Creating great content doesn’t guarantee that anyone will read it. The marketing puzzle requires more pieces to attract visitors to your site. Long marketing tails come when content, community, search engine optimization (SEO), and demand work together. Sometimes, a long tail is a surprise. When that happens, expand your reach by capitalizing on it.
In 2006, I wrote an article for our Multichannel Magic newsletter entitled “10 Signs Your Company is in Trouble.” It was inspired by a visit to company whose management didn’t know that it was in serious trouble. A few weeks later, it was included in the Free Articles section on our website.
Once the search engines started indexing it, people started visiting the page. Once they arrived they stayed for a while. My initial reaction was “that’s cool”. Two years later my reaction changed because that page was still one of the top traffic drivers for our site. We needed to update the information.
We wanted to provide additional value without losing our search engine ranking. I wrote an e-book “10 Signs Your Company is Sinking”. The original page continued to drive traffic to the site. The guide added value. There weren’t any surprises until November 6th this year.
Apparently, 1766 people needed to know the warning signs that a company is in trouble on November 6th. Most of them originated at MSN and Bing with these searches:
– signs your company is in trouble
– 10 signs your company is in trouble
– ten signs your company is in trouble
– 10 signs your company might be in trouble
– top signs your company is in trouble
All are variations on our headline and brought a significant bump to our traffic and increase in subscriptions. This is from an article that was written in 2006! In addition to the continued traffic, I have been interviewed for three articles in trade journals.
Takeaways:
- Create content that provides valuable information. (If it isn’t worth reading, your visitors will bounce.)
- Use search engine optimization tactics to maximize your exposure. (I wish that we had placed more keywords in our original URL.)
- Include call to action triggers in your content. (We added a link at the top of the article to our e-book and have other call to actions at the bottom.)
- Monitor your web analytics. (If you don’t know which pages are getting the hits, how can you capitalize on it?)
- When something is working, expand your offerings. (We added the ebook to provide additional value.)
