Growing Online Content Traffic

Finding your market influencers

How to grow online traffic using Google

Pulizzi advices that the first step towards building online traffic is finding out where the influencers (the top online presences in your niche) are posting content at online. He recommends setting up varying Google tools and social media sites as listening points, or sites one can “listen in on” and find chatter on a businesses’ particular niche, or where people searching for information about that niche are finding answers.  The Google External tool is the first of multiple Google tools business owners can apply to narrow down keywords on the internet.

In this example, the owner is using keywords to search for conference centers in Cleveland. Google External tells the owner what the competition level is like for that keyword (who is buying keywords against those terms) and also how many global searches the keyword has hit in the past month.

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Once an owner has organized and cross-examined a list of keywords, the next step would be tracking those keywords with Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a tool that tells owners what Google is indexing and where online. Users can register certain keywords and Google will send them a report (in their Gmail inbox) tracking who’s talking about what in their industry. As soon as owners positively identify market leaders, they can start sharing that content on their own blogs and social media sites, thus growing their businesses’ Google presence as a result.

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Finally, a business owner can use Google Insights to compare usage of terms over time. In the example above, the user is looking to maximize on the term “concert center,” but when they inserted their keyword Google Insights told them that “event spaces” is a more popular term. The owner now has a choice of maximizing his presence by switching the usage from concert centers to event spaces on all fronts.

Building Relationships

Once a business owner has established which influencers are controlling the market, their next step is to interact with those influencers until a mutual relationship forms. When both parties connect through hashtags and blog links, they forward their content to new users and simultaneously accumulate hits and gain market influence.

Social Media 411

Pulizzi has a content growth strategy he calls Social Media 411. For every six items of content a business shares, four items should be shared from other influencers. One piece should be its own created content, and one should be a promotional coupon, webinar, or newsletter. When a business outsources most of its online content, and leverages that content by sharing with top influencers, it automatically promotes itself as a top market player.

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and co-author of Get Content Get Customers, discusses in his webinar how businesses can leverage their content to grow an audience and build a stronger internet presence. Pulizzi attributes content leadership with doing two things well, listening to market influencers and building relationships by sharing and interlocking content.

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Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi founder of the Content Marketing Institute,
A content marketing evangelist and passionate about the color orange, Joe Pulizzi is one of the leading thought leaders behind the content marketing and social media movement.
http://joepulizzi.com/

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