This blog post was originally published on Start It – a regional blog about startups in South-East Europe.
No matter what kind of startup you’re running, you’ll likely need a converting landing page and a good amount of targeted visitors to land on it.
So, how to attract targeted visitors to your landing page? There are countless ways to go about it, but this time I want to bring your attention to Twitter and the reversed content syndication strategies. We’ll also review custom solutions with examples, so you can get creative and maximize your results. At the very end of the blog post, I’ve prepared a special bonus for the ones willing to take action.
However before we focus on the strategies, here are few important principles to keep in mind when talking about attracting traffic:
1). Using a single and simple strategy can often bring more results than running five different things at the same time.
Even if you apply different strategies one by one, if you don’t give them enough trial time, you won’t be able to explore them on a deeper level. The chance to end up being disappointed from the lack of results is huge. It takes time to reach the high levels of a certain skill, but once you achieve it, you’ll suddenly start collecting the fruits of your efforts.
2). Consistency is key
If you put efforts to try again and again, you’ll finally achieve your goal.
The process of traffic attraction reminds me of one of those stories, when a young craftsman potter is consistently following his master’s instructions for years. At the beginning his pots looks ugly and attract no interest, but after hundreds and thousands of mediocre results, he finally gets it and becomes a worthy successor of his master. This story comes to confirm that even it feels boring to do the same thing, you’ll most likely succeed if you keep going just a little longer.
3). Following up is another key
Be prepared for the success you are going to have in attracting targeted visitors.
Once you’ve attracted good leads and they’ve submitted their emails or ordered your product, you should pay attention on keeping them not forgetting you. You need to follow up with people and this will make a big difference, because today number one reason for many businesses to fail is that they don’t fully leverage on the attention they have initially received. A follow up email sequence that answer questions of your customers, free webinars and successful case studies are a few options to explore.
Now let’s dive in the strategies:
For whom are these Twitter approaches good for?
– Good if you or the rest of the people in your start up don’t have a lot of experience in creating content
– Good if you have a lot of followers (but having less isn’t the end of the world)
– Good if you enjoy interacting with people
You could work with your personal profile or with the startup profile you’ve created. The method works for both kinds of accounts.
Twitter allows you to follow up to 1,000 people per day and according to the last update, you can follow up to 5,000 people in total. It’s important to keep a healthy ratio between followers and people you follow.
Prepare a pinned tweet
It all starts with writing an appealing title – tell people what exactly they should expect when clicking on your link. You can use Gary Korisko’s blog post on Writing Irresistible Subheads and re-use it for tweets.
Take one of the main visuals from your landing page and upload it using the ‘Camera’ button. Then add an explanatory text and a shortened bit.ly. Pin it right after you Tweet it. You can also tag members of your team on the picture.
Twitter treats
Now is the time to come up with different practices and start repeating them every day until you turn them into routines. I’ve compiled a list with few and you can add more later.
Visitors from new Twitter followers
The easiest way to get new followers is to first follow them. Target people using one main keyword in mind and do a research for suitable profiles on Follower Wonk. Click on ‘Search Bios’ and pick ‘search Twitter bios only’. The goal you have is to encourage other people interested in the problem you are solving to follow you. The first thing they’ll notice when landing on your profile is the pinned tweet put there to direct them to the page you want. As a bonus, you’ll be getting likes and re-Tweets. The more relevant to their interests your message is, the higher the chance is to get new targeted visitors.
NB! You’ll notice that not everybody follows you back. You are free to unfollow them, just make sure you don’t abuse this too much because you might get a restriction on your account.
Visitors from DMs
You can send your new followers a direct message along the lines of:
‘Hello, a huge thank you for following me! How are you doing? :)’ followed by some kind of interaction (liking his Tweets, RTs, answering questions if he has Tweets with questions etc.).
Then a second step would be sending a DM outreaching for a feedback.
An example:
I’d be interested in your opinion on [link] – we are trying to figure out if this is solving the issue with [name the problem you are solving].
Newsletter Twitter RT campaign
Smart startup teams think in advance and build lists in various ways (people they’ve talked to as part of their customer development, events, opt-ins on their websites etc.). These people are your brand ambassadors and believe it or not – they are ready to help you spread the word about your product.
Explain to them how important for you is that more people learn about your product. If you think it fits your style you can say “To secure the bright future of NAME_OF_PRODUCT, we need your attention for a minute” followed by a call to action where you ask them to RT or share the content you need.
