For anyone looking to create a consistent flow of high-quality, organic free traffic to their blog or website, one of the best ways to go about doing this is to produce compelling content.
There are a range of different types of sources for you to drive traffic from, depending on the kind of compelling content we are consistently producing:
- Information-based traffic – e.g. search engine traffic (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.)
- Entertainment-based traffic – e.g. video/image-based websites (Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)
- Social traffic – e.g. social networks (Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, etc.)
- User-generated traffic – (Wikipedia, etc.)
- Consumer/commercial-based traffic sources (eBay, Amazon, etc.)
Expanding on this further, generally speaking, there are five main categories in terms of the types of compelling content we are able to produce.
1. Written Content
People visit Google and the search engines because they are seeking information and have questions that they want to resolve. When creating written content, ensure that your blog posts/articles are informative and provide valuable information and answers to what they are searching for. Your readers are actively searching for answers, so provide it for them!
2. Visual Content
Other online searchers don’t have the time to read through text-based content. Instead, they choose to use sites such as YouTube as their preferred search engine. In fact, YouTube is now 2nd to Google as the world’s most favored “search engine”. Aside from this, however, one of the main attractions to video is for entertainment purposes. Ensure that you come across as authentic and be genuinely interested/enthusiastic about the compelling content you are creating, keeping your main goal to serve your viewers.
This sincerity and enthusiasm will reflect in your videos, and you’ll find people wanting to follow you and get involved with what you are doing/promoting without you having to try and convince them. Another important thing to keep in mind is that you can’t please everyone. So just be yourself! People will be able to get to know you better through your videos more so than any other compelling content you are creating. Just talk like you would when talking to a good friend of yours who you’ve known for a long time, then they’ll feel as if they ARE a good friend of yours and have known you for a long time!
3. Social Content
We humans are social creatures! We like to INTERACT, socially! We enjoy engaging in sociable content, not just simply clicking the ‘Like’ button on a post. Generally speaking, people prefer to hear news and contemporary events from their peer groups as opposed to the mainstream media. One way to capitalize from this is to create compelling content concerning what people are already talking about and what they’re interested in (i.e. products, people, events, marketing and so on.) Keep your finger on the pulse, keep tabs on current social trends and provide content to serve the current demand! Give people more of what they are already talking about and/or interested in.
4. Community Content
Content generated by READERS such as comments can also generate more traffic to your content. As briefly mentioned earlier, people prefer to listen to real people expressing their real views on things. People are always seeking social proof. By actively interacting with people in your comments, asking questions and by simply being yourself. You’ll be able to build up a good amount of community content on your website through people conversing and sharing on your site.
5. Consumer Targeted Content
People love buying and selling things, and increasingly so on the Internet! Moreover, people want to purchase through REAL people! As mentioned earlier, social proof is a very important factor for people when buying things. People prefer to hear genuine recommendations from people before they go ahead and purchase a product (hence why testimonials are an important feature to include on sales pages). If someone wants to purchase directly from a corporate site, they will do so. Until then, just be aware that people WILL listen to your views and will also buy directly from you, providing you are supplying the compelling content as aforementioned. While compelling content is a fantastic way to drive a consistent flow of organic traffic to your site, unlike paid traffic, it can take some time to build up enough TRACTION to begin ranking and generating a consistent flow of traffic, leads, and sales.
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I appreciate you stopping by.
Kind regards,
~ Nomadic Danny
Podcast: NomadicDannyPodcast.com