“Content is king,” goes a popular online adage, and it’s true. Without great content, you will have nothing to engage prospects and clients with. If you think of your website as a stage, then content is the “performance” that people want to experience.

Unfortunately though, “if you build it, they’ll come” doesn’t apply to websites. There is nothing more common than websites of small and large businesses alike with great content that just sits there, gathering digital dust. No likes, shares or comments, just crickets! In fact, the internet is littered with questions like “why is no one reading my blog?” and “how can I get more traffic to my website?”

Content discovery is a significant part of the online marketing puzzle. Fortunately though, getting the right people to your website is not as hard as it may seem. Let’s take a look at how you can create content that can get you the online traction you really want!

The trick William Potter, is to be helpful…

First off, your content must be part of a holistic online marketing strategy. Publishing stuff just for the sake of it is a sure way of getting lost in the SERP jungle. The best way to create discoverable content is to work backwards.

Start by figuring out where your tribe hangs out. Are there major blogs in your industry? Are there any popular Facebook or LinkedIn groups with large memberships? Let’s not forget the trusty old forums! Subscribe to them, and interact with the people there. Make yourself known.

Over a period of time, you should begin to get a sense of what some of the problems your audience is facing are. These issues can become the topics for your blog posts, whitepapers, podcasts or videos. Great content that gets shared always aspires to solve problems, so try and figure out what ails your audience and then use your insights to provide solutions in the form of content.

With that settled let’s take a look at some unorthodox strategies you can use to get your content discovered quickly…

  1. Expert roundup posts: Hands-down, one of the best content discovery strategies out there! A roundup post is typically a blog article that includes insights from industry experts on a topic. Make a list of all the experts and thought-leaders in your industry and reach out to them with a request to chime in on a pressing problem. Now, turn their input into an article on said pressing problem with each person’s comments. Once the article is published, mail or tweet it to all the experts who were included. More often than not, they will share the post with their (very sizeable) social media following and mailing list which will send a torrent of targeted traffic your way!
  2. Insert shareable snippets into your content: Have something witty or very informative to say? Chances are people will want to share it. Instead of having them copy and paste text to social media, you can turn such pieces of information into shareable snippets that a user only needs to click on to share. Here’s an awesome guide on creating social snippets.
  3. Gate your content: If you really have something spectacular to give away, you can put it behind a “share gate” that asks a reader to share the post with their followers on popular social media channels before the content is unlocked. Make sure that the content is worth it, though! Here’s how you can use content gating to your advantage.
  4. Try the Skyscraper Technique: Created by Brian Dean of Backlinko, the technique essentially revolves around taking the best content on a topic, and making it even better. Next, you can reach out to all the websites linking to the content(s) you used as the base, and ask them to link to your post if they find it useful. Usually, many of the sites will oblige, getting you some very high quality backlinks! Check out this case study on the skyscraper technique by Dean himself.

There are many more interesting ways to increase the chances of content discovery. However, the aforementioned strategies are well tested and proven. Try them and you should see some awesome results pretty quickly.

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