An example:
As shown in the example above, you can include more links to Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks. The links are shortened from the unique URL that each publication has in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google Plus and Stumble upon. Send the email and measure the results.
Reversed content syndication
Reversed content syndication is an approach that is not that popular these days. I’ve first stumbled upon on it thanks to Ryan Deiss from Digital Marketing.
Earlier this summer I had the chance to test this strategy attracting visitors to the Swipes blog with this title.
The goal is to publish pieces of content that were successful when they were initially released. You only need to change the title and you are ready to start promoting the piece.
NB! This works best, when you’ve chosen articles with topics very closely related to your product.
Additional tip on how to increase the number of visitors to your most important startup page using the same strategy
Put a big page header with integrated call-to-action inside and a link under ‘What to do next’.
Who are these content syndication approaches good for?
– Good if you need extra efforts to first educate your customers
This approach involves spotting content opportunities, getting in touch with the original author to request permission for re-publishing, posting the content (with some degree of pre-formatting) and spreading it among your followers and across different social media to reach your target audiences.
Spotting content opportunities
To find relevant pieces with proven success, you can use BuzzSumo – a tool originally created to analyze which content performs best for any topic or competitor and to find the key influencers to promote your content.
But check that picture below:
I’m using BuzzSumo to find popular blog posts based on the keywords I’m using.
NB! It’s a paid tool and you have five free inquiries per day. You can also use a plain Google research instead.
Getting permission to republish
This one is easy.
Once you have found the content you’d like to re-publish on your website, find the name and the email of the author and ask them if they are fine with getting their article syndicated. To strengthen your message you can first share the post on a sub-Reddit or another active community – even if it was shared before, people will notice it, because it will most probably have an outstanding title and a great story line from the first to the last sentence.
Once I noticed to a blog post proving that routines are key for success. I shared it on Reddit, people started commenting, then I wrote an email to the author including the Reddit link. The permission was instantly received.
Publishing the content
There are two important tasks related to publishing the content:
1). Putting a rel canonical tag with the URL to the original content to notify the Google spiders where the original source of the content is.
2). Pre-formatting the blog post.
If you use WordPress and the SEO Yoast plugin, there’s a rel canonical field to paste link to the original content. If you aren’t on WordPress or are not using SEO Yoast, you may watch the following video from Eric Enge to get an idea how to republish.
For pre-formatting the blog post, I suggest following the instructions from The Anatomy of a Perfect Blog Post: The Data on Headlines, Lenght, Images and More by Kevan Lee.
Content promotion
You have the blog post published. Now is the time to share it with your subscribers, inner circle and promote it to the world. There are many ways to spread your content, but the best use of your time would be to focus on communities that might be interested in your product. 16 Explosive Content Promotion Strategies is an action-oriented blog post that will give you ideas on where you can promote the syndicated article.
Let me once again remind how important the header of your page layout is. If you’ve decided to use the reversed-content syndication strategy to attract new leads to your landing page. then make sure to build a decent header that attracts visitors.
Custom solutions with examples
In order to get maximum results, you can make a deeper analysis of where you potential customers spend their time online. This may be a popular or a less popular community on a social network. Other options include forums or the comment sections under famous blog posts written by industry authorities.
Here’s a list of examples for platforms like Instagram or Tribe.net, but the truth is that you’ll discover your winners with a simple Google research including your keyword phrases as search quires.
I’ve generated a list of examples to give you better idea what I’m talking about:
– Promoting flower delivery service on a forum for single men looking for relationship advice
– Promoting wedding photography services when submitting pictures on famous Pinterest boards as a contributor
– Selling custom made jewelry on… Etsy, of course
– Promoting educational courses through partnerships using email lists – often used with a free webinar that includes a pitch with invitation to the paid course
– Promoting life insurance on a family forum
NB! For the ones interested to test forum marketing, you can’t just sign up for a forum and start promoting. You need to put some effort and devotion to get real value by commenting and participating in the forum for some time before promoting yourself. Once you have gained authority, you can start providing advice in your field, thus positioning yourself as the forum expert in that particular area. Forum marketing has its own rules.
There are also live events like festivals that may also fit to what you are selling, but this would be a subject to another blog post.
I hope you got it: act fast & according to the circumstances
