In the year 2018, we generated $106,000 from our blog Bloggers Passion.
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Do you want to know how we did it? The credit goes to the content marketing strategy we used on our blog.
Content marketing is all about creating content that sells itself. It helps you create content that not only drives more traffic and leads but also huge profits.
If you’re curious to find out how to increase your sales using content marketing, this post is a treat for you. Let’s get started without further ado.
Keyword research plays a big role
When it comes to content marketing, you need two main things.
Without the above two things, you simply can’t build a profitable website that actually makes profits in the long run.
That being said, we spend a ton of time on coming up with topic ideas. Keyword research is where we also spend most of our time. We know using the right keywords can dramatically increase our website’s search engine traffic and overall sales.
If you’re not getting the traffic you deserve, you might be ignoring keyword research process.
Finding better keywords is not hard though. Here are few simple yet most effective tips you can use to come up with great keyword ideas that increase your overall website sales and traffic.
- Always target long tail keywords as they contain 4 to 6 (or even more) keywords which are easier to rank for as they usually have low monthly searches.
- Start using the right tools to find low competitive keywords and we highly recommend you to check out tools like SEMrush, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs etc as they give a ton of information (along with search volume, CPC, trend, keyword difficulty).
- Understand the searchers intent when performing keyword research as you should know what your target audience are really looking for. Are they just looking for more information or discounts? Once you understand their intent, finding keywords becomes easy.
- Keep an eye on your competitors keywords as you can use tools like SEMrush to find a list of all the keywords your competitors are using to generate more search traffic to their sites. You can use few of them to increase your own site’s traffic too.
Quick tip: Make sure to find low search volume keywords (generally below 1000 monthly searches) and high CPC keywords to easily get higher rankings on Google along with highly qualified visitors to your site.
Don’t forget SEO
Content marketing and SEO both go hand in hand. You can’t ignore SEO if you want to use content marketing to earn huge profits online.
Here are few things that help you take your SEO to the next level in 2019 and beyond.
In-depth content is the key
Don’t write just another 500 word articles. They are not going to work. No matter what industry you are in, in-depth content performs well in search engines.
According to many case studies, publishing 2000+ word blog posts rank well in search engines like Google.
Have a look at recent case study done by SEO expert Brian Dean from Backlinko about the average content word count for top ranking pages on Google.
By looking at the above illustration, you can understand that the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words.
Just make sure you are not filling your content with fluff to make your content detailed. Include highly practical tips and techniques so your target audience can find your content useful.
Either hire a professional writer or spend quality time in creating highly informative content for your website as great content produces more social shares, backlinks, traffic and so on.
Your content should be in-depth, highly informative and educate your target audience about the products or topics you’re going to discuss. That’s how you create content that sells.
Side note: Here’s an excellent article on how to start a blog from scratch within 10 minutes.
Optimization
Learn how to properly optimize your keywords for search engines. Make sure not to ignore your target audience too as you need to satisfy both search engine crawlers and users to creating high converting content.
Here’s how you can optimize your blog posts to generate more search traffic.
- Include your primary keyword in title tags, meta description and image alt tags.
- Make sure to include your primary keyword in your URL (and keep it short and simple)
- Use sub headings properly as you can sprinkle few relevant LSI keywords within your content to properly optimize it without actually stuffing any keywords repeatedly.
If you’re using WordPress, you should start using an optimization plugin like Yoast SEO as it helps you easily optimize your contents for specific keywords.
Backlinks
Backlinks are still so important if you want to get higher rankings in Google search as it considers links are “positive votes”. So the more quality links your content has the better rankings it will get.
Here are some ways to attract high quality links to your site.
- Guest posting (as it works like a charm but make sure to find and land on those sites which have a good domain authority of above 50 and which are relevant to the topics you cover on your blog)
- Press releases (you can also use HARO where you can help the reporters or journalists by giving information which is credible to build links)
- You can also find and comment on do-follow comment enabled websites
- You can also use the skyscraper technique (where you’ll find top performing content in your niche, create 10x content around the same topic to get more links and shares)
Proper monetization strategy is essential
At an average, we generated around $10,000 every month for a year. That’s how we were able to earn over $100,000 within one year i.e 2018.
