Content Marketing Hacks to Increase Web Traffic and Leads

Have you ever felt that your content marketing efforts just aren’t earning the ROI you expected them to? That you’re spending tons of time creating and publishing content with good (not great) results? That your content just isn’t hitting KPI goals the way you want it to?

The truth is traditional content marketing tactics (like blogs) can’t always earn optimal results on their own in an increasingly competitive landscape. It’s great that more companies are using content marketing, but it also means that Google results pages are more crowded.

Simple content marketing hacks like the ones in this article can be the remedy to breathe new life into your content’s performance.

Quick Takeaways

• Content marketing hacks can support traditional content marketing tactics (like blogs) to increase your content’s ROI.

• Repurposing and updating old content boost organic traffic and extend the shelf life of your best content.

• Content calendars are critical to keeping your content strategy on track.

• Visual content earns significantly more views and shares than text-only content.

• A holistic SEO strategy is the best way to get consistently noticed and ranked by search engines.

• Lead magnets are a win-win because they collect contact information for brands while delivering real-time value for users.

Why are traffic and leads so important?

Organic traffic and leads generated are perhaps the two most important KPIs in your content marketing strategy. Without both of these, it’s impossible to grow your business and convert new customers.

Let’s quickly define both.

Organic traffic is any traffic to your website from unpaid sources. Mainly, organic traffic comes from search engines. Organic traffic has been shown to be one of the biggest indicators of brand credibility and authority.

Leads are users that have initiated interest in your brand in some way, such as filling out a form or subscribing to your newsletter. Leads fill your pipeline so that your sales team can eventually convert them into paying customers.

Without both organic traffic and leads, it’s pretty impossible to grow a business in today’s business environment. And even traditional content marketing tactics like publishing a regular blog won’t get it done to the extent you want it to — at least not on their own.

Companies that use simple but effective content marketing hacks to increase the ROI of their content are able to increase traffic, generate more leads, and eventually earn more revenue for their business.

7 content marketing hacks to increase web traffic and leads

Repurpose old content

Repurposing content is one of the most efficient ways to give your content traffic a boost. It also maximizes your content’s ROI by putting a new spin on topics you’ve already covered. To find opportunities to repurpose content, you should start with your blog. As the hub of your content marketing strategy, it will contain the most potential for repurposing.

First, look at your best performing content. Which topics and articles really seemed to resonate with your audience? Which do the numbers say earned the most traffic and engagement? Take these articles and think of new ways to present them — for example, by turning a great blog post into a highly shareable infographic that shares the same information in a new, visual way.

MIG did this with our perfect blog post checklist after realizing it was such a high-demand topic for our current clients and larger blog audience. Here’s just a small snapshot of our infographic:

When you repurpose content with new content types, you increase your visibility and open the door for reaching new audiences.

This can work the opposite way as well. For example, if you do an educational webinar that gets great engagement live, you can make a teaser blog post that covers part of the topic, then links to your webinar recording.

Share on social media

Your social media platforms can be extremely effective tools for earning more content traffic. My advice is to share all of your blog posts on social media — not only because your followers will see it, but because they’ll also share it when they find it valuable.

With over 3 billion people using social media every month, the opportunity is pretty huge. On just about every platform, users and engagement just keep growing over time.

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Think about it. People on your social media feeds are sharing content every day, right? Content is a great conversation starter. When you create content that aligns with customer needs and helps to solve their problems, people will want to pass it on.

Update old blog posts

Trends and statistics change all the time, and it’s one of the primary reasons blog posts become outdated. The thing is that most of the time, the important points stay the same — it’s just the details that change.

You can significantly extend the shelf life of your blog posts by updating them to include current statistics and new trends that have arisen since they were originally published. You can also edit old blog posts that aren’t performing up to par.

HubSpot shares three smart categories to use when you’re looking for blog posts to update:

• The Biggest Losers: Content that has lost organic traffic at a high volume in the past 3-6 months
• The Almost Famous: Content that’s currently ranking on page 2 of Google SERPs
• The Nobodies: Content that’s targeting the right keywords but still isn’t ranking

And below are the results HubSpot experienced after updating some of their own old posts. Not bad indeed!

Image Source: HubSpot

Use a content calendar

A content calendar is a documented schedule that includes all of your content projects and their deadlines. It gives you one, centralized view of your planned content and publishing schedule. It also holds your team accountable for staying on track and sticking to deadlines.

Content calendars take time and commitment to manage, especially when you’re just getting started. But the truth is that without one, your content strategy is likely to lose direction. You’ll earn the highest ROI on your content when you use a calendar to actionize it effectively.

Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to content calendars. There are tons of free templates you can download and customize, including this one that we use at MIG:

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Make it visual

Visual content is the key to content engagement. Research has found that users typically only read about 20% of the text on a web page. To boot, they only remember about 10% of what they do read, compared to 65% of what they see. Using visuals to support your written content makes it more digestible, engaging, and memorable for readers.

The proof is in the content performance: blogs with visuals earn 94% more page views than those without them. Video is by far the most consumed type of content (it will account for 82% of all online traffic by the end of this year) and infographics are shared 3x as much as any other type of visual content.

Adding visuals doesn’t have to be complicated, either. You can create short-form videos for social media stories that require minimal production. High-quality images can be sourced from reputable websites to add to your blog content. You can use apps like Canva to easily create supporting images without any formal design experience.

Prioritize SEO everywhere

By now we all know about keywords and the importance of crafting blog posts optimized for search engines. But there is way more to an SEO strategy than just your blog articles.

Technical SEO, for example, is like the nuts and bolts of your website’s SEO performance — it holds it all together and allows search engines to easily find, crawl, and index your pages. Backlinks from high-quality sites increases your brand authority and establishes your brand’s reputation as an expert. Metadata like titles and descriptions draw people to your content.

My recommendation is to approach SEO holistically the same way you do for your overall content strategy. Make it a priority in every part of your content plan, from keyword research to blog setup to article writing to publishing schedule and more.

Use lead magnets

Lead magnets are high-value content assets offered in exchange for a user’s contact information. The thing about lead magnets is that they’re a win-win for everyone involved. You aren’t scheming anyone into sharing their information because the content you’re providing in exchange helps them solve a real problem or accomplish a real task that’s important to them.

Lead magnets include content like PDF checklists, ebooks, reports, whitepapers, templates, videos and more. You can use them to boost engagement and generate more leads all while demonstrating how your brand can provide value in real-world situations.

When used effectively, lead magnets can increase opt-in rates by 85%! Here’s a quick overview on how to do it:

The key is great content

You can’t implement any content marketing hacks if you don’t have a library of high-quality content. The team of writers and SEO experts at Marketing Insider Group can deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every week for one year (or more!). Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service to learn more or schedule a quick consultation with me to get started!

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