Quality Over Quantity: Repurpose Your Best Ideas and Distribute Them Far and Wide

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but …
Your audience does not need your ideas.
Sorry to disappoint you.
It’s true though.
Your audience is exposed to plenty of ideas. Everywhere they turn online and offline, they are bombarded with ideas. Ideas, ideas, ideas. Mostly filler and fluff.
Think about yourself. Do you need any more ideas to consume and consider?
No.
What you need are someone’s best ideas. And what your audience needs — in fact, all that your audience needs — are your best ideas.

• The ideas that cut through the crap and clutter to make a difference
• The ideas you’ve thought through, spent time with, and sculpted
• The ideas that are closer to finished products than initial impressions

And you should invest more time distributing these premium ideas further and wider, in different ways and in different places. You shouldn’t simply hit Publish and then run to the next idea.

This way you can meet more of your current audience members where they are and you increase the likelihood of reaching potential audience members with your best work.

Let me show you an example of how I’m doing this on one of my sites …

It all starts with a blog post

Given my responsibilities here at Rainmaker Digital, and being a new dad, I don’t have a ton of extra capacity for side projects.
So when I do have an idea worth sharing over at The Assembly Call, I want to maximize the impact and distribution of that good idea. I can’t afford to spin my wheels.
In the immortal words of Sweet Brown:

“Ain’t nobody got time for that.”

This is why I’ve shifted my strategy and begun taking one well-thought-out idea and repurposing it into several different types of content, distributed in many different places.
The idea is given birth in a blog post. Why? Because I do my best thinking when I’m writing.
Writing forces me to clarify my thoughts in a way that I’m never able to by simply ruminating, or even talking.
I need to sit down, think, write, edit, think a little more, edit a little more, and chisel the idea from rough stone into something smooth and polished.

A lot of the fluff, filler, clutter, and crap gets removed, and then I feel much more comfortable turning the idea loose in the world.

(This process also makes me more prepared to speak extemporaneously about the topic in the future — a very useful side benefit for a project that involves a podcast and radio show.)
You may be different. You may thrive working it all out in your head. You may find that you clarify your ideas best by talking them out. I urge you to learn what works best for you and follow it.
But for me, it starts with writing. Hence why I began a blogging series titled “3-Point Shot” — where, basically, I take a topic of interest to IU basketball fans and come up with three useful observations about it. Simple. Consistent. Repeatable.
Sometimes I know what the observations will be before I start writing. But usually the process of conducting basic research, and then synthesizing it into three clearly articulated ideas, reveals new insights that are useful to me and, in turn, to my audience.
I write the first draft. Sometimes I rewrite or rearrange parts. Then I edit and proofread. Soon thereafter I hit Publish. The entire process usually takes 60–75 minutes.
Now I have a blog post, usually in the 1,000–1,250 word vicinity, that I can distribute via social media, use to attract search traffic, and send to our email list.
One piece. One format. A few distribution channels.

All done? Hardly. I’m actually just getting started.

The beautiful part of this strategy is that the most difficult and time-intensive part is now done. I developed a high-quality idea — it’s not just something I slapped together in 15 minutes as a cheap traffic grab.
Next, it’s time to leverage this fully-formed idea into a blitzkrieg of distribution.

The blog post becomes a podcast episode (and video!)

Keep in mind as we go through this example that the specific steps and channels that work for me over at The Assembly Call may not necessarily be the steps that you need to take.
That site is built around a podcast, and we’re also trying to grow our YouTube audience. Therefore, getting content out to our podcast audience and publishing more content to our YouTube channel are priorities. That might not be true for you.
But the big idea that I’m describing here — combining the power of quality over quantity with repurposing and smart, widespread distribution — will work for you. Just take the basic principles and apply them to your situation.
The next basic principle for me is this: turn the blog post into a podcast episode … and there just so happens to be a way that I can do that while simultaneously creating a video version too. Score!

When time is of the essence (and when isn’t it?), you have to take any chance you can to work smarter, not harder.

So here’s what I do:

• Double-check my microphone cables and settings, and do a test recording. (Always, always, always do a test recording!)
• Open up my Assembly Call episode template in GarageBand, so I can record locally.
• Create a YouTube Live Event to broadcast the recording live.
• Open up the blog post in a web browser, so I have it ready for reference.
• Tweet out the link to the YouTube Live Event, so anyone who is interested can watch the live recording. (For what it’s worth, I’ve never had fewer than 16 people watch live online, and occasionally that number is up in the 50s and 60s.)
• Hit Record in GarageBand, hit Start Broadcast on the YouTube Live Event, welcome the audience, and start reading the blog post.

