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Using SEO is a fantastic way to bring people to your site, and by writing great content, building lots of links and designing your site in a spider-friendly way you can get a lot more traffic from visitors who are looking for the information or the service you provide. On its own though SEO can only do so much, and is only one form of promotion. When marketing anything you need to have something to sell, and you need to make sure that your offering stands out among the crowd and piques attention. This is the way you need to be thinking when you’re trying to promote your site, and it’s what can really make the difference between a site people can find, and one that people can get excited about.
In short, you need to start viewing your articles as products and that means that you should be doing everything you can to ‘sell’ each one in the same way a business tries to sell any item or service. Here we will look at how you can go about selling your site products and how this can help you set your site apart.
The Title
When you try and sell an e-book through a website or a course, usually you will use a landing page that will utilize a sales script to try and make people buy what you have to offer. This might read something like ‘Finally, a simple guide to making money online – here’s my story of how I made thousands over-night’.
This is a great way to sell a product because it grabs attention, it promises results and it has a personal interest element to it. And that’s how you should be writing each of your article titles – by creating it the same way you’d create sales pitch and using all the same tropes. Don’t be afraid of long bombastic titles – they sell.
The Presentation
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The way you present your content is just as important as the packaging on a new line of toys for Hasbro. If you want people to choose to read your content over another site’s content then you need to use the best images and the best the layout to make it a joy to read and so that it really catches the eye. Give it a layout more closely resembling a magazine article than your typical blog post and people will notice the difference.
USP
USP in business means ‘Unique Selling Point’ and this describes the factor that makes a product different from others on the market. If your product is exactly the same as everyone else’s then you don’t give your potential customers any incentive to choose you over the competition.
The same goes for your articles – so don’t just rewrite the news as you read it, or regurgitate samey lists of tips. Instead, think about how you can take a different angle on the story, bring your own experience to the mix, or relate the topic to something different. That way you give people a reason to read what you’ve written even when they’ve heard the news already elsewhere.
Promotion
SEO will help people find your articles, but you should also try and promote your content and generate hype for it in the same way that Apple might generate buzz for its next iPhone. You can do this in a number of ways, but generally this means talking about your article on forums, discussing it through social media channels and showing it on YouTube. That’s right, not just posting links, but actually talking about the article and demonstrating why people should care about it. It’s a subtle but potent difference.
Iteration
The iteration cycle in business is a process of subtly tweaking a product over time in order to perfect it in response to market feedback. The point I’m making here though broadly is that you don’t have to just release your article then leave it at that – by tweaking it and improving it you can ensure it’s the best it can possibly be, always up-to-date (which Google appreciates) and well suited to the audience reading it and what they tell you they want from their articles.
In other words then it’s time to stop popping out articles and posting links, and time to start thinking long and hard about how to really sell your articles and show them in the best possible light. View each post as a project and a business endeavour and your time and care will be sure to pay off.
About the guest author: John Crenshaw is the brains behind the Cincinnati SEO company, Razorlight Media. Razorlight are a Google-Certified partner who offer SEO, PPC and Web Design services.
This is a unique article published on SEO Desk with exclusivity.
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