So we’re supposed to be in the era of content generation – where your best shot at getting mass traffic to your site is to generate valuable and useful relevant content targeted at your niche market.
But once you go about trying to put together an action plan toward building out your content strategy, some immediate questions come to mind like "What sort of content should I be generating?" and "Where do I submit my content for best results?"
We share weekly secrets and results of our various advertising and traffic generation tips inside InfoMarketersZone to keep our members up to date on the latest and greatest techniques…but here are some very important tips that may be quite different from what you are hearing in the wider internet marketing community.
ARTICLES:
Yes, articles still are an excellent source of "food" for both the search engines and your niche market to get important information, find your site, assess YOU as a source of information and drive traffic to your lead generation systems.
But…you’ll often hear people who have dozens of articles created that target specific keywords, throw this junk (that’s really what articles written around keyword optimization are) up on their sites and wonder why they only get a trickle of traffic and nobody actually clicks through and buys their product.
Honestly — I often wonder if any of these people really put themselves (for one second) in the mindset of their customers who are urgently looking for answers to questions online, type in keywords and then arrive at this crappy, useless article. For me, I get angry! Do YOU buy from people you are ANGRY with?
No!
A much better approach is to research leading questions in the minds of your readers, write thoughtful answers to their questions (a few paragraphs will sometimes do…longer isn’t always better), post the article to your OWN information portal and then focus on relevant linking strategies back into that article to get it quickly indexed by the search engines.
In my experience, having written well over 1,000 articles in the last few years you will get minimal advantage (perhaps even some disadvantage) from automatically spewing your articles out to a bunch of article directories.
A better approach is…
1. Build your own article portal so you get search engine credit for having the articles on your site.
2. Submit an article or two a week to Ezinearticles – you can then link back to other related articles, your sales site or your article directory in the signature
3. Write an excerpt about the article on a blog you run in separate directory linking back to the article – this will get you inbound links to the articles so they get indexed much faster (as any regularly updated blog gets daily visits from Google as well as all major blog directories if they are in your ping list)
4. Form relationships with other blog publishers and authority site owners in your marketplace where you will write an article a week or even one a month where you trade off exposure…
VIDEOS
We are living in the time of massive video adoption – the result of which means both opportunity and challenge. The opportunity is that people are now willing and have the means to search for video and play that video given the highspeed bandwidth supply to most homes.
The challenge is that there is a massive glut of video hitting the net and that means you need to really stand out by:
1. Making sure your videos are spot on in terms of targeting in-demand topics
2. That you keep your videos as brief as possible. Most questions can be answered in less than 5-minutes, so don’t ramble – get to the point, offer your value and mention your site driving traffic back to an opt-in.
3. Consider getting someone else to do your videos for you if you have a rough command of the English language or have trouble communicating via videos
Google Video/YouTube are still the major portals for video – you must be present on these systems to get full exposure, but lately I’ve also had very good success with Myspace and Facebook in terms of drawing interest from both within these massive social networks as well as being picked up by search engines. For now, I would focus in on these 4 places to upload your video.
Keep in mind, when you produce a short informational video you want to answer a question, create interest, lead people back to an opt-in site where they can get more free information – you can do this within the video itself AND via the description you post alongside your videos. Just as important as the video itself is your PROFILE that you setup on each of these video aggregators – you will find that hundreds of visitors will click through to see your profile and may access your site via links you post in your profile. So – spend time getting your profile setup in an exciting and interesting way with links back to your major sites.
Content works to get more traffic…just maybe not the way you are hearing people speak about it in the internet marketing forums.
Jeff