From time to time while reading, I’ll interject something extra — the kind of comment that might have been a footnote to the written piece. But for the most part I just read the blog post verbatim, trying to sound as casual and conversational as I can.
I was worried when I first starting doing this that our podcast and YouTube audiences wouldn’t be too enthused about this content since it’s just me (without my co-hosts) and I’m basically just reading something they could get on the blog.
My worries proved to be unfounded. The response has been unequivocally positive.

I’ve received numerous tweets and emails thanking me for finding a way to deliver this written content in the preferred consumption medium for podcast listeners, which make up the majority of our audience. These folks would never get to see or hear the content otherwise.

And it is so easy to do. The entire time investment to record and post the podcast is about 30–35 minutes:

• 5 minutes to set up
• 15–20 minutes to record
• 10 minutes to publish the podcast (the YouTube Live Event is automatically archived on our YouTube channel for on-demand viewing)

Furthermore, while our blog posts only publish in one place — our blog — we are set up to distribute our podcast episodes far and wide, with only a few button clicks required.
Every episode goes to:

• iTunes
• Google Play
• TuneIn Radio
• Stitcher
• iHeartRadio
• Spreaker
• SoundCloud

This doesn’t even account for the many individual podcast apps that scrape places like iTunes for podcast feeds. (For example, I use Podcast Addict on my Android device, and The Assembly Call is available there even though I never signed up or submitted it there.)
And here’s a fun, little side benefit …

One of my favorite bonuses about tweeting out links to podcast episodes over blog posts is that people can consume the content right there in their Twitter feed.

Look at this tweet. All someone has to do is hit the play button, and the episode will play right there in the Twitter feed. Less friction, less distance between my audience being intrigued and then actually consuming my content.

Turn one quality blog post into a traffic and attention engine

So if you’re scoring at home, we’ve now gone from one blog post, one distribution channel, and a few traffic sources to:

• A blog post
• A podcast episode
• A video
• At least 11 different distribution channels
• Countless traffic sources

And here’s the crazy thing … it could be more.
I could:

• Repurpose the blog post someplace like Medium, or as a guest post
• Create a slide presentation for SlideShare
• Find additional video channels besides YouTube
• Extract clips of the audio for a service like Clammr
• Make clips or GIFs from the video to post in visual channels like Instagram

And on and on.
The main reasons I don’t do those are a) time and b) because I’d get diminishing returns.
I’ve tried to be strategic about investing the limited time and effort resources I have for this project into the channels that will deliver the best and most immediate returns. SlideShare, for example, isn’t going to do much for a sports audience, but it may be a great option for you.
What’s been the impact of all this? It’s only been a month, but already:

• I added 400 new email subscribers
• We doubled our YouTube subscribers (in just a month!)
• Traffic to our blog increased by 31.91 percent
• Podcast downloads in just March of 2017 (the majority of which was during the off-season, when attention is usually lower) were nearly equal to the combined total of January and February

What you should do next

Ask yourself if you’re maximizing the distribution of your best ideas.
Not your best blog posts, but your best ideas.

Because if you have an idea that’s a winner, but it’s only distributed via text as a blog post, then you’re missing out on a wide range of additional attraction options.

Can you turn your blog post into an audio recording? Can you then turn that audio recording into a video — even if you just use a fixed image rather than filming yourself (like I do here)?
Or, if you have a great podcast episode, can you go the other way and turn it into a blog post? If you already create transcripts for your podcast episodes, this is incredibly simple to do.
The bottom line is that rather than focusing on the quantity of the content you publish, you should invest more time in creating fewer, higher quality pieces of content … and then find efficient, scalable ways to distribute these high-quality pieces to as many nooks and crannies of the web as you can.

You’ll reach more people with your best ideas in the way they’re most comfortable consuming content.

And there’s no better way to build an audience and authority, brick by brick, than that.

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Get Traffic Without Paying For it

DID you know you can increase website traffic without marketing?

I know, I know…It sounds too good to be true. But, it is.

Marketing is one of the most important aspects when it comes to business, and should be a primary focus from the very start. However, if you only focus on the usual traffic generation tips and tricks, then you’re going to be missing out on a lot of audience reach and potential customers.

