Content promotion bignner mistake

 Welcome to the lesson #8. How to promoteyour content and make it rank high in Google. Here's what we're going to cover in this lesson. Four common content promotion mistakes. The best content promotion strategies. And how to compete with the "big guys" in Google'ssearch results. So let's go! Part 1. Four common content promotion mistakes Let me ask you a question: what goal do youhave in mind when promoting your content? For the vast majority of people the goal ofcontent promotion is to get as much traffic as possible to their newly published article. 

And they are super happy and satisfied ifthey manage to beat the traffic record of a previously published one. That sounds like a great goal to pursue,which aligns perfectly with the goal of growing your blog and your business, right? Well.. no. If your only goal with content promotion isgenerate short-term traffic., I suggest you to go back and watch this course again,starting from the very first lesson. Because by focusing on short-term trafficyou're focusing on the "Spike of hope", which as we have discussed in those firstlessons will eventually fade to nothing anyway, taking you back to where you started. If you want your blog to grow - you need to focusyour efforts on building passive consistent traffic. 

Which you get by pushing your articles to thetop of Google search results! And that is pretty hard to do, I must say. Guess how many articles reach the front pageof Google in a year after being published? 5.7%!!! And by "reach the front page of Google" I meanranking for at least a single related keyword, not even the main topic that they're targeting. This percentage comes from a study that wecarried out last year. We tracked the performance of 2 million newlypublished pages and it turned out that only 5.7% of them were seen in Google top 10 for at least a single keyword within a year from being  published. This means that a staggering 94.3% of allnewly published pages never reach the front page of Google and never get any search traffic at all. 

Can you guess why? That's because most people prefer to relyon the "Publish & Pray" approach and hope that their pages will rank in Google by themselves. Which obviously never happens. In the previous lesson we have discussed that yourwebsite cannot rank in Google without backlinks. Which leads us to the conclusion that theprimary goal of content promotion should be to build quality backlinks to your content,so that it will start ranking in Google. And this brings us to the first mistake ofcontent promotion. Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term trafficover backlinks. But wait a minute, didn't I say in the previouslesson that the articles at Ahrefs Blog aquire 80% of their backlinks naturally as a resultof generating traffic to them and expecting some of these people to link to us? Which means that "generating traffic"basically equals "acquiring backlinks". 

So how come I am now saying that you shouldnot focus on traffic? Well, the thing is this equation is only true forbig and established blogs and won't really work for those who are just starting out. Let me give you three reasons why. Reason #1: Only a tiny percentage of all yourvisitors will link to you. From my personal experience, aquiring onenatural backlink for every thousand visitors is a pretty good result. So if you want to get just 10 natural linksto your article, you should aim for at least 10,000 visitors to that specific article. If that math doesn't scare you - go for it.

 But for most newbie bloggers 10,000 visitorsto a single article is far from achievable. Reason #2: People tend to link to websitesthat they know and trust. This explains why Wikipedia has a ridiculousamount of backlinks and their articles are super-hard to outrank. Most people would prefer to link to a Wikipediaarticle over a similar post on a blog that they've never heard of before. No one wants to risk sending their readersto some questionable website, right? That's why brand new blogs struggle to aquirelinks naturally. And finally, reason #3: Most peopledon't have a website to link from. It's easy for me to talk about acquiring naturallinks while Ahrefs blog belongs to the internet marketing niche where almost everyoneowns a website. Usually even more than one. But in many other industries that is not the case. Which makes natural link acquisition nearlyimpossible. 

So as you can tell, turning traffic into naturalbacklinks is the kind of luxury that is only available to well-known established websitesand the success largely depends on the type of industry you're in. If you're not in the fortunate position of beinga well-known and established website, I'm afraid you'll have to manually build your backlinks, rather than wait for them to come naturally. And I'm about to share quite a few actionablelink building strategies with you. But not before we discuss three more mistakesof content promotion. Mistake #2: Giving up content promotion too early. Most bloggers have a so-called "content promotionchecklist" that they reference when promoting every new article that they publish. It usually looks like this. Send a newsletter to email subscribers. 

Post on social networks (Twitter,Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc). Submit to Reddit and any relevant forumsand communities; Reach out to everyone, who was mentioned in the article, etc. Some bloggers have more items on their checklistthan others. But as soon as that list is completed, theyforget about that article and move to a new one. And that is a big mistake! You should not quit promoting your articlejust because you're out of the items in your content promotion checklist, no matter howbig that list is. Your goal is to rank high in Google and getpassive search traffic to your article, remember? So your content promotion should not stopuntil you reach that goal. There's a rather famous piece of advice, whichsuggests that you should put 20% of your efforts into creating content and 80% of your effortsinto promoting it.

