It seems like a lot of my consulting work as of late has heavily involved teaching clients how to get their content strategies off the ground or how to get better results from what they’re currently doing. The more I do this, the more cemented I become in the belief of how crucial your content is for getting traffic. In my mind, it has become a keystone to any successful online marketing strategy.

If you’re new to content marketing, you may be wondering how content can help you sell a product or be used to generate traffic. Let’s take a closer look and explore some of the benefits of using content for your marketing efforts.

Of all the benefits, from a traffic generation standpoint, creating backlinks and a viral movement is the most significant benefit. Sure you can pay X dollars and get X traffic via paid search results, but for those who are looking for deep, long-lasting results, getting people to link to you has the highest pay off in the end. Not to mention, it’s free. If you’re paying for traffic, what happens when you stop paying? If you have prominent links and mentions regarding your site on related websites, not only do you have instant social proof, but you have traffic that won’t immediately vanish.

So, if getting links is so important, the next question to ask is naturally, “How do you get people to link to you?” This is where planning your content marketing strategy really gets fun and creative. You want to write content that will motivate people to spread your message. You want content that others will willingly post on their own sites. To help lead you in the right direction, here are a few key elements to writing content that stands out and begs to be spread virally.

Obviously, not everything you write is going to be a stroke of literary or marketing genius. However, a good amount of attention should be devoted to at least two to four “killer” articles per month. Personally, I would try to write two for your own site and two really great guest posts per month to get started. As you get going, you’ll be able to determine what efforts are best suited for your particular business or project.

It used to be said that content is king. When it was mentioned before, it was from the understanding that whoever had the most content “wins.” I still believe the phrase to be true, however, the context has changed. The smart use of quality content is where the focus should be. Content definitely is king, but learning how to market it and make it useful is definitely queen.

What are your thoughts? How do you use content to gain more traffic?

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As a blogger or producer of a content-based website, engaging content is pivotal to building your following and brand. Without it, you don’t have a product. When you’re selling an actual product, it’s even more imperative to write copy that engages and then sells. This is a lot of pressure for a do-it-yourselfer marketer. You could hire a professional copywriter to ease your mind, but in a lot of cases it isn’t an affordable alternative. Over the last 13 years, I’ve written thousands of articles, sales copy, product descriptions… you name it, I’ve written it. I’ve certainly made mistakes, but I’ve also learned a lot. I’ve taken that knowledge and created websites that have some of the highest stickiness ratings online. My top 1,000 site had an average of 21 pages read per user. A typical user spent 45 minutes at the site. Talk about engaging the user!

So what are these great tips I’ve learned over the years? Let me share a few of my favorites:

Tell A Story
A story is an easy way to capture the attention of your readers. It keeps them engaged and hopefully wanting to know the outcome of the situation. A story typically has a clear start and a clear end, making this style of writing very intuitive for keeping you on track and focused. I think the best benefit of storytelling is that it’s incredibly easy for others to spread your message. Stories capture the imagination and are therefore retained easier. If you’re able to weave a story about your product, article topic or blog post topic, do it.

Get Your Reader To Visualize
It’s a writer’s job to create a world or story that captivates the reader and draws them in. This is especially true for writing sales copy or anything that requires your readers to take an action. You need to write in a way that captures the reader’s imagination and gets them to visualize themselves using the product or techniques you’re writing about. You can do this simply by asking questions. This gets your reader thinking about your topic or product as it relates to them. What questions could you ask to get your reader to think deeper and visualize your topic or product?

Keep It Simple
I think a lot of us fall into the trap of expecting our readers or customers to know everything we’re talking about. We’re usually so surrounded by people in our business world and social media circles that it’s easy to assume everyone knows our industry. This is a huge mistake. It’s a good practice to write for the lowest common denominator. Don’t overcrowd your message with huge words or technical terms that someone will have to look up just to understand you. If you must use technical jargon, provide definitions or links to explanations of the term.

Keeping it simple isn’t just about word choice. It also plays an important role in sentence structure. Unwieldy and superfluous sentences don’t sell a product or concept. When in doubt, cross it out. In most cases, just moving a few sentences around will provide you the flavor and flow you were looking for.

