As a new blogger, looking for ways to drive traffic to your blog, what is the most commonly shared advice that you’ve seen on different internet marketing blogs?
Let me guess; create great content, share on social media, work on your blog’s SEO – right?
There’s nothing wrong with this advice, except that most of it is incomplete.
Creating great content, sharing it on social media andbuilding a strong SEO foundation for your blog are some of the fundamentals of modern day blogging.
But to create a massively popular blog in a very short time, you need to be smarter than the average blogger.
In this post, I’m going to share a simple strategy that can fast-track the growth of your blog and bring hundreds and thousands of visitors to every blog post you publish.
1. Create Content for Guaranteed Success
Most bloggers analyze the needs and interests of their readers (combined with some guess work) to come up with relevant content ideas for new blog posts.
But what if I tell you a simple technique to get thousands of visitors, hundreds of social shares and dozens of comments on every blog post you create?
It’s called the Skyscraper technique, and it was first introduced by Brian Dean (Backlinko).
The basic idea behind it, is that instead of reinventing the wheel and coming up with entirely new and untested blogging ideas, you look for similar blog posts that have already done well in terms of traffic, social shares and comments.
You then carefully study this popular post, find loopholes in it, and create a new original post that is bigger, better and heavier in terms of content length, real life example, lots of statistics and references, and snapshots.
Since learning this technique, I’ve used it for creating dozens of blog posts, and almost every time I’ve achieved remarkable results (both for myself and my clients).
So I can confidently tell you that it really works.
Here’s how you can do it.
- Take the main keyword related to your topic, for example guest blogging, and enter it in the Ahrefs Content Explorer. This tool shows you the blog posts that have the highest social shares.
- Analyze the results of your search query and make sure they’re sorted according to the highest number of shares.
- Open the posts that are closest to your original idea and analyze them in detail. Study the post structure, the kinds of images used, and any other thing that makes the post stand out.
- Now create an original post for your own blog, on the same topic, and make it MUCH bigger, better and heavier.
- Go in much more detail and make the post more useful for the readers.
- Also add multiple tweetable quotes for your readers, using ClickToTweet, and mention other bloggers in your post.
That’s it!
I’ll be the first one to admit that executing this strategy takes a lot of time and effort. But the results are almost guaranteed, because you’re modelling your content on an already proven idea.
Once you publish your post, you obviously need to promote it aggressively and take full advantage of the traffic that comes in.
Let me explain this in the next two points.
2. Build Your Email List from Day One
Ask any successful blogger and they’ll tell you that email list building should be your number one priority from the day you start blogging.
But it becomes even more important when you’re using the Skyscraper technique that I described in the first point. Using this technique, you’ll be putting in a LOT of effort in creating content.
You need to make it count in terms of the number of subscribes you have.
Setup your blog for success by creating an email sign up incentive for your readers and place it on all the prominent spots of your blog and promote it using pop-ups.
Offer PDF downloads of your Skyscraper post, convert it into a podcast, offer a summary checklist or any other incentive that can lure your readers into signing up for your blog (here are some great examples of sign up bribes).
The main idea is to capitalize on the efforts that you’ve put into creating your content and convert your readers into subscribers so that you can drive more traffic from your email list in future.
3. Have a Consistent Social Media Sharing Plan
You’ve created an epic blog post, and you have your email opt-in boxes in place to attract subscribers. Now all you need to do is to give your content some early momentum and drive traffic from different social media websites.
Most bloggers share their posts when they first publish them. But after sharing once or twice, they stop.
This is a huge mistake.
You need to understand how social media works. People using social media are bombarded with hundreds of Tweets and Facebook updates every day. If you share your posts just once, you’re likely to be ignored.
So you need to have a social sharing plan for every post. Here’s a great example shared on theCoSchedule blog.
Your target audience is distributed in different time zones, so you also need to schedule your updates in the peak hours of different time zones for maximum engagement.
For example, the best time to post on Facebook is between 1PM-4PM, and Wednesday has the highest engagement rates.
You can study this detailed infographic on the science of social sharing to learn about the right posting times on other leading social networks.
The basic idea is to ensure that you consistently share your content even months after publishing it.
Apart from using social media tools like Buffer and Hootsuite for scheduling your posts, you can use theRevive Old Posts WordPress plugin to share the archive content on your blog automatically on different social networks.
Wrapping Up
Many new bloggers feel overwhelmed by the number of competitors in their niche. However, even as a newbie, you can significantly increase the growth of your blog and compete with other established blogs if you focus on creating Skyscraper content and combine it with aggressive social media marketing and email list building. If you stick to this strategy for a few months, you have every chance of beating your competitors and establishing a hugely popular blog.
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