You know the saying: All dressed up and nowhere to go. That’s sort of how it feels when you’ve slaved over your website and content only to realize there’s nobody coming to the party. It’s now easier than ever to have poor-performing content all over your website. More than 80 percent of the content published on a given website drives little to no organic traffic. What do you do to promote content that isn’t performing well? Do you leave it there, rewrite it, trash it? I say promote the heck out of it. Here’s why: as a content marketer, you know the content is useful for your audience, that’s why you created it in the first place. These five tricks will get your terrific content to the party and give it the attention it deserves.
#1 Use Click To Tweet
If your content is getting a lot of traffic, but no shares to show for it, the Click To Tweet plugin can encourage readers to share your posts. It’s a simple snippet in specific parts of your post’s body that encourages readers to share a selected quote from the article.
Here’s what this looks like.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
The plugin makes it super easy for readers to tweet quotes they like in your content, promote it, and generate brand awareness.
#2 Promote poor-performing content via paid ads
My tip above helps you drive shares to content that’s getting traffic; but what happens when you don’t get any traffic? Content marketing has clearly gone beyond just sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and crossing your fingers hoping it will garner attention. You need to spend time generating traffic, and that’s where paid ads come in. Ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, when done right, can drive an avalanche of traffic to your poor-performing content within a few hours or days. The team at DigitalMarketer, for example, ran a Twitter ad on a blog post and got 198% ROI — which amounted to over $7000 dollars in revenue.
#3 Get Influencers on board to share your content
If you’re not getting traffic to a piece of content, influencer outreach is another effective option. Influencers are often social media users in your industry with tens of thousands of followers. However, having just one influencer share your content won’t cut it. Most influencers, even with their thousands of followers only get a handful of clicks per tweet. Last year, I had an influencer with 244k followers retweet a post and it got 15 clicks.
Not exactly the “woot woot” moment I had imagined. There’s nothing wrong with having influencers tweet or share your poor-performing content; it’s a great idea, in fact. But you need more than one carrying the load and sharing your post, so you’ll have more to show for your efforts. Reach out engage influencers who have large audiences and make the most of their visibility. And while you’re at it, make the most of every post by including lead magnets right in the body.
#4 Have lead magnets in the middle of the post (alongside strong copy)
What if your content is getting traffic and shares but no conversions? After everything’s said and done, you need conversions, and having lead magnets in the middle of your posts helps you drive that traffic right to you. There’s a caveat, though: the lead magnet has to be relevant to the post. If your lead magnet is on a topic like Free Social Media Tools, don’t use it on an article about lead generation. Showing the reader your lead magnet on Free Social Media Tools would be like changing the subject of a focused conversation midstream. You can confuse your audience.
Instead, a lead magnet about free social media tools will be more relevant to people reading a post about premium social media tools. If they are reading about social media tools they can pay to use, then they might be happy to check free options. Hubspot does a great job with this on their posts:
The post is about social media trends; Hubspot put in a lead magnet — right after the third paragraph about a social media calendar. What a way to drive conversions!
5. Use the swipe up feature on Instagram
This tip is only useful for business (not personal) accounts with at least 10,000 followers. So, if your company’s Instagram page has 10,000 followers or above, it’s a great opportunity to get traffic to your blog posts. The engagement on Instagram stories is bonkers these days; it has up to 300 million active daily users. The Next Web excels at exploiting this opportunity. They post about five Instagram stories for their new posts to over 80,000 of their Instagram followers.
This way, Instagram followers swipe up on your story and land on your blog post, and a poor-performing post can be transformed into viral content.
Conclusion
If your content is not performing well, it doesn’t mean it will never perform well. You created it in the first place because you knew it would impact your audience, but for some reason, they’re not engaging with the message. Click to Tweet can help you drive shares, paid ads create swarms of traffic over a short period, influencer outreach can help drive traffic, lead magnets in the midst of your posts can drive leads and conversions, and finally, Instagram stories can bring visitors to your doorstep.
Work with these strategies to get the traffic you deserve. You’ve done your best to come up with valuable, shareable, actionable content. Use these tips to see that readers both see and share your posts.