Content Production 101 - Creating Great Content that Gets Traffic & Links
Content marketing can help your company bring in lots of relevant traffic who are interested in what you do. But it’s not easy. Producing one piece of amazing content can be challenging enough, let alone creating lots of great campaigns that consistently gets traffic and links. These days, there is more digital content online than ever, leading the market to become saturated and making it harder than ever to gain coverage. So how can you develop your content production so that you’re consistently getting traffic and links?
Read these top tips to help boost your content marketing strategy and consistently create great campaigns that gets links…
Get creative
With over 3 million blog posts being published on the internet every day, it can be hard for your content to stand out. Therefore, getting creative with formats and thinking of some cool visual components in favour of a standard blog post, will help your content be more memorable.
Interactive maps, infographics, GIFS and videos are all great examples of alternative formats for online content pieces. Offering extra copy points, quotes or extra data in your outreach can also help journalists create an article without needing a visual component, if they would rather not host the content piece on their site.
Think about timings and sustainability
Great content pieces will allow you to generate traffic and links for months after you’ve launched them. While a Christmas piece that is launched for a couple of weeks over the festive period is great, a broader winter piece that can be repitched and repurposed over a period of four or five months will help you build links and traffic over time.
We learnt from our mistakes last year when we launched a piece of seasonal content just a few days before Christmas. While it did get a few links, most journalists had already covered or scheduled their Christmas articles, leaving us with content with an incredibly short shelf life. This year, we’ve made sure the refreshed and updated piece was uploaded to the client’s website in the first week of November, giving us plenty of time to outreach in the build up to the festive period.
Similarly, while content pieces centred around current affairs, news topics and events or awareness days may catch an audience’s attention, you’ll need to be confident that you will be able to push the idea through concept, into build, and have it uploaded to a website in plenty of time. Think about how you can develop sustainable content so that you can repurpose or update the piece at a later point in time, or reuse elements of the content for future pieces.
Ask for feedback
Let’s face it, we’re all guilty of becoming consumed in ideas that we love, and this can skew our objective judgements on how well the piece is going to perform, or how the idea can be improved.
Feedback is therefore imperative when developing content ideas, and also throughout the design and build process. Ask colleagues on a different team, or even drop your partner or friends a quick text to see what they think of the idea or design, to gain multiple opinions about what is working well, what can be improved, and to sense-check for any design glitches, typos or grammatical errors. In the era of a 24 hour digital news and content consumption, ensuring that all your content campaigns are optimised for all screen sizes, browsers and devices can also make a huge difference to how much traffic you receive from your content.
If you’re unsure on how well a content piece is going to perform once you’ve started outreaching, why not try requesting feedback from a journalist? It may be that the piece or idea is not right for that particular journalist or publication at the time, or it may be a specific concept or design flaw, but gaining insight from the people who you are pitching your content to will be invaluable when you’re next brainstorming for ideas.
Don’t neglect your content promotion
At the end of the day, no matter how great your content is, and no matter how well it’s been designed and optimised, it is unlikely to get links without a strong outreach strategy. Stuck on how to pitch your content to journalists? Read our top tips on how to be pitch perfect in your outreach here.
Content promotion should act as the push to earn your content links in the first place, and once your content has been featured on a few reputable sites, there is a much stronger chance to organically gain more links. Once your content has enough links, it will be easier for writers in need of sources to find it and link to it, and so the link cycle continues.