Check out these simple strategies for increasing your website’s traffic without having to do a single bit of marketing:

Types of Website Traffic

Before we can focus on ways to jumpstart your traffic, we should first cover the various types of traffic. It’s a pretty well-known fact that having a high volume of traffic coming to your site is one of the signs of success in the online portion of your business. It means there is content that has drawn people to your site, and more visitors means more potential sales.

There are four types of website traffic you need to be aware of before you can implement strategies to increase your website traffic:

• Organic traffic
• Referral traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Social Traffic

Of these four types, the organic traffic is definitely the most important. This type of traffic comes from search engines, and brings in more valuable, targeted users. After that, referral traffic is high up on the list, but that really depends on what type of website is sending you referrals. If they’re coming from popular websites, you’re more likely to get quality traffic. Low-quality sites will bring in less than stellar traffic and, as such, won’t benefit you all that much. Direct traffic comes from a user visiting your website’s URL directly from a browser – They either bookmarked you or typed it in directly. Finally, social traffic comes from (you guessed it) social media networks.

Increasing Website Traffic

When it comes to implementing the following strategies, it’s best to keep your actions repetitive. Keep doing these things as often as possible, and you will really start to notice a significant (and steady) increase in your website traffic. It won’t happen overnight, or even within a single month, but it will happen. It will pay off, and you won’t have to spend a single cent on buying traffic or advertising your business.

Things to Do

Network, Network, Network!

This one really can’t be stressed enough, which is why it gets listed at the top. Social network traffic is extremely important for business and is pretty easy to get when compared to the other types – especially organic traffic.

Get active on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and even Snapchat. Don’t spam your followers, but make sure your clickable links are prominently displayed. Share their content, comment on their posts, and start a discussion. The more you network, the more connections you will get. Once you build a community or become part of one, you will see a steady increase in website traffic. Leave valuable comments on other blog posts and social media posts, and others will click on your link to check what you’re all about.

This is why you need to make sure your website’s pages are shareable, too. If they aren’t designed to be shared, you may want to consider adding some social plugins to your site in order to make it easier for readers to share your posts across social networking platforms.

Collect Those Emails

From the very first day, you start your website – especially if it contains a blog – make sure you are building your email list. Don’t force visitors to subscribe, but offer a valuable incentive for them to do so. This lets them subscribe willingly while getting direct benefits out of it. If they subscribe willingly, you will be able to send them posts directly to their email without them unsubscribing and considering your emails to be spam.

If you want to get more blog readers, one of the best things to do is to link your email list to the RSS feeds on your blog. This ensures your readers are notified as soon as you publish a new post. Your readers will stay in the loop, see your newest content, and keep your business fresh in their minds. They will be more likely to think of you when they need the type of product or service your brand offers.

Expert Tip: Use this cutting edge tool to collect emails!

Optimise Your Content

Pages and posts that are search engine optimised (SEO) are going to rank higher in search engines and, as such, will help you increase website traffic without marketing. If you have, say, 60 posts that are ranking even fairly high within search engine results and they each get 10,000 clicks, that means 600,000 clicks per month and millions of page views for your website.

How exactly do you do this? SEO can be pretty complicated and involved, but there are some basic practices you can implement right away to boost website traffic:

Conduct keyword research

1. Summarise your product or services
2. Highlight the keywords and phrases within that description
3. Take that list of words and create as many combinations as possible
4. Find more ideas via Google Keyword Planner
5. Test out all of those ideas with the Keyword Planner by using the “See how they perform” option.
6. Pick the options with the highest volume and lowest cost per clicks. These are your “Target Keywords”
7. Implement these into the content on your page, or hire an experienced freelance writer who is able to do it naturally

Optimise the entire site

• Use a unique meta description for each page, making sure to incorporate one or more relevant target keywords. Keep this under 155 words.
• Put a target keyword into the URL of each page/tab
• Optimise the images by using ALT tags with related keywords.

Use quality content

• The content of your site should have enough value to keep your readers engaged. This means your site should have at least 300 to 400 words of unique content on each page.
• Start a blog for your business, and publish a post as often as you can. A couple times per month is good, though more would be ideal.
• Promote your content across various social media platforms.

Use Power Words in Headlines

Using power words is one of the best ways to compel a user to click on your post and read the content of that page. A headline like, “Best marketing automation software you should buy” is likely to get more hits or clicks than one like, “Marketing automation software you should buy.”

It’s recommended that at least 70% to 75% of your time should be spent on the title of your web page, blog post, or article. You want to ensure it uses power words and is catchy enough to snag the reader’s attention.