Don’t Try To Be A Literary Guru On Your First Draft
There are countless stories of literary geniuses and bestselling authors who have to write multiple drafts of their work before it’s even good enough to send to their editor for even more review. For me, the best way to write is to just sit down and let it all flow out. I consider it similar to a brainstorming session. I just write everything on my mind in regard to the topic. I’ll even leave paragraphs half written because I’ve thought of another point of interest in the topic that I don’t want to forget.

When I’m done with this dumping of my thoughts, I read what I’ve written and then move things around into a more logical flow. A lot of times, I’ll completely cut out what I’ve written, or I’ll save it for another article or post on the same topic. Once I have the overall flow down, I’ll go through and look at how I can improve each paragraph, sentence by sentence. If I see something that doesn’t need to be there, I cut it. Other times, I just move some of my sentences around to make it flow better. The more comfortable you get with making mistakes and editing your own work, the stronger you’ll become as a writer.

Keep It Flowing
Once I’ve finished editing my work, I always go back to make sure everything has a natural conversational feel to it. I want each paragraph to flow or segue to the next. This keeps your reader’s attention, paragraph by paragraph. In many cases, they’ll find themselves reading all the way to the end without realizing they did. I think this is the most important writing strategy I’ve used. I don’t worry about getting the reader to the end of the article or page, I focus on getting them to the next paragraph. By doing this, your reader will read the entire message naturally, because they were so engaged.

Have Your Work Checked By Someone Else
No matter how skilled of a writer you are or how well you know the language, always have some proofread your work. Always! If you’re lucky enough to have someone who is also a writer, even better. Let them have some freedom to replace your words or move them around. I’ve always thought that two heads are better than one, and often another person can bring a fresh perspective to your writing. Always be open to changes, and honestly evaluate whether or not they’ll communicate your message more effectively.

Writing is always an evolving skill. Every time you write, you get better at it. Kind of rewarding isn’t it? Now that I’ve shared my tips, what techniques do you use or plan to use to help you write more engaging content?

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For some reason, I’ve been attracted to a lot of talk about creativity and taking personal time to awaken your inner creativity. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. I think this is a good thing.

As bloggers, entrepreneurs and business owners, we’re always pushing out information and then sucking up so much of it to try and grow our business that we often overlook setting aside time to unwind and allow real creativity to sprout. We overlook the fact that we need some downtime to really absorb all that’s going on around us.

Personally, I think it’s crucial to anyone’s success to find tools and habits that allow you to nurture your inner guidance and inspirational system. Think about it – if your mind is cluttered with to-dos: trying to improve sales, dealing with employees, stressing about bills, etc. there isn’t much room left over for inspiring ideas. This is where developing habits for personal inspirational time will help you find your next “big” idea or an amazing solution to a problem you were facing.

You can liken this time to the “Aha!” shower moments. It never fails that my best ideas are always in the shower. Many other successful people, for instance Jack Canfield, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, can attest to this “phenomenon” as well. In that moment, your subconscious takes over and your real genius creates amazing ideas.

Now, imagine doing this on purpose in a way that allowed you to nurture the best of your ideas. Over the years, I’ve found there are two essential ingredients to unlocking your best creativity.

#1 – Make Room For New Ideas, aka “The Purge”
In order to receive, you have to make room for new ideas. I do this daily by following Julia Cameron’s tip in the Artist’s Way of writing out three pages of whatever comes to mind. I consider this my daily purge. I used to do this by hand, however, recently I found an awesome online resource that lets me type it out at 750words.com. If you’re a writer, you should definitely check it out.

#2 – Be Available for New Ideas, aka “The Reception”
Just about everyone has heard the expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” In our busy times of digesting information, we rarely take the time to actually absorb it and allow this information to foster new creative ways of doing things. We’re getting plenty of water, but we’re not taking the time to drink. In a hyper-competitive world, taking 15 minutes a day of alone time could be the edge you needed to stand out from your competitors. Just find someplace private and peaceful where you can be alone with your thoughts and see what emerges. Don’t use this time to focus on worries, but rather on positive ideals and expressions of gratitude. It’s lot more difficult to create something good when you’re coming from a place of negativity and worry.

