Content marketing is an important activity to drive traffic to your website. Once you have posted blog content, the next step is to get that content out there.
While there are so many tactics to use to drive traffic to your blog, there are those methods that can do damage to your site. Most of the time, these are marketed as “easy hacks” to market content. Some can be errors from your end.
Today, you will learn the top five of these and I’ll show you how they can hurt your rankings.
These five mistakes are:
- Using social media the wrong way
- Buying backlinks to drive traffic
- Using solo ads to spam people
- Paying for direct traffic
- Skipping on quality
Do not fall victim to these content marketing mistakes. Let us move forward and discuss each of them.
Using Social Media the Wrong Way
Social media is one of the most effective ways to market your content. However, using it the wrong way can spell disaster.
How does this happen?
For one, not all social media channels are perfect for blogs. For example, you may think that there are millions of Instagram users so you think that sharing your blog here is a great way to get traffic.
Well, not all the time.
People on Instagram engage on posts because the posts either have great images or videos. Instagram is best used for fashion, health, food, and other niches where the niche is about eye candy—beautiful stuff that people can see.
The same goes for other channels. Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter have generic market bases. Other social media channels like LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok have users who have particular interests.
Marketing your content in the wrong social media channels is going to backfire and will not yield favorable results.
Buying Backlinks to Drive Traffic
You can buy hundreds of backlinks for only $5 or $10, and you would be happy to know that these backlinks are real.
So how is it a problem?
Well, Google will know that these backlinks are artificial. And if Google finds out, you will get penalized. This penalty means that your blog posts will not get priority ranking. And if this happens, it will take some time for Google to trust your website again.
There are two main issues with paid backlinks:
- They are not relevant to your niche
- They happen instantly
These are the two things that would signal to Google that your backlinks are fake—that you bought them from backlink providers like private blog networks.
If you buy backlinks, the providers are likely going to put backlinks to your website from other websites that have no relevance to your niche. For one, site visitors of these websites will not be interested, so the backlink you bought will almost never be clicked.
Second, Google’s algorithm would notice that in a span of a few days or weeks, your website suddenly had a lot of backlinks. This is a red flag, as it is almost certain that natural backlinks do not happen instantaneously like this.
And because of this, your blog will not get ranked on the first page of the search results.
Using Solo Ads to Spam People
What is a solo ad?
A solo ad is an email marketing campaign where you pay someone to send an email to thousands of people.
These providers have thousands of email addresses in their lists, and they would send your marketing content to these email addresses. It does not work all the time, and you will waste a lot of money running ads like this.
Your blog is a niche-based blog. The problem with solo ads is that they are almost certainly sent to random people, most of whom have no interest in what you are blogging about.
Solo ads are one of the content marketing mistakes that you have to avoid because it is a waste of money. For every 1,000 people who received an email, you have to ask yourself how many of them are really interested in what you have to offer.
Besides, your blog content is nothing more than a source of information. As a blogger, solo ads are not great for you because your blog post itself is a part of the sales funnel. Sending emails to get people to read your blog post is not going to yield money.
Solo ads are only effective for direct sales where you send an ad inviting people to check out a product or a service, but not to read content.
Paying for Direct Traffic
Paid traffic can work wonders. The problem with this is that it is not sustainable. If you market your content this way, you will surely see a spike in traffic for as long as you are paying for the direct traffic.
What you did not know is that this traffic is happening because of robots. In some cases, these are real human beings who get paid cents to click on links.
The thing is, are these humans even interested in what you have to offer? So, they click on a link, stay here for a few seconds or a minute, and then they leave.
If you think about it, you never really gained anything. While there is traffic, this traffic is useless. Nobody subscribed to your email list, and nobody bought any item from your affiliate links.
Paid direct traffic does not work. It does not work for shops, and it does not work for blogs. Paid traffic is just one way of gaming the system—to show others that your website has traffic. However, it really does not amount to anything besides good-looking site stats.
Paid traffic does not generate money, and it does not generate a following.
Skipping on Quality
We all have heard it—quality over quantity.
And yet there are so many bloggers who market content of poor quality. People visit blogs because they want to read and learn. If you do not create great content, people who visit your blog post will leave immediately, and never come back.
All these behaviors are recorded and indexed by search engines. If Google found out that your content is short, and that the content has little value, your site will not be prioritized in the rankings.
The amount of time people spend on your blog post is a fundamental factor in your success. Google records how long a site visitor spends on your post and makes calculations as to how valuable your posts are.
The longer people stay, the more Google would think that your content is valuable. The shorter amount of time they spend means they are not finding value from your website.
Summary
Content marketing takes more than advertising. Most of the time, ads are viewed by people as spam. You also do not want to hurt your Google rankings just because you want to get easy traffic.
Traffic is difficult to build, and being impatient can lead you to take actions that would, later on, hurt your blog.
Market your content without using black hat SEO. Any approach that makes it seem so easy to get traffic is a sham. Nothing is easy about blogging. It takes the right mindset and a carefully crafted marketing strategy to get high-quality traffic.
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