So what will it take to excel in 2013? What will it take to get that ever elusive traffic to your website, so that you can turn those clicks into cash?

There is no magic formula and you are going to have to put in the time, effort and understanding for your clients and your companies to understand what their customers want.  In this article, I am going to address the nuts and bolts of what can be done to increase exposure to their websites. I am not going to discuss the more advanced methods of content marketing like viral videos, infographics or other methods that work on zeitgeist.

To that effect, I am going to list some simple questions that I address when creating content for the sites that I manage.

1. Why are people coming to your site?
2. What are the basic questions your content should answer?
3. What to do while you are waiting?
4. What to do if you see no effect or results?

Content marketing helped grow traffic by 36%

But first, the results.  If I am going to propose some kind of theoretical solution to your content marketing needs, shouldn’t I also provide some proof that the results are worth the effort? And so I shall! In 2012, I initiated just such an initiative in reaction to Panda and Penguin, and the results have been stunning.

As you can see, traffic is up over 36%.  We are seeing some drop off in pages/visit and average visit duration but we understand that as we gather new traffic, we might not get traffic that is as focused as that of our earlier customers.  Overall, the number that matters for me is that our e-commerce sales year-on-year so far for 2013 are up over 44%, and we continue to lead into this as the year develops.   Remember, Google Analytics is a good tracking tool, but you also have to weigh that with real world results.  I could be incredibly happy with a 36% increase in traffic, but that would not mean much to my CEO or myself if sales were not rising as well!

Why are people coming to your site?

The first question I ask when I look at a site, and at individual pages is, “What is a visitor looking for, on this site or page”. In my career in ecommerce, the answer to that has always been – customers who have been looking for products. And often, based on the phone calls that our customer service group gets, these customers are asking questions about the products, the fit, the purpose, and if they are getting ready to purchase the right item for the job.

Great content is content that trains customers on product, educates them on features, and answers core questions about what products do. And I am not talking just on the product pages, I am talking about content on the category pages, and the main subject pages of the site.

A good example of this is from when I worked at Harbor Freight Tools, we designed a section of the website to answer the question of what is the difference between an oil-less compressor and an oil compressor. Turns out, it’s fairly important as most artists who use airbrushes do not want oil from the compressed air mixing with their paints! So take time on your website pages, and look at them carefully. When a customer is navigating a page, what questions are they going to have? Once you know that, write content on that page to answer those questions.

Pay attention to these content types

Common types of content that can be generated depending on your industry:

What are the basic questions your content should answer?

Content that you develop should answer the following questions:

1. Who am I (might be answered by simply being on your website)?
2. What do I do (again, might be answered by simply being on your website)?
3. What features do I offer?
4. What is the value proposition?
5. Is it unique content (not spun or copied from manufacturers or other websites)?

A simple case test

Now that you have asked the basic questions around what kind of content you want to develop, you should start the process of developing that content.

Let’s build out an outline of how to start that process from the beginning.

Choose Pages

Take a look at Google Analytics content section, and locate 5 pages with moderate to high traffic that have little or no content.  These will be the pages that we will experiment with over the next 2 months.

Choose Subjects

For each of the 5 pages that you have chosen, pull out a piece of paper and document what you think are the main questions that your visitors will be asking on these pages. Visit your customer service department and ask them the very same questions about those 5 pages.  Pull all of that information together to generate idea on what type of content to develop such as FAQ, How To or a Case Study.

Choose Keywords

Now, you could use Google Analytics to find keywords related to the pages that you have chosen.  Find a few keywords that are ranked below 10th position, and still have some impressions or clicks related to them.  You’ll want to choose 2-3 keywords.  Of these 2-3 keywords, choose 1 main keyword.  When you design your content, make sure to use the main keyword several times – two or three times should be fine. Now, include it in a link to an appropriate sub-page.  For the other keywords, use them once or twice.  If your content is under 200 words, write more.  You should be looking for 400-1000 words of good content addressing the subjects that you have discovered above.

Once you have a total of 10 to 15 keywords, create a keyword group in BrightEdge, and start tracking those keywords.

Post Content

Once you have produced your content, post the content on the appropriate pages, and over the next 2-3 months, watch your rankings in BrightEdge.  If you have produced quality content that visitors find interesting, you should see a very positive effect on your rankings and traffic.  Additionally, you should see much more activity around the pages whose content has been increased.

What to do while you are waiting?

They say that no good deed goes unpunished.  And the price for writing quality content that generates traffic, is writing more quality content that generates more quality traffic.  As you wait for your prior posts to show activity, you’ll want to be writing more content that your customers demand – and placing it on your website in locations that are related to the content subject matter.

What to do if you see no effect or results?

After a period of time, you know that Google has crawled your site, and you know that you should be seeing an effect.  If the results don’t look good, you have a few places to look – and you can use the formula below to decide what to do:

RANK = QUALITY x RECENCY x RELEVANCE x ORIGINALITY

First, decide which of the above signals you need to affect.  It could be one, two or all of them.

Originality

Did you just copy your content from elsewhere, and you have duplicate content from your own site, or another website?  This is an easy fix, update the post, and write your own content.

Relevance

Are you trying to rank for a keyword that really is not relevant to the page, area or website that you are on?  Take some time, and review what you are trying to do, and either move the content to a more relevant section, post links on other pages to this page reinforcing the relevance, or change your keyword targets.

Recency

Is the content you posted, old? It might be time for a re-write.

Quality

Are people coming to your content and leaving (Bounce), or are they only spending a short amount of time on the content (much less than the average of your site)? If so, you may need to re-evaluate the content, the subject matter, and start working to discover if you have the right content in the right place.

