Here at Neil Walker Digital we’ve written a lot about content, from the advantages of content marketing vs. native advertising to how to organise your content around a successful marketing campaign, our blogs aim to let you know about what’s going on in the digital world of advertising. If something’s trending, we want to let you know how and why it is doing so well and what you can learn from it.
As of yet though, we haven’t given advice on how to write content, whether to go for quantity over quality, about content marketing services and agencies, or what to do in blog writing to increase online traffic (and even make money!). Whilst there are no hard and fast rules on writing content, there are certainly a few lessons to be learnt from some of the giants in online traffic. With this advice, hopefully you’ll have an insight into what content gets high traffic, and how you can increase your own site visitors using clever content writing.
Time your Content
Most of the high ranking blogs and sites have rapidly increased their traffic and Google ranking through the use of topics that are trending. Specifically, trending through mainstream news. This is because more people will search for it, meaning you have a higher chance of receiving visitors from potential readers. It can also increase your google ranking, as if you’re constantly putting out content with high search numbers they’re more likely to increase your site’s authority in future results.
As we’ve mentioned before, using sites such as Alltop can give an idea of what’s popular and trending in the online community. Alltop collects together the most popular content from some of the most visited sites on the web and presents it all together. It’s a bit like having all of the national newspapers of the internet laid out on the table in front you, for you to pick the headline stories to run with. Timing can be everything with this sort of content, and making sure you release a story whilst it’s popular is paramount – otherwise you just can run the risk of telling people a story they’ve already heard before.
Quantity/Quality: The Age Old Question
In the battle of quantity versus quality there are arguments for both sides, and we’ll return to the advantages of producing consistent quality content later on, but for the moment we’ll be focussing on quantity. In terms of quickly gaining rapid content, quantity is the way to go, with many of the big companies out there setting goals to write blog posts at least 4 times day. It may pain many writers to hear, but when hits are concerned, churning out article after article wins out over a single, well craft piece of literature.
Why?
Well for one, it makes sense that the more content you have on a blog the more things there are for people to see and carry on looking at on your site. One great article can get a lot of attention, but unless you can keep writing them over and over it’ll be hard to find any advertising revenue. The more articles you fire out, the more likely you are to hit.
An interesting thing to bear in mind concerning the website views of articles that have been regularly posted is that attention hasn’t just come from social media shares, it’s mostly been because of Google. This article here shows that content sites that publish 4 or more posts a day receive 55% or more of their traffic from search engines. As said before, the more indexed pages, the more of your website or blog search engines have to show, and the more relevant and up to date the content in that is, the more reasons Search engines have to include you in results.
Convert Influence into Traffic
This is where social media gets involved. Most successful blog writers have a large influence and are pretty well connected in regards to networking. This helps them to get their stories spread around the internet by the right people. Like when a younger band supports the headline act, it is one company using their influence to inform their potential viewer base of other services. When producing content, it’s worth considering who to aim your work at, but also who else will want to use it. Smaller companies will benefit from being shared by those with a larger audience, helping raise the number of traffic for content.
Dan Carnegie wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People:
You can make more friends in two by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
This is definitely true of online content and networking. Spending that extra bit of time getting to know influential bloggers and site owners can be the difference between thousands, if not millions of views. The same is true of the writers you hire to produce content.
Hiring great writers is a great way to produce quality content, but as we said we’ll be returning to advantages of quality later. When searching for a decent contributor to your blogs have a look at author statistics before choosing it. Great articles produce loyalty but may not bring in as many visitors as one that is written by a well connected writer that can bring extra traffic to your site. When a sports team looks for new talent, they may look at quality of play, but more often than not they’ll look for results. Is that player going to give them the goals they need?
When talking about the online world, quality can frequently get converted to meaning online reception. If you’re making at least 4 posts a day it can be tough without the help of some excellent contributors, so make sure you’ve got writers that are adding to the number of views your website receives. If they’re not, find out why and maybe consider looking for another writer that can.