The major credit goes to the monetization strategy we use at Bloggers Passion. Almost 80% of the income comes from selling affiliate products.
Affiliate marketing is the best way to earn passive income online. If you’re someone who’s looking to earn more even while you sleep, you must consider affiliate marketing.
That said, affiliate marketing is not easy.
It takes a lot of time to find the right content marketing strategy to earn decent commissions every single month. You should also be consistent with your blog posting frequency and drive as much traffic as you can from search engines like Google.
Here are few monetization strategies you can consider to make money from your blogs.
- Affiliate marketing
- Selling your own products
- Offering services such as SEO, web design etc
- Consulting
- Selling online courses
- Using display ads such as AdSense
If you’re just starting out, we highly recommend you to create a blog sales funnel as it helps you easily turn random website visitors into leads into customers.
Here are few things to consider to create a solid sales funnel that makes money in 2019.
- Offer a lead magnet (you need an email list and offering incentives such as eBooks can help you quickly build and grow your email list)
- Create landing pages (where you can offer your products or services)
- Use Facebook ads (or SEO to drive more traffic to your landing pages)
- Nurture your audience (you can educate your audience by creating highly targeted contents, videos, newsletter etc around the products or services you promote)
- Start pitching your products (once you grab the attention of your blog audience, it gets easier to convince them to purchase your products)
Update, merge or redirect your content
Another biggest content marketing strategy most people ignore is this: harnessing the power of old contents.
What’s the point of creating new content if your existing content is not bringing you any traffic or sales already? You should better be spending your time and money on updating your old contents so you can get better results.
Here’s the same strategy we use when it comes to updating old content on Bloggers Passion.
Update, merge or redirect.
How does it work?
Update: Find a list of blog posts and pages which are already ranking well in Google and bringing your some traffic from search. The idea is to find at least 10 to 20 (or even more if you’ve hundreds of contents) blog posts which are sending you the most traffic from search engines.
Then, do some keyword research around each of those old blog posts to find highly relevant keywords (including LSI keywords) and sprinkle them within your content. Make sure to update your headlines, meta description, add few appealing images and new content to your existing posts to make them detailed and properly optimized for both Google and users.
Once you’re done with updating your old blog posts, fetch as Google from Google Search Console as it also lets you manually submit pages to Google’s search index, so you can quickly let Google know about changes to your site.
Merge: If you’ve a ton of contents already published on your site, the chances of having similar contents will be more. The key here is to find high traffic blog posts around similar topics and merge them together to make one piece of article extremely detailed.
Not only it helps you bring more traffic but also helpful for your target audience where they can find all the information they need around a topic on one particular page. It also helps you minimize duplicate or similar (or thin) content issues on your site which helps you increasing your overall search traffic in the long run.
Redirect: If you don’t find your old blog posts or pages useful to your target audience in any way, there’s no point of keeping them. Instead of deleting them (which leads to broken pages and 404 errors), use 301 redirects to redirect them to your best performing blog posts. That way, you’re giving more link authority to your existing and high performing contents.
Quick tip: If you’re using WordPress, you can use a free plugin called Simple 301 Redirects to seamlessly redirect existing pages to other pages without losing link juice.
Final thoughts on using content marketing to increase traffic and sales
One of the best ways to increase your online sales is to use content marketing.
Content marketing is a pull strategy as opposed as a push strategy which is using paid ads such as PPC ads, Facebook ads etc. Content marketing involves in topic research, content creation, promotion etc.
The best part about content marketing is that you will attract your prospects into your funnel that you can turn into leads and sales.
So did you find the content marketing tips mentioned above useful? Are you going to use content marketing to increase your sales in 2019?
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