Crafting blog posts can take an intensive amount of resources, time and planning.
However, the process doesn’t stop once you’ve published your blog post. To get the most out of your investment, you also need to be diligent in refining the content and distributing the content to gain the maximum number of readers. How you promote content on your network and how you share it on social media plays a big impact on how much traction your content gets.
To get the most out of your content, here are 3 tips to intelligently boost the number of clicks on your blog posts without doing a lot of incremental work by A/B testing, also known as split testing.
1. Test Your Blog Post Titles
According to Ogilvy, the headline matters a lot more than the actual content of your article,
On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. -David Ogilvy
Unfortunately, most people’s tendency is to focus on creating the content of an article before giving any thought to the headline. However, if you’re doing any content marketing for your company, it’s imperative you give more thought to the titles of your content.
How to test: If you’re using WordPress to power your blog, install the free Title Experiments plugin. This plugin allows you to enter multiple titles for one blog post and the plugin will automatically rotate the title displayed to readers to see which ones receive the most clicks.
2.Test Your Twitter Updates
Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, where you can only post once or a few times a day before you risk flodding your connections’ news feeds, it’s normal for Twitter accounts to be posting multiple times a day or even on hourly basis. Being able to update Twitter frequently, makes it a great platform to test what is most effective in encouraging your followers to click.
How to test: Variations to test in your tweets include the text of the tweet, using an image vs. no image, posting at different times such as in the morning vs. afternoon vs. evening, and the use of hashtags vs no hashtag. To track the responses to these tweets, visit the Twitter Analytics dashboard for your account to see if there’s a difference in the total engagements (clicks, replies, retweets or favourites) for your tweet variations. For more tips on getting more Twitter clicks, see this blog post on 15 Ways to Increase the Click-Through Rate on Your Tweets.
3. Test Email Subject Lines
Sending out an email every time you publish a new blog post is a great way to keep in touch with your followers and send traffic back to your website or blog. However, before the recipient clicks the link inside your email, they need to have opened your email first.
The subject line of your email is the biggest reason why the recipient opens, or doesn’t open, your email. To optimize the open rate, test the subject line open rates among a smaller group of recipients and then use the winning subject line when sending the email to the remainder of the recipients.
How to test: If you’re using an email program, such as MailChimp, you should have access to A/B testing functionality that allows you to test variations such as subject line, the From: name, and the delivery time of day. The variations are sent to sub-segments of your list, and then the winning variation is automatically sent to the rest of your list.
Writing and publishing your content is just one part of your content marketing strategy. Ensuring that you actually deliver value to readers and prospects by distributing and promoting your content is also an essential part of an effective content marketing strategy.
To learn more about how you can use your content to get sales leads, contact us at [email protected].
