What’s the Best Content Marketing Service to Increase Website Traffic?

In a world where it’s so easy for prospects to filter out TV commercials, radio ads, billboards and all the other forms of advertising that used to get their attention, content marketing has become the go-to strategy for businesses that want a better return on their marketing investment.

If you’re new to content marketing, it can best be defined as using timely, relevant and high-value content to build relationships with your target audiences. To sell without selling. Content can be in the form of blog posts, webinars, email, whitepapers, infographics and more.

The challenge with content marketing for most business owners, though, is determining where to start and what formats will help them meet their objectives.

With that in mind, here is the first question in a series about various business objectives and the content marketing strategies and services to help you achieve those objectives:

Question: What content marketing service do you recommend when your website isn’t getting enough web traffic?

Answer: Blog Writing and Management

Studies are consistently showing that blogging can have a powerful effect on increasing web traffic. In fact, companies that use blogging effectively and strategically can see an increase in web traffic of 92%.

While there is plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of blogging, there are a few harsh realities about blogging that many companies face once they begin to implement it on their own.

Reality No. 1: A Business Blog Takes Time

For every blogging success story, there are far too many abandoned and ineffective blogs.  Building an effective blog requires a significant amount of effort, time and persistence.

If your company’s resources are already stretched to their limits, trying to blog on your own could lead to a dead end and a failure to meet your web traffic objectives.

Reality No. 2: Blogging Requires Advanced Skills

Building an effective blog means:

• Doing research on the interests and needs of your prospects;
• Performing keyword research to align your content with how prospects are searching online;
• Promoting posts effectively in social channels for more exposure;
• Reading and analyzing analytics to determine the effectiveness of your blogging strategy; and
• Knowing when to continue a blogging strategy or when to make adjustments.

While you may have the time to build a blog, you also need these skills in order to see a measurable ROI from your time investment.

How a Blogging Service Helps

Here are five ways a blogging service will help you get increased traffic to your website.

1. Quicker ROI – It’s possible to see results in a few months from a blogging service. If you tried enrolling in blogging courses to learn how to do it yourself or delegating blogging to one of your employees, it may take years to see any traction (that is, if you don’t give up when you fail to see any results.)

2. Expert Insight – Leveraging the knowledge and expertise of someone outside your organization helps you overcome the knowledge gaps that amateur bloggers face, especially when it comes to attracting new website visitors.

3. More Effective Content – Though you may be an expert in your business, there’s no guarantee that you will be able to write about what you do in an engaging way that will help you communicate your expertise. While your goal may be to get more website traffic, your content should also help you generate leads and close sales.

4. Data-Driven Decisions – Along with a monthly analytics report, a blogging service can use data from web analytics to help you spot trends and opportunities to get more results, including increased web traffic, from your blog.

5. Cost Savings – While the cost for a monthly blogging service may seem like just another expense, each published post is actually an investment in your marketing that can bring you web traffic for years to come.

The Wrap Up

I have tried various content marketing techniques over the years to attract new web visitors, but nothing has worked as well as blogging.

I have also seen companies get excited about the potential results of blogging but saw no results because they tried handling their blogging in-house instead of trusting in a partnership that would have benefited them in the long run.

I hope you enjoyed the first post in this series. Let me know in the comments below your questions about how content marketing can help you meet your business objectives. I’ll be glad to answer them in future posts.

(Photo via Design by Zouny on Flickr)