known as ‘Search Engine Optimization’ or SEO) then that meant creating content that was, quite honestly, gibberish to the human eye or mind.
Blogs have moved the goalposts significantly so that is no longer necessarily the case!
Now, that is not to say that SEO is a tactic that you no longer need to consider. Indeed, with ever increasing competition in online market places, it is probably something that needs greater thought and consideration with every passing day.
But, blogs do have a great deal of intrinsic SEO advantages over traditional static website, as made very clear in this excellent article by Lee Odden entitled “SEO Benefits From Blogs”.
The great news too is that is no longer absolutely necessary to write palpable nonsense in order to attract the Goggle or Yahoo robot spiders.
Indeed, in today’s online business marketplace, it is important that you really strive to write to attract real human beings, without all of the often ridiculous keyword repetition and pedantic, wooden writing styles that you might have been forced to use at one time.
Now, the answer is to write as naturally and clearly as possible, and let the search engines sort out how to rank your content on their own.
But there are nevertheless still some small SEO tricks or tweaks that you should focus on, things that will (thankfully) be unnoticed by your visitors, so that they are no bothered or put off reading your copy by what were at one time some pretty obvious (and ridiculous) SEO tricks.
The point is that these little tweaks are super noticeable to the bots from Google, Yahoo and the like, the next time they come calling!
Post Titles: You will rank higher in the engines if your main keyword is included in the title of your post, especially if you are creative enough to make it the first word.
Tagging: Tagging is a process of ‘highlighting’ specific words in your post as being the keywords that you want the bots to take notice of. By using the ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’ plug-in, you will be able to tag the proper keywords for your posts at the bottom of the posts.
Those slightly technical details aside, how do you make your content attract visitors and gain a reaction from them?
Firstly, do not write bland, boring stuff that tells people nothing. Give them nothing and that is exactly what you will get in return.
Aim to create content that can raise your readers from their torpor, and elicit a response, so try to make your content whatever you need it to be in order to do this.
Whether it is useful or controversial, valuable, unique, thought provoking, poetic or even caustic and sarcastic, it does not really matter.
All of these techniques (and many more besides) would describe the types of content that are most often linked to and appreciated by surfers in ANY niche.
That’s what you need to do with your own content and here is exactly how you do it!
Take a handful of the top keywords that you would apply to your own blog and run a search for them in Google to find the top 10 sites for those keywords.
Read those sites thoroughly, to see what they are saying and (more particularly) how they are saying it.
Are they being controversial or sarcastic? Are they thought provoking or just simply outrageous?
Now, can you create content in the same style?
If so, then search around for a slightly different subject matter or topic, but ideally that is something that is still in the same area of interest, and give it the same treatment!
Truthfully, you should probably accept that the first time that you try this, it is unlikely to be a spectacular success.
The chances are that maybe this style of writing is something that you are none too familiar with and you are accordingly unlikely to be able to carry off the style in anything like a convincing manner.
But, don’t worry overmuch, and certainly do not give in.
You have clearly seen what works in your market niche, and you should make an effort to continue to follow the top ten sites, to keep a constant weather eye on exactly how they are moving forward too.
In the meantime, keep practicing and honing your own skills, and undoubtedly over time you will begin to find that the required writing style will become more natural to you.
So, you will improve and progress naturally too.
Also, be aware that the subject matter that you are writing about has a part to play in the popularity of your content.
There are some subject matters or topics that are going to be more interesting than others and my own experiences tell me that, despite your best efforts, it is not always so easy to know what the really popular topics will be beforehand.
I can tell you as a fact that some of the blog postings and articles that I have written that I genuinely expected to ‘catch fire’ in actual fact did nothing.
Then, there were other pieces that I created and almost immediately and completely forgot about, that turned out to be the ones that drove masses of visitors to my blog, simply because the subject matter together with the style of writing seemed to hit a collective nerve somehow.
So, if what you write the first time does not set the world on fire, do not be too hard on yourself, but just work on doing the job far better next time!
Letting Others Create Content
Wordpress allows people to register with your blog site, so you can simply upgrade these people in your admin area to ‘author’ class subscribers, and invite them to contribute.
They are then able to come in and make posts on your blog without seeing or having any kind of access to the more sensitive areas of your WP admin area.
So, you could approach other bloggers in your niche and offer to write unique content and articles for their blog sites, in return for which they would do the same for you.
This would bring a fresh perspective to both of your sites, and should increase traffic for both of you as well, as some of his (or her) loyal readers would take a look (possibly for the very first time) at your site, and vice versa.
Now, extend that idea from a straight one-for-one swap to a group of twenty of fifty bloggers all working together in the same niche, cross-fertilizing each others blog sites with fresh new content on a regular basis.
Imagine how many new visitors that could add to your site, simply by posting articles that you would be writing anyway on a site belonging to someone else, rather than to your own.
This has a couple of further added advantages too.
The more posts that are on your blog site, the more keywords that you can be potentially ranking for in the search engines, plus it creates links between all of the different blogs in the group, and a good network of links is clearly established as one of the two major keys to achieving high search engine rankings (together with SEO).