 These numbers are meant to illustrate thatcontent promotion is uber-important. And while I totally dig what the author ofthat advice was trying to say, I actually think that it is a very misleading analogy. So I invented my own rule. It's called the 110/110 rule. And it means that you should go an extra mile in both: creating an absolutely outstanding pieceof content that your readers will love; and promoting it super-hard and not quittinguntil it reaches the top positions in Google. So why don't you do a bit of research andthrow a few more items into your content promotion checklist? Luckily, 

there's no shortage of differenttactics that you can use, just Google around a bit and you'll find a ton of ideas. Let me add just a few more items for you to consider. Submit your article to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+; Mention it in relevant conversations onpublic Slack channels; Repurpose your content into different formats(video, audio, slides, images) and syndicate it to proper websites with a link to the original; Reach out to everyone who has linked linked to articles on the same topic; Reach out to everyone who has published articles mentioning that topic; Publish a guest post that references thatarticle and make people want to check it out. 

And here's something very important. Most of these strategies can only be used once,but some of them can be scaled almost indefinitely. Like guest posting. What stops you from publishing more and moreguest posts that each link to your article, thus helping it to crawl up the Google rankings? Same with outreach, it scales rather welland it's a great way to get quality backlinks. We're going to cover both of these strategies later. And now, mistake #3: Abandoning your old content Imagine the following situation. A year ago you have published a great article. You promoted it a lot and got some nicebacklinks that helped it to rank in Google top 5 for it's main keyword. 

Ranking in top 5 is a very good result,so you decided that your job here is done and moved on to creating new content,never bothering to revisit that article again. That doesn't sound like a bad scenario, right? Well, first of all, why would you settle withany Google position but the very first one? I mean, if that article brings customers toyour business, you want it to get as much relevant search traffic as possible, right? And besides, if the search query that you'retargeting has some good business value, you can be sure that sooner or later yourcompetitors will try to outrank you with their own articles. In other words, abandoning your content is a no-no. 

But what are your options? You cannot just keep promoting the same articlewith the same content promotion strategies, because you're only going to irritate people this way. Well, there's a loophole that you can use. After your article has been live for a fewmonths, you should re-visit it and find ways to make it better. And once you update your article - you canre-promote it again with the same content promotion strategies as if it was brand new. Here at Ahrefs we only spend half of our timeand efforts on creating new content. The other half goes into updating old content. Here's why we do that.

 First of all, if the article gets traffic fromGoogle we want to make sure that our visitors are getting the most up-to-dateinformation on that topic. Letting our articles age results in a baduser experience. Secondly, the mere act of updating yourarticle with fresh information sends a positive signal to Google and oftenleads to better rankings on its own. And finally, in most cases our updates arequite substantial. We often re-write the entire article from thescratch which then It allows us to promote it to our audience again as if it was brand new. In fact, when we email our blog subscriberswith a link to an updated article, we do disclose that it's not entirely new.

 And so far there hasn't been a singlecomplaint about this. In fact, we've found the opposite. The spike of traffic that we get frompromoting an updated article is almost always bigger than when it was first published. Our "SEO tips" article is probably the bestexample I have. We re-launched it three times in two years,each time generating more and more traffic. You bet we're going to continue updating andre-launching it in future. And there's one last content promotion mistakeleft to discuss. 

Mistake #4: Not spending money on content promotion. As you already know, We have a decentadvertising budget for every article that we publish at Ahrefs blog. This allows us to reach a huge number of peoplethat we wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. But whenever I mention that to other bloggers,most of them tell me that they can't afford to spend money on content promotion. Well, in psychology they call this a Limiting Belief. The truth is - you can afford to spend moneyon content promotion. You just fail to justify it. So let me try to help you with that. I have two good arguments, that should do the job.

 Argument #1: The "free content promotion methods"are not free. So how much time does it take you to promotea new piece of content? One hour? Five hours? Ten? And your time is worth something, right? So why don't you multiply your estimated hourlyrate by the time it took you to complete all items in your content promotion checklist? This way you're going to get the cost of what youthink are your "free" content promotion methods. And now that you know the price tag, why don'tyou add 10% to that sum and use that money to run a Facebook ads campaign? Think of it as an additional item in your"free content promotion methods" checklist, but this time you're paying with your moneyinstead of paying with your time.

 And you might actually discover that puttingyour money into Facebook ads has a much better ROI than putting your time into some of theseother free strategies. Argument #2: Your content should sell your product. The best way to justify spending money oncontent promotion is by getting this money back in a form of sales or customers. If an article doesn't bring new customersto your business - I can understand why you don't want to spend money on it. But why did you spend your time promoting it then? And, in fact, if an article doesn't help youto get new customers, why did you even create it in the first place?

 Do you see where I'm going with that? Paid content promotion is a litmus test forthe business potential of your content. Here at Ahrefs we're not afraid to pour moneyinto content promotion, because we know that our content converts. Check out this tweet I saw the other day: "Excellent content on long-tail keywords. It also resulted in me signing up for a free trial. Great work @ahrefs :)" And a few weeks later Thomas also tweetedthat he became our paid customer. Which is a perfect illustration of how ourblog brings new customers to our business.

 And this wraps up the four mistakes of contentpromotion that I wanted to warn you about. Here's a quick refresher. Mistake #1: Focusing on short-term trafficover backlinks. Mistake #2: Giving up content promotion too early. Mistake #3: Abandoning your old content. Mistake #4: Not spending money on content promotion. And now it's time to review the actual contentpromotion strategies.