I hope that this article has shed some light on how to choose subjects for content marketing, and what you can do to affect your website’s traffic.  It’s about consistent delivery of quality content that is relevant to your audience and that is original and new.  With these very few basics, over time, you will win your position to more traffic for your website. Please write me (Kevin Hill) and share with me the results of your very own experiments!

Thank you for supporting us in 2012 and rest assured that we will empower you with even greater innovations this year!

Rule 1: You Can Participate – Not Control

Social media is a place where people go to talk about the things that matter to THEM, not you.  What this means is that ,often times, the discussion might be about how a customer is using a chainsaw as a nose hair trimmer – and your legal department is having fits about you  even responding to this kind of post.  Most likely, they are begging and pleading with you to get this post off of Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media sites because of liability issues.

What is important to realize is that you don’t control the content or content of the conversations about your products or services.  Let me repeat that.  It’s important.

YOU DON’T CONTROL THE MESSAGE.

What you do control is how you participate in the message.  Can you add value to the discussion?  Can you answer people’s questions? Can you be helpful and responsive?  Can you do it in a professional, yet human way?

Rule 2: Develop A Ruleset

Now that you know you can’t control the message or subject – what can you do? Develop a ruleset around what subjects you will post about, what you will respond to, and how you will deal with angry or negative posts.  I suggest something like the following:

Tone

1. Will use proper grammer
2. Will use language your customers use
3. Will be neutral in tone

Content

1. Will be informative and relate to the discussion at hand
2. Posts about our products or services will generally be human interest stories of how our products were used, or professionals in our industry have succeeded/won or done something newsworthy
3. Posts like the above could start with “Like this if:…“
4. Use stories that are of interest, or that ask questions

Subject matter that will not be posted

1. Involving improper use of products
2. Political in nature
3. Sexual in nature (unless that’s your business)
4. Abusive, angry or attacking
5. Foul language

Dealing with Angry Posts

1. Posts that attack others, contain foul language will be deleted, and we will post a comment acknowledging the deletion and reason for the deletion
2. Posts that reference politics, sexual issues will not be responded to
3. Responses will ask the person in question to contact customer service at xxx-xxx-xxxx so that we can help the customer directly.

Rule 3: You control what you post

The 3rd rule is pretty obvious.  You control what, how and when you post.  For Twitter, you probably need to assign someone who uses Twitter regularly, and is willing to respond to a Tweet within seconds of it going live.  That means they monitor it during all their waking hours.  It also means you need to assign this task to someone who understands your policy of how you post, when you post, and what you post (See Rule 2).

When responding to customer posts, it’s critical that you participate in the discussion at hand, and don’t try to “sell” something right away.  Help the conversation along by simply participating and being human.  Social media is about developing a place where people can talk about your products, and sharing with people how your products matter to them in their personal lives.

It’s also simply about sharing what’s of interest at the moment.  Think about posting things that are interesting, may generate questions and responses.  Find someone who knows how to be the center of a conversation, and how to enliven a conversation. This person will know how to turn up the volume, and get activity to increase with interesting stories, tidbits, and posts.

Rule 4: Don’t sell things in social media

Unless you are asked to, don’t sell.  When someone is having a discussion about how a ladder might be used, it is totally appropriate to post with some details about the differences between fiberglass and aluminum ladders, and include a link to your website where you sell ladders.  It’s not appropriate to interrupt a discussion about puppy house training, with the said ladder post, or an offer for 20% off dog collars.  When a post comes around asking about “where can I find a coupon for…”, by all means, post a coupon offer.  But don’t post that coupon offer just because there is a conversation about the best way to use a DeWalt power drill motor for driving skateboards. Unless you are involved in the conversation and proved that your not just a vulture trying to hawk products, avoid such posts.

Rule 5: Post often. Post Frequently.

You have the ability to post content to your social media page and accounts.  Make interesting posts about your company, your staff, and your products and how people are using them.  Make the posts often, and make them frequent.  Look at what posts your customers respond to, and post relevant content.  Be genuine in your posts. People have very good marketing detectors today.  They’ll spot a sales pitch miles away and filter it out.

Rule 6: Monitor your Social media

Watch your social media regularly. Visit it.  See what your customers are saying. Learn from that, and use it to find and spot trends.  Do you see quite a few posts about how customer service is abusive? Perhaps it’s time to start monitoring phone calls and seeing if there is any truth to that rumor.  Do you see a Tweet complaining that you are always out of stock on flux capacitors?  Perhaps a call to Purchasing might shed some light about the situation, and you can Tweet back with some information about the issue?  Get involved.  Respond to your fans, and they will respond to you.

Rule 7: It’s not hard, it’s just constant

Social media is not hard.  It’s constant.  That means you need to start living and breathing your social media.  Fans will instantly detect fake interest, attempts to control the medium, or blatent attempts to monetize all social interactions.  Be real, Be human, and start talking to your customers.

Rule 8: Never censor (unless you have to)

And then, if you do have to censor, be transparent about it.  If someone posts a comment about a subject that is clearly illegal, wrong or calling names, feel free to delete the post or edit it.  But be 100% clear about what you did and why you did it.  For example – let’s say someone posts an attack against another poster that is laced with expletives.  You’d probably be justified in removing or editing the post.  And along with that, post a comment saying “This post was deleted and/or edited because it did not follow guidelines found here.  Specifically this post used inappropriate language and attacked another poster.  We hate to do this, but when this happens, we will always let you know.”

Rule 9: Have Fun!

Most of all, remember, social media is more like a conversation than a sales pitch.  You are extremely high up in the sales funnel, and your goal is to bring customers to think of your brand, product and entity in a ZMOT way.  You won’t get sales immediately, but I promise you, if you actively post to your social accounts on a regular basis, and your stories that you share are of interest to your audience – you will grow – and more people will be reachable by your media.