How to Create Content That Drives Traffic, Engages Prospects, and Spreads Virally

  Everyone wants to attract more traffic to their website. But to win business you need to get the right type of traffic and engage them once they arrive. To do this you need high quality, relevant content. Information that interests your target prospects, adds value, and makes them want to read it and come back for more later. After you create great content, you need to promote it by publishing it online so it gets in front of your desired target audience.

To really grow your audience and drive traffic, you want your content to spread virally across the community by having readers re-tweet, post experts, add comments, and publish to other blogs and social media.

Here are 5 Keys to creating content that drives traffic, engages prospects and has the potential to spread virally:

Understand What Your Customer is Interested In - begin by thinking about your customers. Make a list of the top problems your customer's face, the top reasons they buy from you, the most frequent questions they ask, and the type of industry information they are most interested in. Look at the search terms your target uses when coming to your page. Visit some of your customer's LinkedIn pages and see what groups they have joined and what discussions are most popular. Look at industry associations, forums, and information they consume.

Make a List of Compelling Headlines - after learning what your target is interested in, make a list of "Headlines" to write about. Keep the list on file and start working your way down the list to create relevant articles and posts https://yoo.rs/. Think of different ways to write short, impactful headlines. You can ask provocative questions, explain "How to" accomplish an important task, make a "Top 5, 7, or 10 List", share important or breaking news, learnings, or facts in the industry, or tell a story about a recent encounter with a customer who had a challenge or solved a problem.

Have "Stopping Power" - Successful magazine ads have stopping power. There is a lot of clutter, so advertisers know they need to GRAB your attention with a powerful headline and an eye catching visual. The Internet is no different. There are two critical hurdles you must pass in order to get people to read your content. Instantaneous Attraction - Most website visitors make an instantaneous decision, in the first few milliseconds of landing on your page, whether they will engage and start reading your content or whether they will click away. This instantaneous attraction is driven by a powerful visual and compelling headline. Make sure you write good headlines and try to have an attention grabbing image. Engaging Point of View - After to have "Stopped" someone, they will spend about 30 seconds to 1 minute reading your first paragraph to determine if you have something that engages them, or if you are just regurgitating plain vanilla information they either already know or can get just about anywhere.

SEO Optimize Your Content - to attract the right target you need to use the right keyword terms that they will be searching on. Make sure you do your keyword research using the right 2 to 3 word keyword phrases and also very specific 4 to 5 word keyword phrases. Use these keyword phrases in the headline, body copy, content description, and tags.

Promote Your Content and Create Backlinks - each backlink you have is a pathway that leads people and traffic to your content. Create as many links and pathways as possible by promoting your content across a wide variety of social media venues. Publish to Facebook, LinkedIn, eZine Articles, Yahoo, and online industry sites. Also, place links to the content in relevant blogs and forums. But make sure to only place links when the content adds value and is on topic so you build up a good reputation among the target audience.

Content now days makes the web go round and round, gone are the days when dancing hamsters was as good as it got online, rich content sites like YouTube and social networks were just a twinkle in their creators eyes. Over the past 10 years, it has been shown many times that content is needed to keep users happy and with all the content aware spiders out there, your SEO performance will suffer if you don't keep your site fresh with new and rich content. We are going to look at how, what and why you need to keep your content fresh to drive users to your site and make it a success.

Every day hundreds of million users create and distribute everything from videos showing you how to knit, to podcasts debating social change, to an article investigating foreign policy within a government - content on the web has evolved. With so much content created, the web has established a great pool of information at users fingertips. We have not seen this type of media, which enables even a child with a smartphone, can now create videos and photos that can be uploaded online and put into the hands of million users around the world.

Formats

The pen is mighty than the sword, a written article that is a medium that can be distributed at the touch of the button and read by millions of people. This is the key to your sites popularity and its success. Having a rich amount of information at a users click of a button, can keep a users attention and make the site work. If the user gets bored then they move on and your sites message or business will not make the impact you want. Written information is also at the heart of your SEO, you need written content with those all important keywords in it to keep Google, bing and yahoo happy and your index position high.

Online videos are an up and coming format that is driving web usage along at a fantastic pace, online video sites are now becoming a wealth of visual information with millions of users every day browsing and uploading videos. You can review, promote, criticise, explore, discuss anything with hundreds of millions of potential viewers. A good video can drive thousands of users to your site and rack up millions of views and that just cant be ignored in your SEO plans and these days all you need is a camera to get you started.

Radio, once the king of media has now its place online, with its evolution into podcasts. Podcasts are small radio styled shows that can be updated and distributed for free, giving the user a simple platform to gain any type of information with a few clicks that can be used on a host of different platforms. As they are audio it can be a very inexpensive way of making interactive content that can be used on a host of different mobile platforms.

I can do that!

If like most people you are now thinking "I would love to do something like that, but how can I do it?". You can easily start putting pen to paper, pick up a video camera or start recording a podcast. This is start but to really get your content screaming you need time and effort into making it stand out. It need to be planned out, write everything out and take your time in producing it. Your hard work should not be rushed, with so much content online users are very savvy in spotting low standard content and will move along very quickly.

Your content can easily get swallowed up and disappear with the millions of videos that are uploaded every day. You to make your piece unique to make a impact on a site like that and with big companies spending thousands of dollars on doing just that your video might pale in comparison. You need to look into the cost to produce, time to make, remember to take into account the work that you are doing, spending 8 months 24/7 making a video that gets 100o hits in a year is not a good return on your time.

Creation finished, but how to get it out there.

You now have your content to wow your audience and need to get it online onto sites for all those hits. Sites like YouTube might appear to be a great place to start with millions of users on it but that's also its downfall. Your best strategy distributing your content is to start at the bottom and work your way up. Finding a site that is specialises in your content and promoting it within its boundaries can help target the viewers you want. With distribution strategy you can make that content drive users to you and make you the authority within your niche. You need to leave a content breadcrumb trail which leads back to your site, it will help create your important back links and help setup your sites authority within your communities. Make a plan to distribute it, take into account users feedback, recommendations and adjust your methods in creating next pieces. Its like making a big net and casting into the ocean, it takes time to construct but will be there always catching fish.

Now you may ask with such information at my fingertips "why cant I copy a few - it all sounds like very hard work and with so many sites no one will notice", Wrong. With search engines rules changing every day Google wants and needs to keep users happy and by only indexing and displaying sites with original content they will keep those users happy.