The face of the moon was in shadow
In my marketing consulting, one of the most common frustrations clients express is that they aren’t getting much traffic to their website and hardly anyone will share their posts on social media.
If you’re thinking solving these problems is going to be a big headache, think again! Here are five common problems I discover when I analyze clients’ web pages and how you can easily, quickly and painlessly (I swear!) fix them.
Disclosure: I am an affiliate marketer for Outgrow and Social Warfare, meaning that if people open my custom link and then purchase a product from the company, I will get a commission on those sales. I also had a free period of Visme in exchange for talking about their product in this blog. iuoiuo
Observation 1: Your website pages don’t have share buttons.
If your visitors have to copy your post’s URL in the browser, manually open their social media account and then paste your URL in the post field, AND write text to go with the link, most people probably won’t bother sharing it, especially smartphone users, no matter how great the content is. All that clicking and opening new windows is a time consuming hassle and, quite literally, a pain in the neck!
Solution?
If you’re on WordPress, you have a multitude of free plugins to choose from to install share buttons on your site. With one click, a window will open for the social media platform selected and the URL for the associated post will be there. In some plugins, you can even designate text to accompany the link to the post. I love Better Click to Tweet, a free plugin that allows you to write Tweets for placement in your posts, plus include your Twitter handle. All the visitor has to do is click and Tweet! Social Warfare is another plugin that creates share buttons for you. The basic version is free, but with the Pro version ($29 USD/year) you can write specific text for each platform and select share buttons for a variety of additional platforms. Redditors, rejoice!
Observation 2: Your posts lacks original or practical insight.
Everybody and their grandma (Okay, maybe not your grandma…) knows about GDPR right now. There are a plethora of posts about how annoying the confirmation emails are and how publishers can comply with these European privacy standards. That means it’s probably really unlikely that someone will discover your post on the topic via a search engine like Google. It’s simply too competitive.
Solution?
Get creative! If a popular, timely topic is really important to you, find an angle to the story that hasn’t been covered in many posts. Do your research to see what’s out there and think about what gaps your post could fill. You could interview some business owners who have been affected for an amateur video or a podcast. You could hire a Fiverr seller to create a funny animated explainer about lessons learned from GDPR.
Observation 3
Your writing style doesn’t connect with your audience/niche/community.
Are you writing a blog about cryptocurrency startups in the language of an academic journal? Is your business writing loaded with slang or grammatical errors? Are you writing to young people in a formal tone? Many readers will stop reading your post after even as few as a couple of seconds if your writing isn’t appropriate or engaging. Write for your audience.
Solution?
Read blogs that are successful in your niche, especially those that a lot of people share on social media. Make notes on the vocabulary used, the style and tone of the text, the type of information shared, etc. To assess the readability of your text, put it through an app that will use artificial intelligence to determine if it is reader-friendly and appropriate for your audience. Yoast and Readable are just two examples.
Observation 4
Your posts aren’t visually interesting.
In our digital world, with the exception of essay-based publications, most people expect to see images of what they are reading about. And they probably won’t share something if the preview image doesn’t exist or its quality is poor.
Solution?
Visme! It’s a fantastic image design program for creating social media images, infographics, presentation slides, whitepapers and so much more. The customizable templates provided are beautiful and professional. This solution is an especially good fit if you’re sick of all of the pay-per-use elements in Canva. (I know I am!)
There are loads of great video options you can add to your content, too, like whiteboards, explainers and so much more. I’ve used Powtoon, Vyond, Promo by Slidely and Reevio and had a blast playing with them.
Observation 5
You don’t have interactive, dynamic content.
When someone is seeking content to figure out a problem, one of the things they look for is how to apply the information in the content to their particular situation. If they don’t make that connection with your webpage right away, there is a good chance they are going to leave your website (and not come back).
Solution?
Calculators, quizzes and polls are just some examples of content you can create to help your client’s prospects get customized information on their problem and how to solve it.
When this happens, the viewer may want to help others in their community find clarity, too, so they’ll share it with their network. Check out the beautiful calculators and quizzes on Outgrow*. They are very easy to set up and customize and you can get them to only be accessible to someone once they sign up for your newsletter. So this is not only highly shareable content. It’s a fantastic lead magnet for your business.
Note:
* means I am an affiliate for that company, which means I can get a commission on sales made after the person opens my link.