Welcome to the lesson #8. How to promote your content and make it rank high in Google.
Here's what we're going to cover in this lesson.
Four common content promotion mistakes.
The best content promotion strategies.
And how to compete with the "big guys" in Google's search results.
So let's go!
Part 1. Four common content promotion mistakes
Let me ask you a question: what goal do you have in mind when promoting your content?
For the vast majority of people the goal of content promotion is to get as much traffic
as possible to their newly published article.
And they are super happy and satisfied if they manage to beat the traffic record of
a previously published one.
That sounds like a great goal to pursue, which aligns perfectly with the goal of growing
your blog and your business, right?
Well.. no.
If your only goal with content promotion is generate short-term traffic., I suggest you
to go back and watch this course again, starting from the very first lesson.
Because by focusing on short-term traffic you're focusing on the "Spike of hope",
which as we have discussed in those first lessons will eventually fade to nothing anyway,
taking you back to where you started.
If you want your blog to grow - you need to focus your efforts on building passive consistent traffic.
Which you get by pushing your articles to the top of Google search results!
And that is pretty hard to do, I must say.
Guess how many articles reach the front page of Google in a year after being published?
5.7%!!!
And by "reach the front page of Google" I mean ranking for at least a single related keyword,
not even the main topic that they're targeting.
This percentage comes from a study that we carried out last year.
We tracked the performance of 2 million newly published pages and it turned out that only 5.7%
of them were seen in Google top 10 for at least a single keyword within a year from being published.
This means that a staggering 94.3% of all newly published pages never reach the front
page of Google and never get any search traffic at all.
Can you guess why?
That's because most people prefer to rely on the "Publish & Pray" approach and hope
that their pages will rank in Google by themselves.
Which obviously never happens.
In the previous lesson we have discussed that your website cannot rank in Google without backlinks.
Which leads us to the conclusion that the primary goal of content promotion should
be to build quality backlinks to your content, so that it will start ranking in Google.
And this brings us to the first mistake of content promotion.
Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term traffic over backlinks.
But wait a minute, didn't I say in the previous lesson that the articles at Ahrefs Blog aquire
80% of their backlinks naturally as a result of generating traffic to them and expecting
some of these people to link to us?
Which means that "generating traffic" basically equals "acquiring backlinks".
So how come I am now saying that you should not focus on traffic?
Well, the thing is this equation is only true for big and established blogs and won't really work
for those who are just starting out.
Let me give you three reasons why.
Reason #1: Only a tiny percentage of all your visitors will link to you.
From my personal experience, aquiring one natural backlink for every thousand visitors
is a pretty good result.
So if you want to get just 10 natural links to your article, you should aim for at least
10,000 visitors to that specific article.
If that math doesn't scare you - go for it.
But for most newbie bloggers 10,000 visitors to a single article is far from achievable.
Reason #2: People tend to link to websites that they know and trust.
This explains why Wikipedia has a ridiculous amount of backlinks and their articles are
super-hard to outrank.
Most people would prefer to link to a Wikipedia article over a similar post on a blog that they've
never heard of before.
No one wants to risk sending their readers to some questionable website, right?
That's why brand new blogs struggle to aquire links naturally.
And finally, reason #3: Most people don't have a website to link from.
It's easy for me to talk about acquiring natural links while Ahrefs blog belongs to the internet
marketing niche where almost everyone owns a website.
Usually even more than one.
But in many other industries that is not the case.
Which makes natural link acquisition nearly impossible.
So as you can tell, turning traffic into natural backlinks is the kind of luxury that is only available
to well-known established websites and the success largely depends on
the type of industry you're in.
If you're not in the fortunate position of being a well-known and established website,
I'm afraid you'll have to manually build your backlinks,
rather than wait for them to come naturally.
And I'm about to share quite a few actionable link building strategies with you.
But not before we discuss three more mistakes of content promotion.
Mistake #2: Giving up content promotion too early.
Most bloggers have a so-called "content promotion checklist" that they reference when promoting
every new article that they publish.
It usually looks like this.
Send a newsletter to email subscribers.
Post on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc).
Submit to Reddit and any relevant forums and communities;
Reach out to everyone, who was mentioned in the article, etc.
Some bloggers have more items on their checklist than others.
But as soon as that list is completed, they forget about that article and move to a new one.
And that is a big mistake!
You should not quit promoting your article just because you're out of the items in your
content promotion checklist, no matter how big that list is.
Your goal is to rank high in Google and get passive search traffic to your article, remember?
So your content promotion should not stop until you reach that goal.
There's a rather famous piece of advice, which suggests that you should put 20% of your efforts
into creating content and 80% of your efforts into promoting it.
These numbers are meant to illustrate that content promotion is uber-important.
And while I totally dig what the author of that advice was trying to say, I actually
think that it is a very misleading analogy.
So I invented my own rule.
It's called the 110/110 rule.
And it means that you should go an extra mile in both:
creating an absolutely outstanding piece of content that your readers will love;
and promoting it super-hard and not quitting until it reaches the top positions in Google.
So why don't you do a bit of research and throw a few more items into your content
promotion checklist?
