Anyone who uses content marketing is continually trying to answer two nagging questions:
- How do you increase the traffic to your content?
- How do you get free traffic?
Well, today I’m going to answer both of these questions for you.
I’m going to do that by showing you one of the most important, powerful, and reliable traffic building strategies that exists.
You’re about to learn a traffic building strategy that’s not only used by the top content marketers and top content marketing companies, but it has also been used for over a century.
Let me explain…
After my post yesterday, How Charles Dickens Became the Accidental Content Marketer for Christmas, I decided to finally read the book, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits.
I’m really glad I did.
I’ve already come up with a bunch of content marketing ideas — and I’ve only read the first 27 pages!
Anyway, one of the lessons that I discovered, or more accurately rediscovered, was a lesson that is an important one for any company using content marketing.
It’s an important lesson on finding an audience for the content your company (or the company you’re creating content for) produces.
In other words, it’s a lesson on how to consistently drive more traffic to your content. Consistent traffic and ROI producing content doesn’t come from driving random traffic to your site. It comes from building an audience.
Without an audience, your content will have no lasting impact. It won’t produce any lasting and reliable results.
Two Ways to Build an Audience for Your Content
There are two ways to find an audience for your content:
- Build one
- Borrow one
Building your own audience is very important, but it takes a very long time to do. It also can cost you a lot of money.
So what can you do? While you’re slowly building your audience, you’ll also want to begin borrowing one.
What do I mean by “borrowing an audience”? I mean finding ways to get your content in front of an audience that someone else has already created.
In the early days of Charles Dickens’ career, that’s exactly what he did. He didn’t try to build his audience from scratch.
He borrowed the audience of the magazines of his day by writing (creating content) for them. When he did this, something magical happened:
- It was through the process of writing for these publications that Dicken’s found his voice and honed his writing skills.
- It was by writing for these publications that he slowly began to make a living as a writer (aka content creator).
- And it was because of the audience that he borrowed from these publishers over the years, that he was ultimately able to build his own audience that purchased his books.
The same things can happen to you and/or your company when you begin to focus on borrowing an audience.
- Your content will become better.
- You’ll discover ways to actually make money from the content marketing you’re creating. (Yes, that’s an additional revenue stream.)
- You will ultimately build an audience that will give you access to people who want to purchase the solution that you’re offering.
Why Some Content Marketing Doesn’t Work
Besides the fact that so much content that’s created these days is too generic, there are three reasons that so much of the content produced by so many companies fails:
- No one ever sees it or consumes it. In other words, the company has no traffic or no consistent traffic.
- The wrong people (aka wrong prospects) see the content. (That’s a topic for another post.)
- The company producing the content is only focusing on the slowest and most expensive way to generate traffic: building it from scratch.
When these things happen, it causes most companies to give up before the results come.
Why? Because they run out of money in their content marketing budget or their senior leadership runs out of patience waiting to see results.
If you want to want to drive more traffic to your content quickly and at no cost, you need to begin asking this question: Who already has the audience we’re wanting to reach?
Stay Tuned
In my next post, I’ll answer this question that’s probably on your mind:
Why would anyone let me borrow their audience?
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