5 Ways to Optimize Your Content Marketing to Drive Sales and Traffic

At name.com, we’ve found that content marketing is a wildly successful way to drive traffic and increase website conversions. Content marketing can grow your business, too, but only if you’re creating quality content that’s easy to share. Even if you’re already creating quality content, it’s very likely that there are steps you can take to optimize your content marketing strategy to rank higher in search engines, get more social media referrals, and truly get the most out of the time and talent invested in content.

We put together a list of ideas that are 5 ways to optimize your content marketing strategy to drive sales and traffic:

1. Find guest bloggers: We think that this is one of the most underutilized blogging/content marketing tactics. Guest blogging is powerful because it’s a fantastic way to find smart people who are willing to create great content for you. After a guest blogger creates their guest post for you, they promote it to their friends and followers. This means that you not only get the benefit of a new blog post, but also are able to reach the people who engage with your guest poster. Guest blogging puts your brand in the eyes of new groups of relevant people.

2. Don’t be afraid to share your content on social media multiple times: A lot of people are afraid of sharing their content on social media multiple times. They shouldn’t be. While you shouldn’t be a spammer, you’ll quickly see that this simple tactic will drive traffic to your website from social media. To make sure that you don’t end up looking like a spammer, you shouldn’t schedule your posts to close to each other.

Garrett Moon of CoSchedule wrote a blog post that shows a great example social media posting schedule:

1. Social message sent when blog post goes live.
2. Further social messages trickle out to your accounts over the next 2-3 hours.
3. Messages are shared again on the appropriate social channels the next day.
4. Another series of messages are pre-scheduled and sent the following week.
5. More social messages are pre-scheduled for the following month.
6. Additional messages can optionally be scheduled for the three-month mark or beyond.

3. Try reposting your content to Medium: Medium has been popping up all over the place recently. This makes it a great place to promote new and old content, or content you’ve created in the past that you think deserves a second chance. Because Medium features work from a lot of quality authors, it’s a great way to have your content displayed right next to their writing.

4. Give failed content a second chance: We also think it’s a great idea to take content that hasn’t performed well in the past and give it a second shot at glory. You can try resuscitating unread content by doing things like changing the headline and updating the featured image.

5. Make your site faster: Nobody likes a slow website, especially Google. Google Search spokesperson Matt Cutts actually stated that site speed is factored into how your site ranks on Google. If your site is too slow, it wont be ranked as high on Google and visitors are a lot more likely to bounce. If you’re using WordPress to organize your content marketing efforts, a quick Google search will bring up a list of WordPress plugins that will make your site faster in just a few clicks.

Those are just some of the content marketing tactics that have worked for us here. Hopefully you’re more motivated than ever to step up your content marketing game. We suggest spending some time sitting down and evaluating your current efforts. After glancing at your most recent content, we suggest grabbing a piece of paper and a pencil (old school!) and writing down 5-10 ideas on how to maximize your content and content promotion efforts.