Welcome to our Ultimate 2018 Guide to driving traffic to your blog posts, videos, infographics and more. This is Part 3, focusing on our top tips for how best to use republishing and email marketing to get the word out about your work.
(Find Parts 1 and 2, which focus on how to choose your content topics and how to use social media to drive traffic, here and here)
Part 3: How to use republishing and email to drive traffic
This part of the guide, we’ve split our tips into two parts – the first deals with republishing tools like Medium and LinkedIn Pulse to get more eyeballs, and the latter deals with how to use email to drive consistent traffic.
Republishing across the web
If your primary goal is more eyeballs on your content, it’s worth considering whether your website should be the only place where it’s hosted. It’s always preferable to get potential customers directly to your website, but below we’ve highlighted two networks which we think are particularly effective for giving your content a visibility boost.
1. Medium
Medium is a popular blogging network, where anyone can publish written content and include pictures, videos and links. Its chief advantages are its scale – it’s well known and widely used – and its categorisation features, which allow you to give your content visibility by placing it in a category which can be browsed by users interested in the topic.
It’s not merely a method of blogging, but also a social network in its own right. Users can comment on each others’ posts, and ‘clap’ them (similar to liking on Twitter or Facebook). The more comments and claps you receive, the more visible Medium will make your content.
If you do decide to use Medium, we recommend cross-publishing your content across both your own website and your Medium account. Include a link back to the original website version in your Medium post.
Also, ensure you correctly categorise the post on Medium, then begin following other relevant users and ‘clapping’ or commenting their content, to help draw attention to your own.
2. LinkedIn Publishing
This can be an excellent place to republish your written work, especially for B2Bs. You may already have a LinkedIn account with an existing network of followers you can reach, and LinkedIn makes it very easy to publish articles which will reach them. Simply click the ‘Write an article’ button at the bottom of the field for entering a status update on the homepage.
You can add images and video to your content, and when you publish, other LinkedIn users are able to comment, like and share your post. Links to your posts will also appear at the top of your LinkedIn profile, for extra visibility.
As with Medium, we recommend cross-publishing your content both on your website and LinkedIn, and including a link back to your website in the LinkedIn post.
When you’ve completed your blog post on LinkedIn Publishing, you’ll be prompted to create a short update promoting it to your connections. To help grab attention, @mention contacts that you think might (legitimately) have an interest in the post when you do this.
Email marketing
Reports of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated. It remains an extremely powerful tool for getting views on your content. Here’s how to make the most of it without contravening data protection, annoying your customers, or wasting your time.
1. You don’t need a newsletter to promote content
Don’t feel you need lots of content before you can send out an email. If you’ve got just one strong article or video that you feel would interest your existing customers or (double opted-in) mailing list. Seek feedback from your customers on the content and whether they found it interesting, and track whether they clicked.
If they did, consider sending content more frequently. If they didn’t, take a step back to consider why – is it the content, or the quality of the email?
2. Keep your emails brief
Let your content tell the story – give your recipients just enough information that they want to click through. If you’re promoting a video, include a screenshot of the video, ideally with a ‘play’ sign layered over the top – just to make it absolutely clear what they’ll be directed to if they click.
3. Test out different styles of subject line
There’s a real art to composing a great subject line. Work to make yours stand out in your recipients’ inboxes by by phrasing them as a question, including emoji, or being deliberately slightly vague about the contents.
4. Track your links
This is crucial for knowing how effective your emails are at driving traffic to your content. There are lots of different ways of tracking links, but one of the most powerful and flexible is Google Analytics, and one of the easiest to setup and use is Bitly.
With Google Analytics, you’ll want to implement what’s called UTM tracking. This allows you to see clicks in your link reflected within your Google Analytics account. Use Google’s own Campaign URL Builder tool to create these, then place them in your email. When recipients click, your Google Analytics will record it.
Bitly is simpler but less powerful. You’ll want to setup an account on the Bitly website, then simply place the URL for your content in their form for shortening. This shortened version can then be placed in your email, and your Bitly account will track how many clicks it receives. As a handy bonus, this can be used to track clicks on links to websites other than your own (for example, Medium, or LinkedIn).
5. Build content promotion into your business development emails
Reaching out to leads and pre-prospects for a conversation or to let them know about new products or services? Include a link to your latest piece of content in the email.
This serves two purposes – one, it gives the recipient a way to interact with you, even if they don’t reply. If you’re tracking your links as you should be, that means you’ll know they’ve at least shown some interest in what you have to say. Two, it gives you another opportunity to promote your content and get more views.