Build Your Backlinks

Backlinks are basically hyperlinks that connect a single webpage to a full website. Not only are they incredibly important for search engine optimisation, but they also make it easier to increase website traffic without marketing. Backlinks will bring referral traffic to your website and/or business’ blog. This will boost your search engine ranking and domain authority, which will result in you getting more organic traffic.

Utilize YouTube

According to Fortune Lords, roughly 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, with nearly 5 billion videos being viewed each day. In fact, roughly 900 million hours of video are watched on YouTube each month.

If you upload quality videos to YouTube and then link back to your website, you are likely to receive tons of referral traffic to your website. If a video happens to go viral, then you are likely to receive millions of traffic! There is also the added benefit that, assuming none of the Terms of Service is being violated, your videos will remain online indefinitely. That means that source of referral traffic will never go away.

Remember to Use Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are a bit longer (hence the name) than specific target keywords, but they drive specific traffic to your blog and have far less competition. One of the best ways to find these is to check the related Google searches below the results. For example, a search for “find long tail keywords” brings up the following results:

Targeting these long tail keywords within your content can boost your organic traffic by more than 50%.

Focus on Building Your Brand

Increasing website traffic without marketing can be pretty difficult, but one of the most powerful things you can do is to focus on building your brand. Place an emphasis on providing quality, value-driven content to your readers and monetize your blog when possible.

A website that has a strong brand that stands out from the masses will have returning visitors and dedicated readers who place their trust in your authority. This helps you to stand out within your business niche and will bring in continuous support for your business without you having to spend oodles of money on marketing efforts that may or may not pay off in the end.

Things to Avoid

The following actions are pretty common mistakes. This list of “Don’ts” will adversely affect the value of your website and brand’s authority, and will decrease your website traffic.

Spamming Your Followers

This seems pretty common sense but is a huge mistake a lot of people make. Spamming of forums, social networks, and other websites should be avoided. It won’t drive traffic to your website for more than a short period of time, and will just annoy the other users, followers,  and website owners. It’s best to stick with the “80-20 rule of social media networking.”

Publishing Poor Content

You’ve undoubtedly seen this before: A website owner or blogger wants to get has many click-through rates as possible, so they post something once or twice per day. The content is of fairly good quality at first, but then just goes downhill from there.

Posting often may get you some great click-through rates, but it will tarnish your brand’s image to have poor content on your site or blog. Maintaining a solid reputation and brand authority within your nice will bring in the targeted traffic you want.

Buying Traffic

While there is some benefit to buying traffic now and then, it generally brings in non-targeted visitors who are probably not very relevant to your brand. There is also the added drawback of the traffic mainly coming from websites that are considered to be of low quality, which would affect your website ranking. If you want to keep a high-quality website, it’s best to avoid buying website traffic.

Final Thoughts

The above tips help show you what to do, and what to avoid when it comes to finding ways to increase website traffic without marketing. After a few months of regular implementation of these techniques, you will likely start to see your traffic climb.

If you put all of that effort into your content, but don’t see the result you’re looking for, you may want to review your content and hire an experienced freelance writer or web designer.

Looking for another great way to drum up some traffic? Check out PushConnectNotify and leverage the power of push notifications to really increase your traffic flow! It is super easy-to-use and a great way to optimise your site while securing leads.

What are your tried and true techniques for jumpstarting your website traffic without having to break the bank? Let us know in the comments below! 

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Converting Search Engine Traffic to Customers

Search engine traffic is one of the hardest customer acquisition channels to understand, especially for small business owners. Generally, these are the reactions I see from small business owners when they first have Google Analytics installed correctly and learn how to segment the channels down to search engine traffic:

1. Panic — Some immediately panic because they can’t understand why 98 percent of their website visitors don’t convert into a customer.
2. Confusion — Some wonder why AdWords isn’t producing a 30-1 return on their investment.
3. Dismay — Some are happy that they get so many visitors but wonder why there are not enough customers.

Generally, what happens from here, is they either blame their website, their content, or their consultant/agency who manages or built their website for any shortcomings in getting them new customers.
However, the issues normally don’t have anything to do with any of those. Instead, it is how small business owners look at search engine traffic and how they are converting them into customers. It is very difficult to get a customer from the search engine and immediately convert them into a customer. Generally, the average conversion rate on websites is around 2 percent.
Now, this can be a little different for small businesses. Let’s say that someone is searching for a local oil change location. In that case, searchers are more likely to convert. However, it is not that far off because, at the end of the day, customers have two different intents:

1. Buy — They are looking to buy a product or service at that moment. This also means that they could have chosen your competitor.
2. Research — They are looking for more information and considering different research before they buy a product or service.

