Drive Traffic to Your Yola Site, Strategy #2: Create Content

“Content is king” is a common mantra among online marketing pros, and for good reason. Offering enough of the right content is crucial to your Yola website’s success, with your audience and with search engines.

Put in the extra effort to ensure that your site content is:

→ Fresh – Update and add content frequently so visitors have a reason to become regulars.

→ Well stocked – Build up and interlink enough content for your visitors to be able to stay awhile. The more pages of content, the more for search engines to like too.

→ Engaging – Identify your audience and tailor your content and tone to them, whether you’re providing help solving a problem or entertainment.

→ Easy to find – Keep your content focused around your audience’s interests so they’re more likely to find you via search.

→ Shareable – Go viral and you hit the jackpot. Make it easy to pass your content around by using Yola’s Share Me widget. Visitors simply click to share on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

** Tip **
Need Some Audience Insight?
Look up peers’ blogs and websites on a research site, like Alexa, to identify their most popular search terms.

Blog about It
A blog is an important medium for your content. It’s where visitors can go to see what’s new right away and leave comments. Plus, when you start one on Tumblr, you can use it as a source of content for your Yola website. Just add it to your site using the Tumblr Widget in Sitebuilder.

Create or Repost?
In general, creating original content will win you more points with readers and search engines alike. But what if you don’t have the time or chops to crank out high-quality content on a regular basis? That’s when reposting is useful. You can give a new spin on the content by adding your own comments. Just be sure to credit the author and link to the original.

** Tip **
Encourage your audience to share your original content by adding a disclosure statement like, “This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any e-zine, newsletter, blog or website. The author’s name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.”

6 Ways to Get Started
The possibilities for your website content are wide open. Here are suggestions to help you reign it in:

1. Text
Update your website copy regularly to keep your website fresh for regular visitors. This might mean adding new pages, rewording some of the basic copy, or even changing text styles or colors.

2. Interviews and articles
Interview leaders and other individuals of interest to your audience. Many will appreciate the free publicity. Also write on relevant topics. Approaches include opinion and editorial pieces, research and analysis, informative or advice columns, and how-to’s.

3. Photos, slideshows and other images
Boost your Yola site’s success by keeping it visually compelling. Include images throughout, such as photos, graphics, and scans of comic strips or drawings. Create a PowerPoint or Google Doc slideshow, and embed it in your Yola site to introduce some interactivity too.

** Tips **
– Use the Yola Alt Text field to give image files searchable descriptive names.
– Any photos you’ve stored on Flickr you can display on your Yola website using a dynamic badge or embedded slideshow.

4. Videos

Create videos that are fun and quirky, show viewers how to do something, or otherwise engage or move your audience. Publish them on YouTube or Metacafe, then embed them on your website using Yola widgets. Remember to provide your URL where you post each video.

USEFUL FACT
The average US Internet user watches 186 videos per month (Comscore).

5. Podcasts and other audio
Audio files are a great way to showcase musical or voiceover talent. For ongoing audio features, like a series of interviews with prominent people in your industry, you can offer podcasts available for download on your website and iTunes.

USEFUL FACT
Unlike simple audio files, podcasts are distributed as episodes and they increasingly include video.

6. Links
Share links to content your audience will appreciate. Links to elsewhere on your own site will help with your audience retention, but you may also want to include links to other sites. This will help you build legitimacy and trust by demonstrating your desire to furnish the best content possible—even if it isn’t yours.

** Tips **
– Set external links to open in a new window. That way readers will return to your site.
– You may want to ask that the owners of blogs and other websites reciprocate by linking back to your site.

Keep Your Connections in the Know
Use Yola Social Sharing to alert your audience through Facebook, Twitter and email whenever you add content to your Yola site. When you publish, just click those icons on the confirmation page.

If you have a Yola Silver or Gold, you can easily publish your Yola site to Facebook. Then, every time you update your website content, the changes will automatically push out to your Facebook page too.

→ Next in this series about driving traffic to your Yola site:
Strategy #3: Be an Active Online Participant (coming soon, so check back)

Stay Tuned
After the “Drive Traffic to Your Yola Site” series, we’ll be featuring posts on how to get the most out of the top social networks. You’ll learn practical tips, how-to’s and examples to send you on your way.

Want to Learn More?

Intro to Driving Yola Site Traffic
#1 – Get Social
#2 – Create Content (you are here)

#3 – Be an Active Online Participant

#4 – Mind Your Marketing

#5 – Flex Your Expertise

SOURCES

“How to Make Content Go Viral,” Entrepreneur Magazine

“30 Great Content Ideas for Your Website or Blog” by Kay Singh, My Venture Pad, 3/31/2012

Tutorials on Copyblogger

“Social Networking Statistics,” Statistic Brain, 7/18/2012

“Worldwide Social Media Usage Trends in 2012” by Christian Arno, Search Engine Watch, 4/13/2012

“48 Significant Social Media Fact, Figures and Statistics” by Jeff Bullas