In this post I will detail the most important factors that make your content strategy effective.
You could get all the traffic in the world, but if you don’t have epic content, it will be useless to you.
Only put great content onto your site.
The first thing you need to know about writing an effective blog post is that you need to be able to write. There is no way around this unfortunately, except for paying someone else to write it for you.
Authority Site Content Creation
You can take content creation to the next level, and I suggest you do this, as your site will attract more visitors and make more money: Build an authority site.
An authority site is an extremely high quality website that is widely respected. It is a website that has content on it that is so good and is so useful that people are glad they landed on it and want to share it with their friends. Authority sites publish trustworthy information and link to other trustworthy places on the web.
Your authority site should have every single topic on it that exists in your niche. They are the single best source of information about their specific topic that you are going to find anywhere on the internet.
For a long time it was common practice for internet marketers to build websites with a primary focus of making them as profitable as possible while not caring the needs and desires of site visitors. Authority sites don’t operate that way.
Google keeps improving their ability to weed out low quality websites whose only purpose was to make money from advertisers or affiliates while disregarding their visitors. Internet marketers began to realize that if you want to build a site for the long run, you really should be focusing on building a high quality authority site instead of a low quality old-school niche site.
If you are still trying to build an old school niche-style website, then there is about a 90% chance that you will fail. The main difference between building a crappy site or an authority site is simply where you place your focus. With an authority site, you are focused on delivering what the market wants.
Your Key Posts (Pillar Posts)
You will need 3-4 key posts on the main subjects of your site. These posts should have a flow sequence. These are your backbones from where the smaller subject posts can link out. These are usually longer posts and you will keep upgrading them as you keep learning more.
Post Idea
To start, you need an idea. You can get an idea either by picking a keyword from a research tool or just by researching/developing a subject while you use it and then deciding to write it up.
There are several things you need to take into consideration when you write – it’s not by “let’s write and see what happens”.
First of all, your subject needs to be super cool that everyone in your niche would be interested in naturally, without having to be forced. Check your Facebook groups, your forums and see what they ask about, what they write about, what interests them.
Keyword Research
Then you need to pick your main keyword that fits the subject. You can use any keyword research tool, such as the Google Keyword Planner. The main thing is that you need to pick a long-tail keyword. It doesn’t matter if it only has 50 searches per month, through time your post will gather more competitive variations of the keyword.
When your blog is new, you are not doing this for right-now traffic, you are doing this for future traffic. Concentrate on search intent and not on individual keywords. In other words, “write an effective blog post” is the same search intent as “write the best blog post” and you wouldn’t write a separate post for each.
Your Headlines
Once you have your keyword, you need to make it into a punchy headline so that people will click on it.
The most important part of your content is your headlines. This is the first point of interaction for your users and this is what shows up in the search engines.
If you don’t know how to create good headlines, you will need to learn this skill. Your headlines need to be attention-grabbing and make people want to click on it.
In the meantime, you can check similar websites and see what headlines they use, check Twitter, Reddit. Use their headline structures and adjust it to your own site. If you are constructing an opt-in page, check out other opt-in pages.
To get ideas, you can look up other websites or use NicheLaboratory – enter your niche keyword then click on “Article Ideas”.
You need to have aggressive headlines. Period. Compare these two headlines:
“Learn How To Get Traffic” and
“Get 5,000 Visitors In 2 Weeks For Free”
Do you see a difference?
Meta Description
Once you have the headline, also pick am interesting description meta tag so that the search engine snippet doesn’t just contain a random line from your post but it actually boosts click-through.
Linking
Make sure you link out to authoritative external websites in your niche. Outgoing relevant links to authoritative sites are considered in the algorithms have a positive impact on rankings. Link to pages which actually add value and cover the topic very well. Link to articles having good page authority or domain authority. Link to articles which have high number of social media share.
An important use of this strategy is to notify the bloggers that you included in your post and linked to and they may share your content with their followers.
Internal linking is just as important as external. Internal links help to distribute “link juice” across your website. It’s possible to identify pages on your site which have a high number of authoritative links, and to tactically distribute the “link juice” from these pages on to other pages you’d like to give a boost in rankings. As it is impossible to fully describe a subject in one page, internal linking to your related content also improves user experience. Internal linking also reduces your bounce rate as your reader will be inclined to read more than one page at a time. A great example for internal linking is Wikipedia.
Long Form Content
Long form content will definitely boost your page’s ranking. It is a statistical fact that most web pages that rank on the first page have at least 2,000 words of content. Visitors that want to learn a subject are looking for in-depth step-by-step guides. Make sure your posts don’t have spelling errors.
Readability with proper headings, short sentences and paragraphs contributes to user experience. Don’t make your post a wall of text.
The following types of content ranks best and convert best in terms of your monetization efforts:
- How-to guides
- Comparison posts
- Reviews
- Case studies
You may not be able to write all of your posts over 2,000 words, but make sure that your key content is long-form. Another approach is to write some shorter form posts and then later on see in your Google Search Console account, under “Search Analytics”, which posts are ranking for which keyword and then upgrade these later on.
Here is an example of a post written like that, for affiliate conversion.
Photos And Videos
Images and videos tend to attract attention.
Make sure you use lots of images and YouTube videos. This will increase your conversion rate.
You can use stock photo sites to get high quality photos without getting into legal trouble.
Use the Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT for short), a free image optimizer that will let you to visually adjust and compress your photos. Set the default rate to 80 percent. This will help you majorly decrease the size of your images and load your pages faster.
Make sure you use a picture file name and alt tag that contains a keyword. This will help your SEO.
Additionally, watching a video will increase the time your users spend on your site. It doesn’t need to be your own video – there are plenty of videos you can pick from YouTube.
Social Share Buttons
Giving a chance for your readers to share your content is extremely important, especially when your site is new. Share your posts to your Social Media accounts and any forums, Facebook groups. Often this is your only source of traffic.
New Website Content Strategy
In the first month or two of your website concentrate on writing 30-50-100 blog posts targeting long tail keywords.
The goal is twofold:
- Set your site up for organic traffic
- To make your site look like an established, trustworthy, authoritative, content-rich site
You don’t need to get stuck with your niche in each post.
Once you feel that you have satisfactorily achieved #2, you continue writing blog posts regularly.
However at that point you can make your content creation easier with the following method:
Reach out to sites that have to do with your niche. Tell them you are turning your site into an authority site in your niche and you would like to feature them in a blog post. Ask them to provide materials for this. Tell them you will link to them.
When you published their post, tweet it out, tagging them on the tweet. They will most likely retweet it to their own followers and you get free traffic.
Conclusion
While the above doesn’t necessarily contain everything, it is a good start to make your blog posts more successful from day 1.
See here a blog post that was written based on the above for affiliate conversions.