Follow your head, not your heart when writing
It can be difficult to decide what to write on even when you’ve had a look to see what’s trending. As with choosing an author, however, it may pay off to go with what the numbers say rather than a gut instinct. As mentioned before, search engines base their results and ranking on numbers of posts and numbers of hits. There may be an article you can produce that a small number of people will find very interesting, but in order to convert your visitor numbers into advertising revenue, it can pay off to follow what will get the most views.
Tread Carefully, and Carry a Large Headline
Newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Sun may not be praised for journalistic integrity, but are repeatedly the best selling papers in the country. Why is this? One reason could be their big attention grabbing headlines. Copyblogger wrote a whole book on the importance of headlines, stating that on ‘On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.’ A magnetic headline is often what attracts a reader to follow a link leading to your website, as this is generally the only information a user has to expect when looking for content to view.
Headlines, however, are not so easy to write as content topics. The website Upworthy is regarded as one of the fastest growing online publications, and are known for a their distinctive headline style. This is not without criticism though, and this aggressive method of blogging certain gains a lot of traffic, but the challenge when a website receives a lot of traffic is keeping those numbers for the sake of a successful blog in the long term. These tactics can work really well, but only time will tell what the long term success will be.
Maintaining the Highway for steady Traffic
Once you’ve established a steady level of growth and high traffic for your site, the next step is continuing that growth and interest in your content. This is where it can really pay to look at what the big companies are doing to maintain a consistent level of interest. Think about acquiring other user’s content. It’s a simple way of gaining traffic without putting a lot of work in yourself. As mentioned previously, whilst the younger band is getting to perform on the same stage as the headline act, all that bands audience are going to stick around for who they paid the money to see.
Here is where quality content really comes into play. Via the use of tricks and tips such as trend following and networking, it can be surprisingly easy to get a lot of hits, provided you follow the right rules. How do you keep that traffic coming to your site? You need to provide your audience with something they’ll keep coming back for. A great example of how using other people’s quality content can be used to great effect can be seen in the website Cracked. Cracked is a humour website that began life as an American printed humour magazin frequently viewed as an imitator of Mad magazine. Upon going online in 2005, however, a complete overhaul of format lead to them championing list articles and comedy videos.
By 2012, the website was receiving 300,000,000 hits a month, with 7.3 million users. What’s more impressive is that in one month, visitors spent over 255 million minutes on the site, 5 times more than global franchise Comedy Central’s website and 9 times more than rival website funny or die set up by Comedy star Will Ferrell.
Cracked themselves run an open forum for readers to become contributors and writers to the site, with over 90% of their content coming from this method. An audience that know your product, and relish the opportunity to write for them – what better way to acquire content than by having the very fan base that visit your site produce the content for it? You get the benefit of content that visitors want to read, combined with a writer sharing their work with a demographic that more than likely will stick by and view other content on the sight.
It comes as no surprise that Cracked was bought out in 2007 by demand media, showing that a high traffic and retention rate really talks to companies with a lot of money to spend acquiring website and content. Quantity and following the numbers may bring in the high numbers of content, but what sustains the high numbers and produces brand loyalty is great quality content that understands its audience. It’s the basis of most business; follow the market and give the customer what they want.
Conclusion
Content is a great way to drive a website, it can quickly gather traffic and, if a blog publishes high quality content on a regular basis, it can quickly become a big contender, possibly generating some advertising revenue or a big company buy out. Looking at SEO content writing and even content writing agencies can be a good way to upgrade your current traffic rate. Keeping website content writing in mind will make sure that you don’t stray too far, and continue to provide high quality content that will sustain a high online hits rate. Hopefully we’ve shown you a few lessons in content writing to send you in the right direction to creating engaging and attention grabbing content.
What did you think about content writing? Have any tips or lesson you’d like to share? Join the conversation on Twitter theukseo