You’ve just decided that you want to build an online presence and have settled on building a website. Congratulations, that’s a positive first step to making your rock star content available to your visitors.
Assuming you already know Google loves authority content that solves your users’ problems (I mean, otherwise what’s the point of coming online if your content doesn’t solve a problem or help?), here are two things a web newbie and seasoned veteran alike must have on their website for more traffic and leads.
1) Ability to share your content
Giving people the ability to share your content gives your site a boost from two sides. One; from a traffic perspective. Two; potentially from an SEO and Google ranking perspective.
Controversially in 2012, Searchmetrics found that social signals to your web content was the biggest ranking factor in Google.
Now, this has been debated until the cows come home with Google even claiming their bots can’t crawl social media links, but in 2018 social media is even bigger than it was.
Whatever side of the fence you’re on, it’s worth providing your users with the ability to share your content if they wish to.
At worst, you’ll get traffic from these huge social media sites which is especially helpful if you can’t yet afford SEO services from a marketing agency. At best, Google will see people sharing your content and give you a nod of approval in the rankings.
If you’re using WordPress, the WP Social Sharing plugin in the WordPress plugin area has great reviews and is lightweight.
Being lightweight is important as your visitors are unlikely to wait more than 3 seconds for your website to load before giving up. Most social sharing plugins are quite resourced intensive.
Bonus tip: Ensure that the plugin does not load for mobile users. Research shows that 99.8% of visitors on mobile do not share content. At least, via the sharing buttons on your website.
Making sure the plugin doesn’t load on mobile will keep your website loading faster.
This is especially important to mobile users who are even more impatient than desktop users, leaving a web page if it hasn’t loaded up in one second – ouch!
2) A method to contact your visitors again
If your reader enjoyed your article, website or whatever they found on your website, some will want to hear more from you!
It would be a shame if you didn’t give them the option or it was hidden somewhere difficult to find on your website.
You can avoid this by signing up for one of the many email marketing services out there.
They can be expensive, especially if you aren’t making money already but Benchmark offers a free account that allows you to have 2000 subscribers.
This should be more than enough to get you started.
You’ll be able to create a form from your account and add it to various areas of your website for readers to sign up to.
Once your visitor has signed up, you can send them more of your amazing content, tips and increase your trust as the expert. Your website visitors are much more likely to buy from you if they trust you as a person. Remember, people don’t buy products, people buy people.
Quick tip: to get visitors to sign up to your newsletter, offer them something of value for free. Perhaps an ebook, a course or even just your article in a ‘PDF ebook’ format!
Bonus tip: If your reader clicks on something that triggers your opt-in form to pop-up, they are more likely to sign up.
Think about it, if somebody clicks on a link that says ‘Get your free ebook’ and your opt-in form shows up asking them to input their email address to receive the book, they’ve asked for it.
If the opt-in form just pops up automatically like so many websites do, it’s something that your visitor hasn’t asked for and is more likely to annoy them.
Conclusion
In summary, writing content that your readers absolute love is the hard part. If you’re absolutely nailing that side of things, it would be a shame for you to lose readers because they can’t find you or stay in touch with you.
Add these two simple ingredients into your recipe and you’ll be well on your way to baking the perfect online marketing cake.