So you’ve started a blog to begin content marketing for your company or personal site, but it’s not quite yet a traffic-generating machine. You post biweekly. One month goes by and…only 600 visitors. Another month of regular posting and still barely linear growth. Four months later, not much change. You start to wonder if your LiveJournal page from high school got more readers than this.
This is where a lot of people get discouraged (and even give up on creating content altogether). Most content marketers can attest: building traffic to your site is hard, arduous work. But does it really have to take a long time?
I don’t think it does. I believe there’s a way to accelerate growth and exceed expectations. At NerdWallet, we grew a credit card blog with 100,000 unique monthly visitors into a personal finance powerhouse with over 2 million monthly users in two years. At my last company, we took our site from under 1,000 monthly visitors to 100,000 in five months—and we were writing about taxes.
What helped us grow? These three tactics.
Create content that is authoritative
One of the most important factors in getting your articles to rank is how many other sites link to it. Google is modeled off the idea of academic citations: the more citations a book receives over time, the more important and authoritative it is. The same premise applies to Google’s rendering of your search results: the more links (or citations) a web page receives, the more authoritative it must be and the higher up in results it appears.
Think about the kind of content you link to daily—what criteria makes it authoritative enough to link to? Make sure you’re creating work that both you and other people would want to reference, content that is well-written and well-researched—not just a re-jumbling of the same jargon and given new titles, like the majority of content on the internet.
Make sure you tell a story
Given my background in press relations for startups, a lot of people ask me how they can get more media attention. How can you get reporters to write about your company and feature your content? The answer is simple: don’t just ask them to write about you—give them an irresistible reason to. Find data, generate your own data, profile an amazing person, a user, a problem, a solution so compelling that other readers or writers want to also write about it or share it.
Here’s an example: at Zen99, we noticed how Uber and Lyft were spending millions a month for ads on Craigslist. We counted the number of ads they paid for during a week in six major cities, then approximated how much Uber and Lyft spent for those ads. We shared our findings in this article, which we sent to an editor at Fusion, who found the data worth writing about. No matter how small or previously unknown you are, if the story is worth telling, it can become contagious.
Make content for other people
Content is one of the best relationship-building tools. Is there another blog, company, or brand you want to be associated with? Do you know another site that speaks to the same or similar audience? Ask if you can contribute. The benefits are threefold: you reach new readers (who could now more easily discover your site), if you’re able to link back to your blog then it’s good for SEO, and, above all, you can help their readers by creating something you’re an authority on.