The truth is there is no real shortcut to developing long term inbound search traffic and steady business through a website. The few overnight successes that you hear of where traffic suddenly spikes is often just that….a temporary spike because something you posted really took off and became viral. The effects of these one time spikes are also more often than not….temporary. Social marketing is a process that needs very engaging content creation and a lot of activity on several social sites (where your target customers are) consistently and every single day. It’s often this commitment in terms of time which many find they are not able to do as much as they would like to and in that process, there is no daily activity and the social marketing efforts stagnate.

If your experience is similar, drop us a line and explore how we may be able to help you maintain that daily activity required while you focus on strategy and other areas of importance. In effect, this may just be the shortcut you need.

Prior to launching BuzzFactory in my previous work experiences I had the opportunity to work closely with a number of content sites which were designed to draw inbound search traffic around a specific B2B (in most cases) or B2C (in a few cases) industry vertical. The objective was to develop each of these sites into a valuable resource for each industry that had fresh content updates such as news, articles, blog posts and more in a single location and professionals would have a something akin to an industry publication they could quickly open and read through for good content in their space.

One set of these sites were driven by syndicated content which came through RSS feeds from various other related publications and an other set employed a very small team of writers who would contribute to the content daily in the form of one or two articles and blog posts a day. The general idea behind the site which displayed content from other publications was to have more updates and a lot more content in an automated and cost effective way. Since it was simply aggregating content from other sites, it didn’t need much time or money and would update it self several times a day building a large index of links on the site. On the other set of sites progress was much slower. Limited resources mean’t the site could only be updated when there was bandwidth for someone to spend time writing a post or a detailed article, using the right keywords, linking, publishing and finally promoting it personally through social networking and bookmarking sites. While the first set of sites had hundreds of new article links each week (though duplicated (syndicated through RSS) the second slowly and steadily grew at around one new original post or article each day.

Now as logical guessing would have it, the first set of sites should have done very well but failed quite miserably at search results in every single case. The second set of sites which depended on original content though slow to develop grew in terms of both referral traffic and gradually drew a rising percentage of search engine traffic through some very relevant keywords and phrases.

Lessons Learned

• Syndicated content on your business website is a good resource. It’s useful for those who come to your website. It’s not as effective in bringing them to your website from search engines.

• Syndicated duplicate content doesn’t do much for gaining more links in search results as that benefit really goes to the site that originally posted the content you are just re-distributing.

• Duplicate content which is not syndicated and posted directly on your site is a big no no. It’s not just damaging to your page rank and site reputation, it’s plagarism.

• Keep it original even if it means it can cost more in terms of time or money. It will pay back in the long run and give you long term returns in terms of bringing the right people to your site.

• Slow and steady wins the race. Even if you can’t update your site with new content everyday, do as much as you can and make sure it’s fresh, useful, relevant to your business or website and build your own content one step at a time. Even if you don’t see magical spikes in traffic, each original post will bring in a trickle of search traffic and you can build that trickle into a stream of search traffic gradually.

Perhaps best said by Joe Pulizzi of the Junta42 blog in a post he published in July this year:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, social media doesn’t work without relevant, valuable and consistent content. Success in social media relies on a web content strategy that works for the brand and especially for the brand’s advocates.

Running a community, sharing links on Twitter, blogging, search marketing, inbound marketing, online marketing promotions or landing pages all rely on having great content to generate that conversation or value that draws the right people. That “content creation” is a core component of all subsequent social marketing and online marketing activity and needs to be accounted for by businesses.

What needs to be considered about content?:

• It’s a core component of social media and a lot of other activity is built around it and relies on it
• Creating content involves considerable investment in terms of time, effort or money. Even a one man business running a daily blog to create awareness needs the owner to spend considerable time daily to keep posts fresh.
• It’s a constant requirement not a one time purchase. As long as you need to improve search traffic results, deliver something engaging to your audiences or keep a social marketing program running, you need a supply of content.
• It needs to be accounted for in marketing budgets and feature separately for any online marketing plans to really measure true costs of online marketing and accurately track progress.

