Increase Your Traffic by 700%+ with this One Simple Strategy

If you’ve followed me for any amount of time you’ve likely heard me say that I’m not a fan of blogging for many small businesses.

There’s quite a few reasons for that but the largest is the amount of time and energy it takes to start to see consistent results.

In my experience from the past 18+ years of working with small business owners, blogging is something you may hear about at an event or some guru somewhere talks about how awesome it is to get all this free traffic and BOOM – your engaged.

What they don’t tell you is how hard it is.

It’s not just about throwing your opinions out into the "webosphere" and then you are suddenly deluged with copious amounts of free traffic.

You have to craft great content, you have to do it consistently and you have to get as much traffic on those posts as possible.

I actually stopped blogging for a few years and let the person go that was doing it for me because we weren’t seeing any results from it.

We’d craft this blog, put it on our Facebook page and there would be a slight bump in traffic and then within 48 hours our site traffic was flat lining again.

After 6 months of this I gave up. I shifted the revenue from that marketing assistance into paid advertising and overnight we were creating leads – I didn’t look back until about a year ago.

One of my goals for 2016 is to get on more stages and do more speaking engagements. This type of exposure and credibility goes a long way when you have training programs like I do, so I hired a coach that had a lot of experience with speaking and the first thing she said – you have to write. Blog posts, articles, books, etc. Those are all credibility builders. So initially, I was like… what a waste of time and then in my typical fashion, I nerd out on it a bit and see how can I make the best of this situation. That’s when I came up with VERSION 1 of my content distribution strategy.

So here’s the problem – most people that create content will write a post on their blog, maybe share it on twitter or Facebook and that’s it. At the end of the day, the post gets very little exposure, no comments or engagement and the site traffic doesn’t really do much. A little blip – but noting impressive.

I’m paying my coach a LOT of money so I’m definitely going to take her advice because she’s already been where I want to be. BUT, because I’m me, I’m going to try and hack it to see how I can get maximum exposure for my efforts so here’s what I did.

I know from experience that people aren’t going to come by my site looking for my latest and greatest blog post no matter how awesome it is, so I have to get proactive in pushing it out into the web. I have to put the content where the customers are.

I also know that if I get too aggressive it could have negative repercussions so the goal is to physically push out this content as much as I can, and still be “cool” with everybody.

Step 1: Make a list of all the different platforms that I want to show up on.

Twitter
Facebook
Linked In
Pinterest
Google +

Step 2: For each platform identify where my perfect customers were hanging out.

Facebook pages
LinkedIn Groups
Twitter feeds
Pinterest boards

Step 3: Create the distribution calendar based on a few different “rules”.

I know I can post to twitter multiple times per week and be OK.
I know in LinkedIn groups that are similar, many of my people may belong to the same group so to not look like I am spamming, I post to similar groups on opposite ends of the week.
I have multiple Facebook pages for different businesses so I post the content on different pages in different weeks.
At the end of the week, once I’m done pushing it out, I know the content has a very short shelf life so I added it to a scheduling software so that my old blog posts and content will be recycled.
Step 4: Do it yourself.

You have to do it yourself because you may get some push back. Some LinkedIn group owners may post your stuff as promotional so make sure you reach out to the group admins if that happens.

Step 5: Hire a Virtual Assistant to do it for you

1.5 hours per week
Step #6: Integrate paid ads to drive traffic to content to expand reach and remain relevant.

This is my content distribution schedule:

Monday

Publish post on blog
Linked in niche 1
Linked in local 1

Tuesday

Pinterest
Twitter
Facebook – Page 1

Wednesday

LinkedIn – publish on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Niche 2
LinkedIn local 2
Facebook – Page 2

Thursday

Email to list
Twitter
PAID TRAFFIC

Friday

LinkedIn local #3
Linked in Niche 3
Google +
Schedule in Edgar – extend liveliness

Creating great content and having a distribution strategy that puts it in front of your customers where they are hanging out, can increase your traffic by 700%+. Try it!