A lot of people believe the mistaken idea that they have to produce content every single day. In their minds, the more content they have, the more Google will index and the more traffic they would get from search engines.
Absolutely wrong. It depends on your niche.
For example, if you are a publisher of an online newspaper, you have to publish at least once a
day. Often times, news is updated several times a day. But if your niche is fairly static, like, let’s say, insurance, and you’re not offering insurance news, then you should publish once a month at most.
The key here is to prioritize quality over quantity. This is how you will dominate your niche.
Focus your firepower on one amazing piece of content and spend the rest of your time promoting that awesome piece of content.
That’s how you build an empire. Again, it depends on your niche, but the takeaway here is quality over quantity.
The Shortcut
As you probably already know, if you come up with some weird ideas for what’s hot in your niche, chances are, you’ll fall flat on your face. This is almost guaranteed.
Unless you’re absolutely sure that you have some sort of mental connection with your target audience members, chances are, whatever ideas you think are hot are not all that hot to them.
This is where reverse engineering comes in. Study your competitors and look at their most successful pieces of content. Look for content they have that have amazing levels of engagement.
Start with those topics. Pay attention to those patterns and themes. Collect them and then start with creation.
Your First Step Must Be Curation
At this point, you really don’t know what works and what doesn’t work. At this point, all you know is your niche and your container for your niche.
Accordingly, you should get the best pieces of content and populate it on your social media accounts.
Market your accounts to try to get engagement for them. Pay attention to click patterns. Which pieces of content to get a lot of clicks? Which pieces of content to get a lot of engagement?
Now, line these up and then see which pieces of content actually gets conversions. I’m talking about sales or mailing list opt-ins here. Once you have seen the results from your curated content, zero in on the specific types of content that generate a lot of the results that you’re looking for.
Load More Successful Curated Content
Now that you know the theme or type of content that gets a lot of love from your audience members, get more of that stuff. See if the pattern holds. If this is the case, then you’re on to something. You can then move on to the discussion below.
However, if you notice that the new stuff isn’t converting as the old stuff, then you need to keep looking for more patterns. It may well turn out that the initial success of certain niche content may be a fluke. Maybe it’s some sort of statistical blip.
Given enough time, you should be able to see key patterns as far as the type of content that generates the most engagement conversions or clicks.
Create Your Own Content Based on Your Most Successful Curated Material
Now that you have a clear idea of the type of curated content that gets the most engagements, conversions and clicks, the next step is to come up with your own version of that content.
You have to remember, when you’re curating content, you’re just pumping traffic to somebody else’s website.
They’re still benefiting you, because you get to use their content to build credibility and authority with your audience members. However, you’re not getting actual clicks to your site.
The conversions that you get are either ad conversions because you mounted this curated content on your blog, or your social media profiles because you put an affiliate ad on those pages. Still, these third party pieces of content don’t result in traffic to your specific site.
When you create your own content based on these successful curated pieces of content, you build traffic to your site.
How exactly do you improve on successful curated content?
First, you can feature updated content. By simply making sure that your version of your niche’s most successful content has the most up to date information, you can improve the quality of existing competitor content out there.
Next, you can provide multimedia for this type of content. For example, a Top 10 list on the best dog houses are big in your niche. Instead of just a text list of key products and what’s so awesome about them, show actual videos and pictures.
Third, you can use the long form content. What if I told you that search engines actually reward longer pieces of content with more traffic than shorter pieces of content? This should be fairly easy to understand because the longer your content is, the more words it has, and the more this can trigger Google to send traffic that target those keywords. Look at your competitors’ most successful content and come up with a longer version of them.
Fourth, you can simplify the most successful curated content you can find so that your audience members would find them easier to understand. This can involve diagrams, and this can also involve rewriting the materials in eighth grade English. Do what you have to do to make sure that this material is as accessible to your niche audience as possible.
Finally, you can convert your competitors’ most successful content into a video. This not only gives you access to YouTube, but it also makes your content more engaging on social media like Facebook, which can turbocharge your traffic results.
Create Multiple Format Adaptations of Your Content
Now that you have created your own content based on the “best” curated items you’ve used, the next step is to promote this content on all your social media accounts as well as on your mailing list.
In addition to that, you should create multiple format adaptations of your content. For example, you have a blog post. Convert into questions, and then add snippets of content from that blog post along with a shortened link, and then share it on Twitter.
Similarly, you can take the questions that your blog post talks about and create question and answer blocks. So basically there’s one question, and then you copy and paste a significant answer, and then put the original content at the bottom. You then post this on quora.com.
Third, you can create videos, infographics, or just share the plain link on Facebook.
Fourth, you can create a video, as I have mentioned earlier, about your blog post, and then share it on YouTube and Vimeo. Make sure you use your target keywords for your tags and categories.
Finally, you can create an explanatory picture for your blog post and then share it on Pinterest. The picture, of course, links to the blog post.
By creating multiple format adaptations of your content and heavily promoting them on your social media accounts, you drive niche targeted traffic from all over the internet to your website.
Make Sure Each Piece of Content You Produce Promotes Older Pieces of Content
When you create a new piece of content on your blog or website, create at least three links within it that links to older pieces of content you have published. Don’t waste this opportunity.
If you are able to drag somebody from the internet to view your content, try to turn that one visit into multiple page views. You do this by putting text links as well as graphical links in your blog post.
Again, the key here is to maximize dwell time. You get to brand them better and you also drag them into the deeper and deeper parts of your website, which can increase the chances of conversion.