So, when you take those two intents into consideration, it really isn’t a stretch to think that a 2 percent conversion rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Searchers get a ton of different options when they search Google. They might not choose you, or they might not be ready to buy from you. So, it’s important to capture the 98 percent of those that don’t convert into a customer immediately from their search and try to get them to convert later on down the road. Sounds easy, right? Not exactly. But, don’t worry — here are some tips on converting search engine traffic to help:

Tips for Converting Search Engine Traffic to Sales

Focus on the Long Tail

One issue that you might be experiencing has to do with the customers that you are targeting. If you are running AdWords, and you buy short phrases such as “Pizza Place,” it might be too generic to convert them. However, if you buy “The Best Mushroom Pizza in (Your City),” then you are going to be more likely to convert.
When running your AdWords campaigns, focus on the long-tailed keyword phrase and capture them, as they are more likely to convert.

Optimize Your Campaigns

Similar to above, you want to make sure that you are optimizing for your physical location. Check your Google local page(s) to ensure that they have the correct information and that the directories have the same information as Yelp, YellowPages, etc. The worst thing that you can do is have the wrong local information that takes potential customers to the wrong location.
With regards to AdWords, one gigantic mistake that I tend to see a lot is not using the right location settings. It is absolutely critical that you use the correct settings below to make sure you target the right areas if you are trying to use AdWords to acquire local customers. Make sure you set it to “people in my targeting location” for both of those location options below.

Make it Easy to Convert

Another fatal mistake that I see a lot is when small business owners make it extremely hard for website visitors to convert. Usually, this is done in three ways:

1. Phone or other contact information is hard to find
2. Locations are hard to find
3. No reviews or reasons to choose them
4. There are thousands of options on their contact forms
5. Contact forms do not work

If you are a potential searcher, and you have 4 different local businesses to choose from, you will choose the one that stands out. If you want to be eliminated quickly from the content set, then do one of the five options above.
If you don’t want to be eliminated, make sure you don’t make it hard for a customer to do business with you. Make your website inviting and easy to use, and have differentiators of why they should choose you. Were you named #1 Pest Control business in your city? If so, say that your website. It makes you stand out from your competition.

Retarget Campaigns

This one should be a no-brainer for a small business owner. If you are not, please, please start retargeting campaigns now. Ninety-eight percent of customers do not convert on the first click. Getting them back and staying on top of their mind is critical.
Luckily, it is easier than ever before to use tools like AdRoll or create retargeting ads yourself. By doing so, you will get website visitors to come back and, it is hoped, buy when they are ready. I firmly believe offering discounts or other various incentives in your retargeting ads will help convert them into customers.

Use Content and Email Gathering

Similar to retargeting, it can be very difficult to convert searchers into customers immediately because they need to be warmed up. This can be very apparent in small businesses with a high revenue per purchase, such as automotive or housing businesses.
If you are having trouble converting them immediately, I would suggest trying to capture their email addresses and sending them an email chain to stay on top of their minds. In addition, you can build trust by giving them valuable content. I personally use SUMOMe and Active Campaign for this.
Using SUMOMe, I use content popups and other various content in order to get their email addresses. From there, they get the content, and they go into my Active Campaign account. Through this, they get a 12-email series, which tries to get them to convert within the next 3-4 months.
If you are in the automotive business, you could use popups with content such as “12 Mistakes Our Customers Make When Buying.” These guides that show mistakes, failures, or pitfalls when making a large purchase are attention grabbing and will surely convert at a higher rate than your standalone web pages. Then your email chain will continue to build trust and value.

Employ Calls to Action in Content

If you are eCommerce retailers or sell products in retails stores, you can also have calls to action in your content. When writing compelling blog content solving researching questions, you can also include calls to action when you mention your products/services.
You can include items such as “click here for 10 percent off” or other various monetary discounts to give them the urgency to convert into a customer. You can also induce urgency by saying things such as “very limited inventory” or other various phrases to show them that they should buy so they do not get left out.

Conclusion

These are the top ways to convert the “top of the funnel” search engine traffic that has traditionally been a “low conversion rate” source of traffic. If you have any suggestions or any to add, let me know in the comments!



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