Increase Conversions By Sharing Pillar Content When Your Audience is Most Receptive

RECOMMENDED: Click image to read The 10 Unbreakable Laws of Social Media

Have you ever heard this advice:

You should never be so busy working IN your business that you don’t have time to work ON your business?

Most people have fallen for disinformation that they must constantly churn out quantity and build zillions of backlinks.

That disinformation is intended to keep you so busy running in circles that you will never succeed.

You need to start listening to wiser people who have your best interests at heart – like the content marketing experts at Hubspot who recently wrote:

Do NOT dilute your high-quality content
with mediocre or low-quality content!

Many bloggers and business sites are busy cranking out meaningless drivel that no one has time to read. THIS is what they should do instead:

1. CHOOSE KEYWORD PHRASES TO TARGET

It won’t matter how wonderful your content is if it does not attract the audience you most need to reach.

If you’re selling products or services that audience is the
people who are most interested in BUYING what you sell!

To reach them, you need to know what words they would type into a search engine when they were ready to buy what you have to offer. That is true even if they find out about you on social media or in a blog post – the right keyword phrases will catch their attention wherever they see them!

If you haven’t done this STOP whatever you are doing right now and do your keyword research! I’m dead serious. I will provide a link to a post on precisely how to do this at the bottom of this post.

Prioritizing your keyword phrases is the FIRST step to your success!

If you don’t bother with it you are throwing darts into the entire universe hoping to hit a buyer by chance.

The first step is to concentrate your efforts where your buyers are
by focusing on what they are interested in
where and when they want it!

NOT by trying to reach the entire world by being everywhere
and hoping buyers notice you in the overwhelming din.

2. Create Pillar Content for each Keyword Phrase

Click image for Paul Wolfe's Pillar Content Pt 2

Now that you know exactly what you need to write about you need the very best quality content possible for each phrase. This is what is referred to as pillar, cornerstone, or flagship content.

Read Paul Wolfe’s posts 0n How to Create Pillar Content (part 1) for blogs to get a better understanding of the types of content that work best.

If you have a business blog, your pillar content should answer
how your offerings are the solution to the most
frequently asked questions your buyers have.

BEFORE you write your most important content review my post on how to use keywords in that content. I will link to that at the end, too, so you will have all you need in one place.

3. WHEN to Share Content

Those who are busy cranking out quantity or wasting the time of other people trying to use automated methods to build backlinks (that will get them blacklisted and ruin their brand’s reputation) are missing the boat.

Best TIMING = Higher Traffic and Conversions

If you share your very best content at the moment
your audience most wants to see it –
when they are most receptive –
it will be most effective.

Stop spending all your time cranking out fluff and use that time to share your best answers and content WHEN PEOPLE ASK!

Answer them when THEY want to know -
not when YOU want to tell them!

4. TOOLS that enable SHARING at the RIGHT TIME

There are tools you can use to let you know when others are looking for you.

For Twitter, the best solution I have seen is to set up searches and responses in the Twitter search tool iTweetLive.

While it may take some time to get it set up the best searches that get targeted results and not too many unrelated results. See this video on how it works:

I recommend you use iTweetLive to automatically find tweets you may want to reply to but ALWAYS manually edit and approve your replies!

Twitter search tools like FeelTipTop can be used for market research and it looks like Tip Top is working on a way to search for tweets in a specific geographic area.

Much has changed there since I last wrote about how to use their site so I’ll have to do a follow up post on how to use it or you can read their Twitter search blog.

Now Relevant is another alternative search engine that is most useful for finding trending topics or the latest news about any topic because they allow you to decide how many days you want to search.

Use their search engine if you want to find the latest information about an election or legislation under consideration or whether a Nexus tax law was passed or vetoed – or what is trending NOW.

Stephanie @lambdakennels1 wrote a guest post about using Now Relevant to search for recent results.

Businesses that have products or services to sell can use the small business friendly ecommerce social network GoSkoop to find out what their potential customers are searching for and reply to them.

Read my post on how to use GoSkoop find, track and share deals to get the general idea of how to use the site. They have made improvements since I wrote that post so I will need to do a follow up post on them, too.

The best known way to respond quickly when someone is interested is to use Google Alerts (renamed Giga Alerts), but we have too much Google in our lives already.

Google really IS Evil and Google is anti- small business and consistently removing our freedom of choice – so I am searching for alternatives to Google Alerts for us to check out and share tips on how they can be best used.

Social Mention ~ Real-time social media search and analysis ~ one of the only sites found when looking for alternatives to alerts.

Click on the graphic in this short post about social mention results for an overview of the data they offer.

ALTERNATIVES TO GOOGLE ALERTS aka GIGA ALERTS

I am hoping my readers can suggest additional alternatives as no others are immediately identifiable (which means if they exist they need to FIX THAT – if no one can find you how do you expect to succeed?

• Topsicle ~ No USP, no description, nothing on their about page that explains what the site does ~ usability #fail – If you don’t tell people what your site is about and how it can be used they will just leave – and usually never come back.
• Trackle (site gone?)

If you know of others, please leave details including a link to their site and links to any reviews of their solutions in the comments. Comments with multiple links probably will be held for moderation, but I will find and approve them!

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING SOLUTIONS

It is beyond the scope of this post to write about advanced social media monitoring solutions because there are so many of them, almost all of them are paid and very complex tools – and many of them really only suitable for Fortune 1000 or larger companies.

I will cover some that are more useful for small businesses and bloggers in future posts, but not now.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR PILLAR CONTENT:

As promised, these are the two posts you most need to ensure you’re targeting the right phrases and using your keywords effectively. They also explain anchor text and how to use it to benefit every person or company you ever link to in your own content.

1. How to choose keyword phrases
2. How to use keyword phrases in your content
3. Proof that quantity and zillions of backlinks are NOT necessary: Quality NOT Quantity
4. How to use Twitter – if you want to be serious about success you HAVE to use Twitter because that is the most efficient social network and the one used by serious social-media savvy bloggers who will spread your content for you! It is NOT hard and it does NOT have to take hours a day. See the tips next to the star in my Twitter Best Practices post for doing Twitter right.

Choosing the most important keyword phrases is critical and most people choose keyword phrases that won’t work because:

1. The are so general they would not convert even if you ever could get search engine traffic from them – which you probably will not.
2. So specific that there are almost no or even ZERO searches for them.

If you are not absolutely positive that you KNOW
what phrases to target GET ASSISTANCE!

I strongly recommend that you get advice from someone
with great experience to take you step-by-step through how to do
this the first time so you know for sure you are doing it right.

Hire someone to do it for you who can explain exactly how everything I wrote in this post was done in your content and point each key element in it out to you so you can use what they create as a pattern for future content.

Then you can decide whether you want to have someone else do your keyword research or write your most important content or you feel confident you can do it yourself. This is too important to do exceptionally well.

Finally, once you have that key content you can use it over and over to answer questions – the way I share links as answers and additional information here and across social networks.

Use your quality content over and over –
to save your time, share what you do, and
explain why your products and services
are the solution the person asking needs.

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Tagged as: content marketing, inbound marketing, Marketing, social media marketing