If you're looking to increase traffic to your blog, there are many
tactics that can significantly boost your progress. In today's
Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays a roadmap for the journey, offering 10 of
the best tactics for you to keep in mind along the way.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
This week, we're answering the question, "How can I improve the
readership and reach, the interactions, sharing, and of course, the
links which will all help me get rankings and traffic to my blog?" So a
lot of people start investing in blogging, and I actually think a blog
is a wonderful thing to invest in, assuming you meet the criteria for
what you're trying to achieve with a blog as opposed to separate content
sections. And that means having, you know, a person at least, and
potentially, a team of two, three, four people who can contribute
content on a regular basis and who have an affinity for and stylistic
you know ability to contribute at a very high level because it is tough
to blog.
So you know, a blog is essentially just content that is put out in a
consistent fashion, in a timeline sort of view. Blogs are great because
they can help you do things like earn traffic, and build your brand,
attract links, and shares, and rankings, grow your addressable audience.
And this can also... a blog can also help you create affinity with and a
connection with your community, which means a blog can help you and has
definitely helped me, and a lot of times, manufacture serendipity.
Serendipitous things that wouldn't have otherwise come about; do come
about because you have a blog, because you're creating content on a
regular basis. And that's touching people who can potentially help you
achieve what you're trying to achieve in business.
Now over time, it is absolutely the case that creating a successful
blog has become more and more challenging, more and more difficult. So,
when people look at the Moz Blog and they say, "Gosh you know how did
you achieve this?" One of the things that you have to remember, it's not
like I started or we started as blogging geniuses, right? I mean, go
back and read some of the posts from 2003, 2004; they kind of suck.
They're pretty terrible. But, we were very, very early on, right? If you
think about a time frame for blogging, remember that over time, you're
getting a different set of the audience. So, I think about this a lot
like Clay Christianson's innovator's dilemma. And you have these sort
of innovators, and these innovators are much less picky, they're just
interested in anyone who's talking about this subject matter. So you
know, in those early days, not many people were blogging about SEO;
there were probably four to ten other blogs total and not many of those
had tremendous readership. And so, starting a new SEO blog was pretty
easy. Today, there are tens of thousands. If you're starting a new blog
on the topic of SEO today, you're competition is insane, and you have to
be massively differentiated and just remarkable in order to compete.
Meanwhile, if you're starting a blog on a topic in a niche that very
few people are covering, where there's just not enough—so if you, say, a
year ago or two years ago were writing a blog about cryptocurrency—man
you could be the dominant force, right, the dominant editorial force in
that industry; and that's pretty fascinating. Over time, right, early
adopters and early majority, late majority, and then finally your
laggards come in. And I would say, Moz is probably somewhere between the
early majority and late majority stage in the SEO field. But, this
becomes dramatically more difficult to reach this audience once content
brands are already established producing great stuff in these spheres.
This is why it pays to either be an early adopter and/or differentiate
your blog dramatically from what's already out there. And by
differentiate, I mean, in terms of content, voice, focus, the user
experience—the UI and UX, and the format—the types of content you're
sharing. So potentially, you know, video or interactive content, or you
know, podcasting, potentially. That was maybe a little bit more a few
years ago.
These are some additional tactics that I think can help if you've done
these things right. You've sort of chosen wisely, you know that a blog
is for you, you have the ability to do these things. And now, you're
looking for what's going to move the needle. These are ten tactics that
we've found to be especially effective time and time again and I think
can be helpful to you.
So,
the first one, if you
want to earn participation on your site, and by participation, I mean
people contributing comments, I mean people sharing on social media, I
mean people replying to you, people sending you e-mails about the
content that you're putting out, people inviting you to contribute in
other places, potentially in-person talks, or do this video, or would
you do this webinar for us. Whatever it is, if you want to earn that
participation, you need to participate
first. And this is
something that I did a lot when I started, so I actually I spent my
early days in the forums, right, which was kind of like the precursor to
the blogosphere in the SEO world. I participated tremendously in
probably about six or seven forums all the time. I was on there at least
a few of them every day, writing back and forth and contributing, and
that helped me to earn my first bits of knowledge and to have something
to write about, too. And that participation also extended over to the
blogosphere itself. So, I was commenting on, you know, Aaron Wall's blog
and Donna Fontano's blog, and you know, Danny Sullivan's blog, all the
time. And so, when they came to my site, they'd sort of be like, "Oh
yeah, I know this guy, I've heard of him, I recognize him. He's added
substantial, thoughtful, you know; he didn't just comment spam me or he
didn't just say, "Nice post," he really added something to the
conversation. (Don't look this up; I'm not sure if I actually added
that much to these conversations. But it was early days, right?) That
participation that you perform will be visited back upon your own blog.
