Currently, growth hacking and content marketing are two popular marketing trends.
By leveraging clever hacks, growth hacking accelerates the growth of products. Content marketing aims to grow your traffic and reach more people; if you’re creating content, you’re doing it to grow your audience.
You’ve likely seen promising results if you’ve incorporated either into your marketing plan. So, why not go the extra mile? If you could apply growth hacking principles to your content, could you achieve fast-paced traffic growth?
There is a way to do it. The practice is known as content hacking.
Apply these nine growth hacking tactics to your content marketing efforts for impressive, fast-paced growth.
Get your OpenGraph Tags in Order
Social networks use embedded OpenGraph HTML tags to generate link previews so readers can preview page content before clicking through.
An HTML page’s header contains a tiny bit of meta-tag code that generates link previews. When a post goes live, this code tells the social network what image, title, and description to use.
OpenGraph tags can improve click rates, so it is worth configuring and testing them.
Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin works well with all major social networks if you are using WordPress.
At the very least, you should validate your link preview using these handy tools:
- Meta’s Sharing Debugger
- Twitter’s Card Validator
- Google’s Schema Markup Testing Tool
- Pinterest’s Rich Pins Validator
Make Use of Microdata and Rich Snippets
The Google Authorship feature, which displays an author’s profile image beside search results, is well-known to most of us. It has been proven that these little gems increase attention and click-through rates, but the possibilities do not end there.
In search results, microdata (also called rich snippets) appear as a few lines of text. The purpose of these is to provide users with a sense of what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query.
Adding rich snippets to your content gives you an extra chance to persuade readers to click on your link.
The good news is that, if you know a little HTML, you can control what appears here. For your content to get the extra oomph, you’ll need to explore this advanced topic.
Putting rich snippets into practice is also made easy with Google’s two tools. You should start by testing your current data with the free Structured Data Testing Tool. If you need help modifying your HTML, check out the amazing Structured Data Markup Helper. It’s quite easy. You might be surprised.
For a step further, take a look at Google’s In-Depth Article markup.
Make your Readers Aware of your Business Data
Stories captivate readers, and even more importantly, they enjoy sharing them with friends. In an attempt to grow its revenue from $30k per month to more than $100k per month, Groove launched its blog to tell its story as a tech startup.
Another company, Buffer, is telling its story through a content hack based on its business data. On their website, Buffer shares all the details of its business, including the salaries of its employees.
Buffer Open Blog regularly features content about their business, such as their revenue numbers, website traffic, and key metrics. In addition, they have a public dashboard where their content is displayed in real-time.
This strategy may seem extreme to some, but to others, it may seem like a brilliant way to deliver content.
Buffer opens itself up to an entirely new audience and traffic source by sharing the data-based content they use internally. Making “private” data public may present mental hurdles, but your readers will appreciate the transparency.
Speed Up the Loading of your Content
The speed of a site is often equated with traffic, but they are actually related.
Matt Cutts, one of the official spokesmen for Google Search, has said that Google considers site speed when ranking sites. Furthermore, if your website does not address the needs of your visitors, they will leave in 10-20 seconds.
It’s not worth wasting that time loading your website.
You can start by reviewing Google’s web performance best practices guide, which outlines a number of ways you can optimize your site speed.
When managing your WordPress site, be sure to check out plugins like W3 Total Cache and Hammy. Moreover, CloudFlare can help improve site performance and security.
The process of optimizing site speed can be a bit complicated, but it definitely pays off in the end. By reducing page load times from seven seconds to two seconds, Shopzilla increased page views by 25% and revenue by 7% – 12%. It’s not bad for just a few minutes under the hood.
Utilize Old Content in New Ways
Turning your evergreen content into an autoresponder email course that drips out to subscribers over time increases its relevance and interest over time.
In this way, you can collect thousands of new leads by giving “old content” a new lease on life.
A 6 Free Marketing Tips course, for example, is a restructured and repackaged combination of your best blog posts. The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Optimization ebook is a natural extension of Unbounce’s Landing Page Conversion Course.
Choosing a common theme for your blog and finding a group of related posts is the easiest way to begin. The next step is to aggregate the posts in your email autoresponder account so that they drip out over time to your subscribers.
The autoresponder course is a content piece that keeps on giving if you build a dedicated landing page for it and promote it.
Use Medium to repost your content
In the content world, Medium has made a big splash by taking a community-driven approach. With its wonderful interface, you can collaborate with many other quality writers.
A medium is a great place to occasionally repost your content; Buffer has been using it recently to share old and new content.
Promote your content on social media more than once
The practice of sharing your content more than once on social media is polarizing.
Despite what some people think, it is hard to argue with results if you continue to promote a piece.
If you don’t act like a spammer, no one will notice that you’re posting your content multiple times. Pre-scheduling your social media accounts allows you to avoid sending out messages too close together. The following is an example of a well-executed schedule:
- When a blog post goes live, a social message is sent.
- In the next 2-3 hours, more social messages will be sent to your accounts.
- The next day, the messages are shared again on the appropriate social channels.
- The second series of messages will be sent the following week according to a pre-scheduled schedule.
- Next month, more social messages will be scheduled.
- It is optional to schedule additional messages after three months.
Plan a Guest Blogging Schedule
Despite recent reports, guest blogging isn’t dead. Just a misunderstood concept.
As a link-building tool, guest blogging might be dead as an age-old content hack. In spite of this, it’s still a very effective way to build trust and awareness for your personal brand. Professional networking and promotion can still be achieved through guest blogging if you do it right.
Guest posting also boosts your online influence. In just a few weeks, a post on Unbounce can generate thousands of tweets and shares, as well as many new social media followers and email subscribers.
As long as you use guest blogging to build influence, not SEO, guest blogging is still a classic way to grow your content marketing.
Get a better understanding of content marketing
When done well, content marketing can drive traffic, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
Taking advantage of every piece of content you produce is a great start, but you also have to be aware that content marketing takes time.
A classic blog post by Rand Fishkin of Moz nails this point perfectly.
The goal of content marketing isn’t to bring someone to your site once and immediately convert them into a customer; it’s to keep them coming back. Over time, you need to build trust with your audience and earn their business.
A great content hack is to simply create the best content possible – content that is better than anything anyone has ever produced before.
Research your competitors first: what are the top 10 Google results for your topic before you write your next piece of content?
If you want your content to be better, ask yourself how to improve it.
What else can you say?
Would you like to tell me more?
Do you have any more videos or images?
Hacking content isn’t just about tricks and games. There are times when typing is just hard work. If you make sure your content hacking efforts are built on high quality content, you’ll drive traffic like crazy, even over time.
Or you can Go The Way
At Synapse, we believe in granting you the resources to succeed. How? By starting to work together and demonstrating our power to create amazing content pieces that can bring you leads, sales, and every metric you can dream of.
Ready to learn how? Leave your details below and get a free consultation with one of our content marketing pros.