“Targeted search traffic is better than just general search traffic” – this is very, very true. So today, Brian Clark and Sonia Simone from Copyblogger Media shared some great tips on how to build a proper foundation for building out your content hub and attracting quality traffic to your site. It was a one-hour webinar with some great Q&A and enough ideas to great your creative juices flowing to see what you’re doing right, and what you can do better. Here’s my recap from today’s webinar…

Key Takeaways:

Getting Started (the Foundation)

• Focus on creating high value, educational and entertaining content. Chris Garrett calls this “Flagship Content.” Flagship content makes your site sticky and brings people back.
• Ask yourself what you want to be known as the “likeable” expert in? Ask yourself:
  • “What am I talking/writing about?”
  • “Who am I trying to reach?”
• Understand and know your “Second Customer” – this is the person who promotes your content (your “content champion”). They may not necessarily buy from you right away, but they’ll always promote your content to the masses.
• Take 10 minutes to identify your “right” customer – sit down and describe the person who buys from you! This is something David Meerman Scott calls identifying your Buyer Personas.

Writing High Value Content

• There are two critical elements for success:
  1. Beneficial Content: You need to train your readers to like your content. You do this by delivering high value content (they have to learn something) consistently. Set the expectation that you’re going to continuously deliver high value, and entertaining content so that they keep opening and reading your email. You need to make your content too valuable to throw away. How are YOU doing this? In essence, you’re educating them enough to do business with you. Read: How To Create Better Content – Treat Your Readers Like Dogs by Sonia Simone.
  2. Smart Content Promotion: Understand that headlines matter. But also, the opening paragraph matters just as much. You need to get people’s attention, then, once you have it, you need to make your copy easy to read through from beginning to end. Read: The Copywriting 101 Series from Copyblogger.
• There are two ways to attract traffic to your site:
  1. Guest Posting.
     • Focus on submitting original content.
     • Make sure you have a good base of content on your site already before submitting a guest post.
  2. SEO.
• Lastly, “traffic doesn’t matter if you don’t engage.” So, how are YOU engaging with your audience? Furthermore, what type of engagement are you looking for on your blog? Comments, Tweets, subscribers, etc.?
• Create events around your content. Things like webinars and/or pdf reports that you can give away. Then, don’t forget to market them and get the word out.

This first webinar was a great webinar with Brian and Sonia and I look forward to the second and third installment featuring Chris Garrett as well. There’s enough content in there to get your creative though-process going to see what you’re doing right and where you can improve. If you haven’t registered for the series yet, I recommend you do so: authorityrules.com.

Over to you…

Who’s your ideal customer? How are you making your content too valuable to throw away? Does your “About” page accurately describe what your site is about? Do you have landing pages for your content? Link to me in the comments, I’d love to see what you’re working on… 🙂