After all, your results from marketing a site that is barely worth marketing will be miserable in comparison to marketing a site chock-full of engaging, exciting content designed to attract visitors in their droves and encourage them to stick around.
And this is what stickifying your content is all about – making your content more ‘sticky’ so that when visitors arrive, they stick around for longer … and you get more chance and opportunity to convert them into leads and customers. Makes sense, right?
And the added advantage is that the better your content, the more visitors you attract in the first place:
- Great content is shareable content, effectively encouraging visitors to refer people in their own networks to your site … in some cases this can lead to a viral explosion of high quality traffic.
- The better your content, the higher you’re going to rank in Google, and the more visitors they will send you … if visitors are clicking through to your site and sticking around, that’s a positive sign to Google that your site is strong and worthy of a high ranking (and this works far better than trying to manipulate rankings for an unworthy site via shady SEO practices … in fact, it’s your guarantee of high quality traffic for the long-term, and other than your initial investment in creating the content in the first place, there’s no ongoing cost)
With higher numbers of visitors to your site who are interested in the content you produce, the more sales conversions you will be able to achieve. You’ll also experience higher conversion rates, because you’ll be building relationships with your visitors … a sense of connection. As a result they’ll be far less likely to shop around – they’ll shop with someone they’ve come to trust.
Simply put, great content makes you money – and the more sticky it is, the more money it will ultimately earn you.
I’ve said it 1,000 times and I’ll say it 100,000 more: great content is the greatest sales tool in the world … period.
Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion
So where do you get started? Here are five ways in which you can start to “stickify” the content on your website and hang on to your visitors for longer … and you can start right now:
1 – Write Information Pages Around Your Keywords
If you’re not a writer or don’t know how to write content around keywords, you can easily outsource your content creation and have a professional writer create the content for you.
The idea is to create more web pages for your site that are written around very specific topics that lots of people in your target market are searching for online.
This will mean you’re not only creating content that your readers will find interesting and valuable once they arrive at your site, but in doing so you’re also setting those web pages up to be ranked well on Google when people are searching for those topics.
2 – Create A Blog
A business website doesn’t usually get updated very often … but blogs do and are specifically designed for that purpose.
Blogs are created to provide frequently updated information, news and educational materials to your visitors. It’s up to you how often you post – once a day, or once a week or more (at least every week is recommended).
The key is to post regularly and consistently and build up a wealth of interesting, engaging and informative material for your readers.
And of course, each time you post, you have material to send to your social media networks and to your list of prospect’s email addresses (which your blog can help to build up in the first place), build stronger relationships with them and build their familiarity with you and your site. This is how content marketing works.
3 – Set Up The RSS Feed For Your Blog
You can use your blog’s RSS feed to display the titles and first paragraphs of your latest posts on your main business site (or other sites you may own).
This serves to capture the attention of visitors, direct them to your blog and effectively turns your blog into a relationship-building pre-sales tool … plus you prove to your visitors that your site is active, vibrant and ready to do business, while building your authority with them.
And of course it means visitors hang around your site for longer because you have more to offer them … your site and its content becomes more sticky.
The more useful the reader finds your content, the more likely he is to trust you, as well as to remember you and return to your site when ready to purchase.
Again, great content is one of the best investments you can make for your business.
4 – Create A “Sneeze Page” For Content You’ve Created On Other Websites
If you’ve been doing content marketing for a while – such as guest posting on other blogs, uploading videos to sites like YouTube, or article marketing – you’ll likely have a lot of content elsewhere.
Of course, usually this content serves to direct traffic to your site … but there’s no reason why you can’t turn that around, and share this same content with your visitors. They will find it useful, it helps to build the authority of your site (having content elsewhere helps builds social proof), and it helps to further deepen your relationship with them … again with the ultimate aim of converting your visitors into customers.
Create a sneeze page in which you organize all this external content, present the title and brief synopsis, and provide a link to that content.
5 – Create A FAQs Page
Thinking about your FAQs can open up a wealth of sticky content for your site
If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ll know you get asked the same type of questions repeatedly, to which you must repeatedly provide the same type of answers.
Why not compile those questions along with your answers and post them on a Frequently Asked Questions page on your site?
This means you’re providing visitors with answers before they’ve even asked the question … or thought of doing so … enriching their experience of your site, and boosting sales conversions.
It also reduces your support requirements … and for every one person who would have otherwise contacted your support with a specific question that’s now addressed via your FAQ, there will likely be nine or ten others who wouldn’t have done so, and would instead have left your site in a confused state of mind and located a competitor instead where they were able to enjoy a clearer and more authoritative experience.
You can also take this further … for every question on your FAQ page, you can construct a blog post (or perhaps several) that addresses the question in depth, and thus have more material to share with your community.
In general, your website should be full of interesting and helpful information relating to your niche. By integrating the suggestions outlined above, you will be increasing the value of your website, increasing your sales, and using one of the best ways to market your business and the products and services you offer … content marketing.