People will get the idea that you should.
The
second really critical thing here is the first,
people who contribute, the first people who participate; you want to be
building personal connections with those folks right away. So, the first
few people who are commenting on your blog, go check them out if
they've left an email address, or a Twitter profile, or they've
connected to their Disqus profile... whatever kind of commenting system
you've got, make sure that you are going and figuring them out and at
least at the very least, sending them a thank you over email or over
Twitter, and potentially, even doing more than that, saying like, "Hey, I
checked out your site, I thought this was great. I really liked this
and I appreciate the comment," those kinds of things. That will
reinforce this idea of them coming back. I can't tell you how many times
our community team here at Moz has seen someone tweet something nice
about us and as soon as they get that first response, it builds that
engagement and respect and fandom for life. It's very, very powerful;
you can see this with a lot of brands across the social media sphere.
When Alaska Airlines tweets at me or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
tweets at me, I suddenly feel that personal connection. That's much more
powerful than just, "I know their brand and I like their product."
Number three, so many people make this mistake; never, ever,
ever use a subdomain or a separate root domain to host your blog. Reason
being, your ability to generate domain authority and the potential
rankings boost that comes from the rising tide of domain authority, sort
of lifting all the ships on the domain, will be split if you put it on a
sub domain; and of course, will be completely split if you put it on a
separate root domain. Keeping it all in a sub folder is the best thing
that you can do for your SEO.
Number four, mention, quote, include, and reference
influencers. I see this advice a lot actually. This, sort of like, "Oh,
you know, if someone's influential in this sphere, yeah, you should talk
about them and mention them, and you know, potentially cite articles of
theirs because then, they might see you and share it, and those kinds
of things. That can be wise but even better advice is segment your
influencers, right? They're sort of what I'd call hyper-influential
influencers; people who get things, you know, talking about them many,
many times a day. And therefore, your blog mentioning them or saying
nice things about them is nice, it's meaningful, but it may not attract
their attention nearly as well as if you choose those mid-range or
early-stage influencers. Those folks are tremendously excited to be
mentioned even once somewhere; and they are much likely, much more
likely to become proponents and advocates of the content you produced if
you're mentioning them. This can be a very, very powerful tip. I like
going after the not big influencers, but
niche influencers. I think that's a much more powerful way to do this.
Number five, this is just becoming universal truth and in the
past, it was not this way; which is, better content is outweighing more
content. This might seem surprising, right, because you, a lot of the
advice you've likely heard about blogs and blogging is be consistent,
write every day, produce something of value at least three times a week
or something like this. I have actually found that those blogs today
that are earning outsized influence, outsized voices can often be those
that are only producing content once a week, once every month, couple
times a month. You don't want to go like a whole quarter without
producing something. But in can be the case that if you know that you
only have a certain amount of time to invest and you would rather
produce the most remarkable thing that you can once every thirty days,
rather than try and write every day or every night, I would bias to make
that decision today.
Number six, experiment with home grown or self-created
visuals, and in addition to visuals, data. Reason being, visuals and
data are the two things that I find most in the content world, the
blogosphere included, but the entire content world that get referenced
and reused. This is kind of the way that I've found most effectively to
earn links in what I'd say are link saturated and content saturated
fields, is you want to have that stuff that other people are citing,
other people are including in their work, visuals and data. Especially
by visuals, what I do not mean is go onto, you know, Meme Generator or
Cheezburger or something and, you know, take an image and then edit it a
little bit; I mean, truly creating your own visuals even if they suck. I
have seen really sucky, seen, never mind that; I have made really sucky
visuals. Tell me, is this beautiful whiteboard artwork? It's not. This
is kind of crappy, like, look that's a curve that is clearly not done by
an artist. But, these visuals get repurposed and these visuals get
cited far more so than just text alone and far more so than visuals that
I'm embedding from other sources or ones that I've just, you know,
screenshot and edited. It's that home grown nature even if it's
amateurish, that gets you the citations. The same thing is true for
data.
