We all hear that content marketing is the next best thing for online marketing and SEO (search engine optimization). This includes blog posts, social media posts, email marketing, and website content. That's great, but how do I leverage this tool for my business. We will look at three ways to do this -- finability, sharability and convertability. First, we will look at the isue of findability.

We have looked at a lot of ways to drive traffic to your website including video, PPC, E-Mail marketing and more.  In this last installment, we are going to look at using Social Media to drive website traffic. Social Media has become the preferred channel for driving website traffic by businesses large and small and organizations.  The key to driving traffic with social media is to provide interesting, fun or valuable content to readers.  One main rule is "it is not about you".  Constant talking about how great you or your company is will turn people off quicker than anything.  What you want is for them to say how great your company is and the way to do that is to provide them with useful content.  Posting the weekly food special for a restaurant is fine.  You want to engage your customers and build trust and brand loyalty.  Remember the 80/20 rule when posting content on social platforms - 80 percent of the content you post should provide some sort of value while the other 20 percent can be self promotion.  Encourage your social media followers to post content on your page that relates to you or your company - for example if you have a landscaping company, encourage your customers to post photos of their yard or garden on your Facebook page.  People love peer to peer content, and it will help create credibility for your company.

So far we have looked at blogging, business portals, Pay Per Click marketing and E-Mail marketing as ways to drive traffic to your website.  In this installment on driving traffic, we are going to look at utilizing graphics and video.

Most people are visual learners and that is also how they like to get their information online.  People love visual content because they are too busy to read and have too short of attention spans.  When you utilize compelling visual content it can say a lot in one photo or short video.  Remember a picture is worth a thousand words.  Knowing this, if there is anything you need to remember about driving traffic going forward is that you must use good images and video and lots of them to compete online.  Platforms like Pinterest, Facebook and more are great places to share this content.

In our previous post we looked at using blogging and business portal listings to help drive traffic to your website. In this article we are going to look at another option and that is online advertising.  Online ads remain to be one of the more consistent ways to generate brand awareness and to create website traffic.  Internet ad campaigns provide the advertiser the ability to track performance (impressions, clicks, etc.) and see a true ROI (return on investment) for their ads. This tracking makes online advertising one of the safest methods of driving traffic, especially since you can change or have your online marketing company change ads based on performance. You also now have more online ad options with Facebook PPC ads and Boosting a post, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads and more, which can target geographic areas and site visitor demographics.  December 2012 showed an increase in paid search impressions of 18% and cost-per-click rising an astounding 30%. 

So you have spent a great deal of time optimizing your website for your visitors/users and you still aren't getting the response you want. Most likely the problem is not your content but the lack of traffic to your site. For many companies, driving traffic is the single biggest struggle in online marketing and SEO.  While great content and optimized sites are of great importance, they don't matter at all if no one visits your site.  There are a ton of things you can do to drive traffic to your website, and whether  you have time to take advantage of them yourself or you hire a company to do it for you, it is vital that you engage in these activities.