There are three simple check-boxes you must tick if you want to find the definitive solution to how to create content that generates traffic. One, you should produce terrific relevant content for your target audience. Two, you should be able to reach out to your target audience with the content and entice them enough to draw them to the piece. Three, the content should influence the readers enough to trigger a sharing spree. If any of these three quintessential requisites are not satiated, your content will not generate traffic and this is regardless of all other causative or influential factors.

As the world keeps transforming in 2019, more than four million blogs are published every day and three hundred hours of videos are uploaded every minute. The latter is only on YouTube. There are obviously many other platforms where videos are uploaded and shared. At a time when there is no dearth of content in any niche, it is a steep uphill battle to generate sufficient traffic with anything you do unless your following runs into millions. Companies and individuals with limited exposure or outreach, social media following capped at a few thousand and a stagnating audience will need to revitalize their content creation and marketing strategy. The whole approach needs to be reviewed. Here is a comprehensive guide to help you create content that generates traffic.

Understand What the Target Audience Wants

Steve Jobs had once said that customers don’t know what they want. This is true in the context he said it. He was talking about innovation that was beyond the comprehension of ordinary consumers. Anyone who is not astutely aware of the power of any kind of technology can never really conceive the potential product or service that can be developed. Customers will not bring about the next phase of transformation in artificial intelligence. Readers will not create the next new genre or subgenre in literature. As a content creator, it is you who has to come up with the articles, blogs, info-graphics, videos, guides and other pieces that will impress your audience. However, you do have to rely on reverse engineering. You must know what the target audience wants.

Content creators are not necessarily sharing unprecedented information. There are no path breaking details being revealed through the regular marketing contents. Scientists, researchers, professors and scholars helming advancing studies may not care about what the world wants to hear or read because they have something distinct to disclose. Regular content creators are publishing information that is already discovered and proven. It is only sharing of such information and hence the content being produced has to matter to the reader.

Reverse engineering is simply finding out what your target audience is reading at the moment, the types of articles or blogs, the kinds of videos and information they are accessing, what they are sharing and understanding their overall exploratory behavior in the virtual world. You can conduct reverse engineering by finding the most popular contents in your niche. This will give you a lucid understanding of the types of topics people want to read about, you will get to read viral blogs and can develop familiarity with the style and the nature of information provided, you can get down to the promotional tactics used by the blog and then you can develop your own strategy.

Use Omnipresent Platforms to Find Interesting & Relevant Topics

You can use Wikipedia, Reddit, Google and Pinterest among other omnipotent platforms to find interesting and relevant topics. Wikipedia is a galactic encyclopedia. It is a treasure-trove of information. Accessing information in your niche will give you enough basic material to come up with interesting topics. Reddit is a particularly useful platform if you want topics that matter. Check topics, comments and trending discussions on Reddit to know what the readers want. You should focus on your target audience and then pick up a popular topic, write about it and then share with the same readers. Google is the largest resource among such platforms. You can use it to find topics in every niche that are doing well. You should not replicate the topics or the contexts but address the concerns that your target audience clearly has.

Pinterest and some other social media platforms can offer a ton of ideas. One of the easiest ways to find relevant topics is to rely on user generated ideas. Your target audience will often feed the ideas to you through their conversations and comments. User generated content also provides ideas to creators. You can always seek inspiration from fellow creators but also from users. Then you can chart your own course and come up with a unique piece of content developed on the essences of the idea. Listening to your audience, observing behavioral changes on social media and acutely assessing the engagement online will lead you to interesting and relevant topics.

Explore Tools to Assist your Content Creation and Optimization

There are tools such as Ahrefs that can help you with both content creation and optimization. Ahrefs lets you analyze backlinks but it also has a popular pages section. Hence, you will get to conduct extensive backlinks analyses and find popular posts in your niche. You can work on your content creation and optimization accordingly. You can use the first page of search engine results on Google to find popular topics. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to search for popular content. These will definitely enable you to choose quality topics that will generate enough interest and hence garner the attention you need. Online traffic can be generated only when the target audience is enticed enough and of course when the content is well optimized for outreach.

Optimizing every piece of content is at the crux of every marketing strategy. On page search engine optimization is definitely the foundation. There should be off page optimization as well. There should be link building campaign in place. There should be guest posts publishing links as well, mostly from influencers so the outreach can be boosted further. Relevant and popular topics, onsite optimization and a multifaceted marketing campaign will serve as the fillip for any type of content for it to generate sufficient traffic.

Deliver More Information and Ensure Better Engagement

One of the risks of reverse engineering is you will be writing about or exploring the same topics that are already in the public domain. But this is true regardless of how you come up with topics. When there are more than four million blogs being uploaded every day, it is unlikely you are the only one writing about a topic and hence it is not a unique proposition to begin with. What can make your content unique is the information you present and how you produce the piece. You must deliver more information and ensure better engagement. There are two simple ways to do this.

The first is research. You should not simply reproduce the facts already shared with your target audience. You must have something new to offer. You can elaborate subtopics already discussed by others. You can address issues faced by your readers in a given context, say about a product or service. Interesting topics are those that shed light on pressing issues and resolve a problem for the readers. Most readers are looking for better alternatives or solutions to their problems. Deliver the solution and your content will be interesting enough to generate sufficient traffic.

The second important element is design and how you engage your audience. You have to ensure the design of every webpage is suitable to engage the readers. You do not need otherworldly designs. Simply ensure a neat interface that is reliable. Readability is a priority. The user interaction has to be convenient. Engagement is not limited to design. You must be able to reach out to your target audience. You should also interact. Emails or newsletters, social media posts, sustained campaigns across the web and a multipronged approach to ensure more people come across your contents will lead to greater engagement. You should also interact with your readers directly, on blogs and forums, social media and the website itself. Engagement will drive the conversation forward and it will lead to more traffic.

Keywords, Authority and Impeccability

You have to target the right keywords, be it with textual contents or videos. Audiovisual content should be optimized using descriptions and meta tags. Your content should also be authoritative. You have to be thorough so your audience does not long for more information. You may redirect readers to more information from within the content but there should be an avenue to ensure your readers do not look elsewhere for unanswered questions.

Impeccability is also a quintessential element. Do not leave room for doubts or an uncertainty in the minds of the readers speculating if what you have produced is questionable, false or not sufficient. Authority goes hand in hand with impeccability. If your content is not authentic or there are errors, then your audience will sooner or later be uninterested and your reputation will take a hit.