Do these two steps everyday, or as often as you can, and you’ll start to notice it’s easier and easier to find your inner inspiration and creativity.

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I’m going to share with you one of the biggest mistakes I made when creating my previous online magazine, Lovingyou.com. Hopefully, it will help keep you on track and save you some time and money in your own venture.

First, let’s start off with a little history…

Lovingyou.com started as a personal homepage in 1996. It was my “playground” of sorts. I’m fairly competitive with myself, so while it was “personal,” it was still built to succeed. Where I wanted it to succeed was in gaining traffic and having large amounts of interactivity within the site. I applied all of my previous marketing and sales knowledge to these goals. The entire site was built around social networking and user-generated content long before those were buzz words. It’s good marketing – it just makes sense to let people be able to contribute, but that’s a story for another day. These strategies obviously made great sense, because this is where my failure took root.

You need to build for growth.

While I certainly dreamed of overnight success, I didn’t foresee that my methods and strategies would actually work. I wasn’t prepared for success and certainly wasn’t looking at any long-term growth plans. In my mind, it was still a personal homepage with a million pageviews per month. Since it was never meant to be a profit generator, I sort of haphazardly approached growth and expansion. By the time I realized this was going to become our main business, we already had over 50,000 pages of content. Imagine redesigning a site with that much content by hand. It was a HUGE project.

Stay up to date technically.

At the time, there was no such thing as a content management system. Everything was done manually. We eventually automated certain sections of the site as we could afford it. If I could go back, I would have put every extra penny into the technical aspects of the site. The main hinderance here was I wasn’t as knowledgeable in those fields at the time. I didn’t really grasp what a content management system was, and honestly our site was so large (500,000 pages) by the time CMSs became mainstream that it was fairly unapproachable.

Don’t be afraid of hiring an “expert.”

We became quite clever in creating faster fixes for updates, but in all honesty, I should have looked for an expert in the area and let them find a better answer. This lack of foresight is still a problem for the site. I haven’t been involved with the project in the last two years, and quite a significant part of it is still created manually, including the front page.

So what’s the lesson? Anticipate for growth and plan for it!

You’re never going to know everything that’s in the future for your business, but you can put in steps to make growth and transitions easier. It really comes down to how scaleable your business is at any given moment. If the systems you have in place don’t allow you to grow easily and effortlessly, guess what? You’re going to plateau at some point. That doesn’t look too sexy on paper or your bank account.

A lot of people have an “I’ll deal with the problem when it comes up” attitude in an effort to conserve resources. What this attitude fails to take into consideration is that you may be saving immediate time and possibly money, but you’re certainly going to pay for it later, and at an inflated price. While this may be necessary in some situations, it’s best in my experience to try and avoid it as often as possible.

How flexible and ready for growth is your business?

• Take stock of what actions you do every day. Is there a way you can automate or streamline any of these tasks? Could you save time (which in turn saves money) by hiring someone else to do more menial tasks for you?
• What is your method of handling incoming sales, emails and contacts? Can you step away for a day or two and not have your system go completely into meltdown? Is it efficient and easy to find whatever you’re looking for?
• If you have staff, do you need to be there to answer every question? Is there a clear system for doing things in place? Have they been properly trained for it?
• Have you networked to find knowledgeable people in areas you are weak in? For you it may seem like a huge issue, for an expert in the industry it might take them five minutes to give you a solution.
• Planning ahead can shave off tons of frivolous time. It may take a few hours each week ahead of time, but knowing what you’re doing and when you’re doing it keeps you focused and on track during the week. When’s the best time for you to plan ahead?
• If you all of a sudden received a massive influx of traffic to your site, orders or contacts, would the systems you have in place handle them?

Take it from me, I could have done twice the work in half the time if I’d used these tips fourteen years ago. If you’re in a similar situation and need some advice, feel free to contact me and I’d be happy to share my ideas with you.

Now it’s your turn, what are you doing to get your business ready for growth?

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