Marketing growth strategy & driving traffic to your site

How to Build an Asset Creation and Promotion Strategy to Set up Steady Traffic Sources

I’ve written a lot on how businesses need to embrace a new online growth strategy without depending on any *single* tactic (like search traffic, for example).

There’s a popular belief that search engine traffic is the most reliable (and steady) source of web traffic – that’s something I don’t agree with. I’ve founded startups that people don’t even search for (i.e. projects introducing completely new concepts) – which means I had to figure out new sources of incoming traffic from day one.

Creating – and marketing – assets (i.e. something that can continuously drive you some exposure and leads) and turning that into a strategy is the only way my sites have been generating traffic lately.

Here’s what I mean by creating an asset marketing strategy:

On-site assets

Developing on-site content is the first step to building steady stream of traffic. One of the benefits of this kind of content is that it will continue to generate profits and traffic because the information rarely goes out of date (and is easy to update when it does).

Content marketing should not be all about ever-green content only though (as Michael also explains in the above article). You should embrace a strategic content marketing approach aiming at building up content database over time making it more robust and better targeted.

Here are some examples:

  • Collect customer questions and put them into a FAQ section. Here are a few great plugins to put together a FAQ or Knowledge Base sections
  • Collect all your previously written content around one topic and re-package it into an eBook (which can then be marketed on social media and Kindle). Creating regular updates and generating more interactions via email subscribers is a great way to keep your customers coming back to your site.

Another idea is to consolidate your multiple content assets into an online course. This will allow you to engage your target customers in a new way as well as effectively nurture those relationships.

Kajabi can handle your online course marketing strategy:

  • It will help you choose the best format and structure
  • You can use Kajabi to build landing pages and CTAs to promote your course
  • It manages automated notifications, drip campaigns, etc.

kajabi

Don’t forget to optimize your new asset

The ultimate goal is to get it ranked (this is when all the links will start flowing in!) Text Optimizer is your ultimate search optimization tool that will help you optimize your content asset for it to rank high and meet your target audience’s expectations.

The tool runs your query in Google and extracts related concepts and terms for you to build your content around. It helps you understand what your target audience is looking for when searching for each query in Google:

textoptimizer optimize

Off-site assets

Social media assets

Building up your social media presence is a must but not all of your business social media networking is able to drive steady traffic (in many cases, unless you are there constantly interacting, social media referrals are dying out).

There are some social media sites that can become solid assets driving traffic on a continuous basis. My favorite two are:

Both rank well in Google (which means they are very discoverable) and both offer interactive media for publishers to use in their articles – which means people keep coming to your site through those referrals.

Udemy course

Udemy is a great awareness and traffic driver. I have a Udemy course for each of my major projects. I am re-purposing all my site tutorials I upload to my official Youtube channel as separate lectures at Udemy.

This way I encourage my Udemy students to check the site back on a regular basis.

Paper.li

Paper.li is my favorite curation tool mainly because it’s very easy to use: Create a paper once and it will take care of updating itself (and publicizing the news once it does) on its own. I always recommend creating a paper for any brand-sensitive updates you may have (for example, positive Twitter reviews, your author RSS feeds where you contribute, etc)

Paper.li

Paper.li will update itself (you can set up the schedule), then it will auto-tweet and auto-share on Facebook once it does. On Twitter it will even tag Twitter users who have made it to the paper which works great for increasing interactions with Twitter users. The fact that it has an auto-sharing ability makes it efficient for steady traffic and brand awareness.

Blog mentions

I treat every blog mention that I receive as my brand asset, meaning that I would do my best to mention each one, link to them from my articles and try to expose it to a wider audience.

Even though these reviews are not hosted on my site (meaning I can’t control them), I am interested in them being ranked well and doing well on social media (because this way I am getting higher referral traffic from the links in them). That’s why I treat every blog mention very seriously.

I use these tools to monitor and “help” my natural third-party referral traffic:

  • BuzzSumo to receive email alerts whenever any article mentions me or my business.
  • Voila Norbert’s email finder to reach out to blog editors that have mentioned my site to let them know I’m helping promote their article. This will increase the chances of them mentioning your site again in the future.
  • Viral Content Buzz to promote any article that mentions my site. It also helps me store all my site mentions in one place. Whenever I want to check back, I go to “My projects” (you can also organize them by labels to better curate articles promoting your site). I also get notifications of every share, so I can interact with those people who promote my content:

Viral Content Buzz

It also makes perfect sense to set up your CRM platform to capture all those leads from all your content assets.

Are you turning your referral traffic into the promotion strategy? Please share your tips and tools!

Ann Smarty
Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, founder of MyBlogU.com and manager at ViralContentBee. You can learn more about Ann here.

4 thoughts on “How to Build an Asset Creation and Promotion Strategy to Set up Steady Traffic Sources”

  1. I want to use my paper, TheINFORMER as a revenue-generating asset, through the placement of ads on the pages. I have no format for doing such, nor do I have a way to stream my blog in the mix of the curated process. Can you help me?

    1. Hello Charles, apologies for the delayed reply!

      You can utilize Ad Units on your paper by accessing your Paper Settings > Webpage > Layout & Appearance > Ad Units. There, you will find your paper available units, and when you click each available unit, you will find the options available to you, to customize those units.

      As for streaming your blog’s content into your paper, if your blog has an RSS feed URL available, you can add that to your paper’s Content Sources. You would do this in your Paper Settings > Content > Add Sources > Find Content Sources. In the field there, you would add the URL for your blog’s RSS feed and add it to your sources, after it is found.

      If you have further questions on this, please email us at support@paper.li, and we’ll be happy to help you troubleshoot!

      Kind regards!

  2. I want to use my paper, TheINFORMER as a revenue-generating asset, through the placement of ads on the pages. I have no format for doing such, nor do I have a way to stream my blog in the mix of the curated process. Can you help me?

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