Luckily, there's no shortage of different tactics that you can use, just Google around
a bit and you'll find a ton of ideas.
Let me add just a few more items for you to consider.
Submit your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+;
Mention it in relevant conversations on public Slack channels;
Repurpose your content into different formats (video, audio, slides, images) and syndicate it
to proper websites with a link to the original;
Reach out to everyone who has linked linked to articles on the same topic;
Reach out to everyone who has published articles mentioning that topic;
Publish a guest post that references that article and make people want to check it out.
And here's something very important.
Most of these strategies can only be used once, but some of them can be scaled almost indefinitely.
Like guest posting.
What stops you from publishing more and more guest posts that each link to your article,
thus helping it to crawl up the Google rankings?
Same with outreach, it scales rather well and it's a great way to get quality backlinks.
We're going to cover both of these strategies later.
And now, mistake #3: Abandoning your old content
Imagine the following situation.
A year ago you have published a great article.
You promoted it a lot and got some nice backlinks that helped it to rank in Google
top 5 for it's main keyword.
Ranking in top 5 is a very good result, so you decided that your job here is done
and moved on to creating new content, never bothering to revisit that article again.
That doesn't sound like a bad scenario, right?
Well, first of all, why would you settle with any Google position but the very first one?
I mean, if that article brings customers to your business, you want it to get as much
relevant search traffic as possible, right?
And besides, if the search query that you're targeting has some good business value,
you can be sure that sooner or later your competitors will try to outrank you with
their own articles.
In other words, abandoning your content is a no-no.
But what are your options?
You cannot just keep promoting the same article with the same content promotion strategies,
because you're only going to irritate people this way.
Well, there's a loophole that you can use.
After your article has been live for a few months, you should re-visit it and find ways
to make it better.
And once you update your article - you can re-promote it again with the same content
promotion strategies as if it was brand new.
Here at Ahrefs we only spend half of our time and efforts on creating new content.
The other half goes into updating old content.
Here's why we do that.
First of all, if the article gets traffic from Google we want to make sure that our
visitors are getting the most up-to-date information on that topic.
Letting our articles age results in a bad user experience.
Secondly, the mere act of updating your article with fresh information sends
a positive signal to Google and often leads to better rankings on its own.
And finally, in most cases our updates are quite substantial.
We often re-write the entire article from the scratch which then It allows us to promote
it to our audience again as if it was brand new.
In fact, when we email our blog subscribers with a link to an updated article, we do disclose
that it's not entirely new.
And so far there hasn't been a single complaint about this.
In fact, we've found the opposite.
The spike of traffic that we get from promoting an updated article is almost
always bigger than when it was first published.
Our "SEO tips" article is probably the best example I have.
We re-launched it three times in two years, each time generating more and more traffic.
You bet we're going to continue updating and re-launching it in future.
And there's one last content promotion mistake left to discuss.
Mistake #4: Not spending money on content promotion.
As you already know, We have a decent advertising budget for every article that
we publish at Ahrefs blog.
This allows us to reach a huge number of people that we wouldn't be able to reach otherwise.
But whenever I mention that to other bloggers, most of them tell me that they can't afford
to spend money on content promotion.
Well, in psychology they call this a Limiting Belief.
The truth is - you can afford to spend money on content promotion.
You just fail to justify it.
So let me try to help you with that.
I have two good arguments, that should do the job.
Argument #1: The "free content promotion methods" are not free.
So how much time does it take you to promote a new piece of content?
One hour? Five hours? Ten?
And your time is worth something, right?
So why don't you multiply your estimated hourly rate by the time it took you to complete all
items in your content promotion checklist?
This way you're going to get the cost of what you think are your "free" content promotion methods.
And now that you know the price tag, why don't you add 10% to that sum and use that money
to run a Facebook ads campaign?
Think of it as an additional item in your "free content promotion methods" checklist,
but this time you're paying with your money instead of paying with your time.
And you might actually discover that putting your money into Facebook ads has a much better
ROI than putting your time into some of these other free strategies.
Argument #2: Your content should sell your product.
The best way to justify spending money on content promotion is by getting this money
back in a form of sales or customers.
If an article doesn't bring new customers to your business - I can understand why you
don't want to spend money on it.
But why did you spend your time promoting it then?
And, in fact, if an article doesn't help you to get new customers, why did you even create
it in the first place?
Do you see where I'm going with that?
Paid content promotion is a litmus test for the business potential of your content.
Here at Ahrefs we're not afraid to pour money into content promotion, because we know that
our content converts.
Check out this tweet I saw the other day:
"Excellent content on long-tail keywords.
It also resulted in me signing up for a free trial.
Great work @ahrefs :)"
And a few weeks later Thomas also tweeted that he became our paid customer.
Which is a perfect illustration of how our blog brings new customers to our business.
And this wraps up the four mistakes of content promotion that I wanted to warn you about.
Here's a quick refresher.
Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term traffic over backlinks.
Mistake #2: Giving up content promotion too early.
Mistake #3: Abandoning your old content.
Mistake #4: Not spending money on content promotion.
And now it's time to review the actual content promotion strategies.