3 Traffic-Driving Content Hacks for Publishers and Brands

Everyone loves a good “hack”—little, intuitive tricks and tips that are easy to implement yet yield measurable results. Can you “growth-hack” your way to high-performing content marketing and triple your audience overnight? No, and that shouldn’t be the goal in the first place. When it comes to developing and delivering a winning content strategy, there are no shortcuts: Building and growing an audience--whether it be on your social channels or your site--takes dedication and time, and your focus should be on steady, incremental progress. That’s where hacks come into play. Hacks aren’t a strategy; they are facilitators of your strategy. If you’re committed to successfully building out your content channel, here are three simple suggestions to achieving more traffic. Leverage your evergreen content The beauty of evergreen content is that it has legs. Unlike content that is tied to news or a specific event, evergreen items remain relevant for a longer period of time and, therefore, have the potential to attract traffic indefinitely. The only thing you need to do is make sure it stays visible. One option is simply to reshare your evergreen content via your social channels using unique copy (never duplicate the language of the original post). Another option is to group evergreen copy under a category and republish it as an aggregate piece. If, for example, you have several blog posts on content marketing strategy, aggregate them into an “Ultimate Guide for Content Marketers” or select among them the “Top 5 Tips for Content Marketing.” Use interactive content It’s time to start engaging your audience in a conversation by using interactive content formats. What does interactive content look like? Some of the most popular formats include quizzes, polls and trivia, and publishers from various industries are employing them to create a more enriching environment for their audience. Take this recent example by MTV that jumps on the Pokemon Go craze: How Well Do You Remember the Pokemon Theme Song Lyrics? MTV could have easily written out the lyrics and given it to its audience as a refresher, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, it enticed readers with nostalgia and made the experience interactive. Publishers and brands can leverage this type of content around newsworthy events, like the 2016 election season and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Time, for example, polls their readers frequently on topics such as, “Who should Donald Trump pick as his running mate?” Doing so transforms its site into a platform for users to lend themselves to a current, hot topic. Your audience holds its own voice, knowledge and characteristics. Let them express and explore themselves through your brand with content that gives them the chance to do so. Curate what you can’t create from scratch Developing original, quality content takes time, effort and resources, and not every brand and publisher has the capacity to sustain that process on a daily or even weekly basis. Here’s the good news: You can stay relevant and useful to your audience by publishing link roundups, which are simple, weekly or daily curations of your industry’s best content. For example, rather than creating your own piece of content from scratch on “Helpful Content Marketing Hacks,” search for relevant content on the subject from influencers in your industry and round it all up for your audience. Jo Barrow is the head of content for the U.K. at Playbuzz. She can be reached at Jo@playbuzz.com. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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3 Traffic-Driving Content Hacks for Publishers and Brands

Hacks aren’t a strategy; they are facilitators of your strategy. If you’re committed to successfully building out your content channel, here are three simple suggestions to achieving more traffic.

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