4 Scientific Ways to Get More Traffic with Content Marketing

Do you want your content to standout? Would you like some useful content marketing statistics that will get you more traffic and leads?

Content marketing has become wildly popular. A lot of businesses are implementing it. Over 2 million blog posts are published daily and businesses are spending around $200 billion a year on content marketing.

This figure is expected to reach $313 billion by 2019.

It will be hard for any business to stand out from this noise if they create the same old content. This is why I have listed some useful content marketing statistics below and discussed in detail how you can use them to create content that will drive more traffic from both search engines and social media.

4 Scientifically Proven Content Marketing Tips

Tip #1 Write longer posts

300 to 500-word blog posts aren’t good enough anymore. If you want to create excellent blog posts they should exceed 1,500 words. These blog posts attract the most backlinks, get the most shares and rank higher in search engines.

Longer posts attract more backlinks.

Moz.com analyzed their blog posts and found that their longest posts attracted the most links as you can see in the below graphs.

Here’s a graph of 500 posts on their blog representing the word count.

Here’s another graph of the same 500 posts. This graph displays the number of links pointing to each post.

As you can see there is a clear correlation indicating that longer posts attract more backlinks.

Longer blog posts also attract more shares.

Buzzsumo analyzed over 200 million articles and found that longer articles get more shares too.

The New York Times also found that long articles get emailed the most.

Longer blog posts rank higher in search engines too.

A report by serpIQ found that the average content length of the top 10 results on Google was over 2,000 words. As you can see in the below graph, as the length of the post increases the higher the post ranks.

This shows that all those backlinks are definitely contributing to how well the content fares on Google.

Therefore, if you create longer content you can be assured of more traffic from search engines and social media.

Here are a couple of tips to help you create longer content…

1. a) Do a lot of research: A long blog post can take up several hours to create, this is why if you want to get the most out of it, you should do plenty of research. The research should include finding short and long tail keywords that rank well on Google and also brainstorming topics that get shared a lot. Buzzsumo can help you with finding article ideas that fare well on social media.

1. b) Make sure it is of the highest quality: Sometimes people write long blog posts just for the sake of it. You notice this as soon as you start reading them as they are wordier than they need to be. Avoid this as it lowers the quality of your article. If you aren’t able to make an article long, then leave it as it is. You can create a longer one later. For best results hire a good editor to cut out the fat.

A company that regularly publishes quality long form content is Buffer. Checkout their blog to see what they are doing right and how you can do the same.

Tip #2 Include images:

The aforementioned study from Buzzumo also found that blog posts with images get more shares on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s how blog posts with at least one image perform on Facebook…

And here’s how blog posts with the Facebook thumbnail do vs those without the thumbnail…

Also here’s how posts with the Twitter thumbnail perform against those without.

Hence, it is necessary to create unique images and add them as Facebook and Twitter image thumbnails to the post.

If you would like the big image to appear as a large Facebook thumbnail instead of the tiny square, make sure the image is 560 X 292 pixels.

This will ensure that the large thumbnail appears on both desktops and mobile devices. It should get you more clicks.

Also add a Pinterest optimized image so that people can pin it. Pinterest recommends images with an aspect ratio of 2:3 (600 X 900 pixels).

Pinterest is the second highest referrer of social media traffic right after Facebook. If you follow the above two steps and optimize your blog posts for these social networks, you will certainly increase your traffic to your post.

Also place images like screenshots and graphs all throughout the content to make it more visually appealing.

An example of a blog that optimizes its posts with images is Social Media Examiner. They interspace their long blog posts with several images. Each post also has one Facebook and one Pinterest optimized cover image.

Tip #3 Write list posts:

If you go through the Buzzfeed website you will find that they publish a lot of list posts. This is because list posts get shared a lot as found by the Buzzsumo study.

They get the second highest number of shares, right below infographics. They also found that on average list posts with 10 items received the most shares (10,621 shares).

If you want to get stellar results don’t try to imitate Buzzfeed. Their posts usually consist of a line of text and an image to visualize each item in the list. This works for them as they can share it with millions of their followers instantly and they publish hundreds of articles daily. They are looking for the short term benefits of social media.

For most small blogs the Buzzfeed strategy won’t work. Therefore, instead of this you should follow Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique. This will help you create quality content that gain the long term benefits of SEO.

Tip #4 Create infographics:

Most people are visual so it makes senses that infographics get shared the most as 65% of people are visual learners. People can browse through visual content and grasp information quickly.

But did you know that they attract a ton of backlinks too?

KISSmetrics created 47 infographics which helped them attract 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks. The infographics also got them 41,359 tweets and 20,859 likes.It only cost them $28,200 to create all the infographics. KISSmetrics also believes that if they had implemented traditional marketing techniques to get the same results it would have cost them over a $1,000,000.

Therefore, if you aren’t creating infographics yet, you should start now. Here are some tips to create an infographic that will attract both backlinks and shares.

Create infographics on popular topics: Visit the top blogs in your niche to see which of their blog posts are performing best. You can create infographics on topics similar to these. You can also convert one of the most popular posts on your blog into an infographic. It’s a Google friendly way to republish content.

Use illustrations and graphs: People like infographics because of their visual aspect so make sure you include lots of graphs and illustrations to please them. Also use colors your target audience likes.

You can either hire a designer to help you out with this or your can use a tool like Venngage or Piktochart.

Promote the infographic: If you want your infographic to attract shares and backlinks you need to promote it. For shares just ask influencers to share them. For backlinks contact top blogs and ask them to publish your infographic and link back to you. If your infographic looks good and contains a lot of quality information a lot of people will be happy to do so.

You can use Buzzsumo to find influencers who will be happy to share your content and for backlinks you can contact blogs that have previously published infographics created by others and ask them to publish your infographic. Ask them to credit your work by linking back to your website (the source).

These are all the scientific ways to get more traffic and shares with content marketing. Follow them and you will certainly gain quality traffic that will convert to leads and sales. They might require a lot of effort on your part, but the long term results are worth it.

Are you currently using any of the above methods to drive more traffic with content marketing? Was there any of the content marketing statistics you found interesting or surprising? Let us know in the comments.

Oren Greenberg is a digital marketing consultant and the owner of the marketing consultancy Kurve. Follow him on Twitter @Orengreen.

The post 4 Scientific Ways to Get More Traffic with Content Marketing appeared first on Top Dog Social Media.

Contributer : Top Dog Social Media http://ift.tt/2gT9Jbw