Number seven, please invest in email subscriptions. If you're
building a blog, one of the best ways to get repeat engagement and
consistently have your voice out there is to have people who are
subscribing to your blog via email. This used to be the case that RSS
was kind of very powerful for this. With the death of Google Reader a
few, a couple years ago now, and the death of kind of blog readers in
general, and more and more people switching to social for finding, you
know, the things that they do read, email has actually re-emerged in my
opinion as a very, very powerful way to get people. I think it never
actually stopped as a powerful way to get people to your blog but it has
certainly reentered the consciousness. And, it can be a great way to
make sure that your content is consistently in front of the people you
want to be in front of.
Number eight, create a self-service method for two of the
most common ways your blog is likely to earn interactions that lead to
links. And, those are translation and repurposing rights. If you have
something in your footer on your sidebar that says, "Want to repurpose,
reuse, or translate our content? Get information here about how to do
that, or we're under a creative commons license," whatever it is. That
can actually nudge more people. You sort of have a higher conversion
rate with that, than if people go, "Gosh, this is really cool content. I
wonder if they'd let me use it. Well, I'd have to dig around for their
email address and try and figure that out. You know what, I'm not going
to bother. Let me go somewhere else." This is why having it somewhere
right on the page, sidebar, you know, footer, bottom of the post, that
kind of thing, can be helpful.
Number nine, I don't always urge people to create controversy, especially not for the
sake of
creating controversy, but having disparate opinions and challenging the
status quo is a very powerful way to build up a unique voice and a
unique audience. Therefore, what I would encourage you to do is to
challenge thought leaders and challenge conventional ideas but do so in a
very respectful way. When I see people who've said, "Hey, Rand you are
dead wrong about this and here's why and here's the evidence, and
they've done so in a very thoughtful and respectful way. There extremely
likely to earn a link or a citation from me at least, at the very
least, a social share, and often times, even a relationship. And I see
this happening with many, many people in many fields. I think this is a
great way to go. It's a way that I've actually built some audience over
the years, challenging notions and theories from, you know, venture
capitalists, and technologists, and other bloggers, people like Fred
Wilson, or Robert Scoble, whom I have argued with over the years; those
kinds of things.
Number Ten, my last one. When you're using social, a lot of
the time people think of social media as a fire-and-forget way to get
their content out so they blog, they produce something, they share it
across their networks, and they're done; that's the end of the
engagement. I saw a graphic that I really liked, tremendously simple
graphic but a great graphic none the less. This came via Kissmetrics,
I think Cyrus Shepard had retweeted it, and I retweeted him. And it
shows basically, you know, different networks; Twitter, Facebook, Google
Plus, and in this case, Tumblr, and when to share on each of them. So
it's says, you know, on publish, share across all five, all four of
those networks. Two hours later, you might want to share again on
Twitter because you're likely reaching a new and different audience. And
the next day, you do want to share on Twitter and probably, on Tumblr
again. And the next week, you share on three of those. And the next
month, you share on a different three. And, you know, two months from
now, you might share again on all four of them.
This is the right way to think about social sharing. It is not fire
and forget; it's being thoughtful about messaging in a timely fashion to
different audiences because remember that time delta means that you're
capturing different people via social and creating unique messages,
unique formats. So you might see that my Twitter account will, on
occasion, reference a blog post I wrote months or even years ago and
say, "I have a reminder about this," or "Don't forget, this still
matters," or "Hey, I'm going to share this graphic via Facebook or
Google plus or Twitter that is taken from this post, and I just want to
remind folks of it," those kinds of things. This can earn a lot of extra
traffic and a lot of extra engagement to posts that you've already put a
tremendous amount of effort into, and that's why it's so valuable. All
right, everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
We'll see you again next week! Take care