Good social marketing campaigns are fueled by a great supply of quality content. Just take a look around:

Successful software product company 37Signals much loved blog Signal Vs Noise and ebooks like Getting Real have fueled a huge online fan following for the business who will generate massive marketing for anything they do.

Inbound marketing company Hubspot’s exceptional content in the form of blog posts, videos, comics, podcasts, Slideshare presentations and online TV show is behind the huge buzz they have generated online around their business and drew a large customer base in a relatively short time.

The evidence is consistent with every sucessful social marketing effort. They are all backed by great content and to build a supply of great content, a dedicated effort is needed. One that clearly addresses content creation and content marketing as a core part of the overall social marketing strategy. Do you have your consistent supply of online content figured out?

Banners, PPC, adwords and similar campaigns used to drive customers towards a website or generate inbound leads “are pay per campaign” marketing strategies where as spend on “building blogs” and “building online communities” are more like investing in long term marketing assets. It’s important to understand this when you plan to develop a blog around you’re business website to have reasonable expectations and avoid disappointment in the early stages. Like any investment in building an asset that will deliver long term benefits, blogs and communities have a gestation period before the returns really start to show. In the early stages it needs time and constant effort till content starts to build up and the blog starts to build a reputation. New and early stage blogs rely heavily on generating referral traffic and that needs constant promotion through other sites. Since the better part of the traffic to the blog is from other more popular sites, that traffic may not deliver a lot of sales leads and the frequency of inbound leads may be few and far between. This is the stage at which most marketers and businesses abandon their blog or become frustrated with the fact the output from the blog is not proportionate.

For those who do move on at the same rate with the same enthusiasm as they started with, they will move on to see the percentage of search traffic coming through search engines gradually increases in proportion to the referral traffic and this is a good sign. This happens as a result of a large amount of original content on your blog being indexed in search engines and your keywords starting to work for you. It basically means more traffic on your site arrived there as a result of  finding your site while searching one or more of the keywords in your blog content. This also means the traffic coming to your site is more relevant and the likelihood that they are well qualified leads is significantly higher. The frequency of leads captured through the site and quality traffic will be on the rise. The proportion of search traffic increases in comparison to referral traffic till it reaches a tipping point.

At this stage the vast wealth of search able content on your blog indexed by search engines is the main contributor to traffic on the site. It’s not uncommon to find an post you wrote a year or two ago still bringing a trickle of search traffic. You club hundred or several hundred such posts which bring in a trickle of qualified visitors to your site, it’s a flow of qualified leads or relevant audience and the returns are exponential. At this stage, even if the activity slows down on the blog in terms of adding fresh content for some time, the archives of content which still draw search traffic will sustain and that’s what makes business blogging such a valuable long term social marketing asset.

So if you need quick results and quick leads the pay per lead approach will be the better option but if you are looking to build a long term marketing asset, online communities and blogs can deliver some serious value.

On it’s own freshly published original content can drive some amount of search traffic on a more established site but for most sites it makes sense to give every newly published piece of content a jump start by sharing it with as many relevant users as possible. For example, if  you’ve just finished publishing a new blog post for your business website it may generate some views from regular readers and subscribers to your website and blog but to reach out to a wider audience and drive the most out of your content you need to go a step further. Submitting and sharing it with your network on social sites like Digg, Mixx, Stumbleupon, Reditt and others can draw a wider readership and allows the online community to further promote the ones they enjoyed reading. Posting them to social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin and others also could create some amount of traction for your post. Besides the more generic social sites, almost every industry and vertical has it’s own social networks, communities and sites where quality content can be shared with peers and audiences from within the industry giving your content the right kind of exposure and drawing more visitors towards your website.

While many are aware that they can leverage all these social sites to promote their content time and shedules often get in the way causing one to overlook this and a lot of well written, well created fresh content doesn’t get promoted and read to it’s full potential in the process. What is needed is a disciplined process of publishing + online promotion activity to push your content to users as soon as it’s published and build as much momentum from each post, article or piece of content. Once you have that in place you should see a marked improvement in how well distributed your content is and how much more effectively you can market your website. Simple!