When I was talking to someone earlier this week, a really good question came up. We were doing a big marketing plan strategy session and they asked, “How do I get more eyeballs on my content?“

The question came from a good place and I’m sure you’re probably wondering how to get more eyes on your content as well. The answer is not what you expect. Conventional wisdom tells us if we want to get more eyeballs on our content, the solution is to do more outreach, share more, and somehow go viral. This isn’t very realistic and if you’re expecting your friends on social media to become clients, you could be in for a rude awakening.

Facebook Friends Are Likely Not Your Ideal Client

The person who asked me this question during my marketing strategy call admitted that in the past, their strategy for sharing meant posting blog links to social media. It’s important to realize that Facebook friends are not your clients.

There might be a tiny bit of overlap and there might be some of you where that is totally not true. If that’s the case, don’t listen to me. But for most of you, the people who went to high school or college with you and the people you know in real life are going to love you no matter what you do. Still, they are not your clients. So short of sending money to a Facebook campaign, how do you get more eyes on your content? The answer I gave him was probably not satisfying, but here it is.

Create More Content

Your content marketing channels are a number of different places, right? When you check your stats at the end of the month, what you’re checking for is to see the different composition of where your traffic is coming from. Is it coming direct? Direct traffic means that somebody typed in your URL into their browser and they’ve started browsing from there.

A small percentage of your clients will end up being the people that actually know you in real life or the people that you asked to check a link to make sure it’s working.

Then there’s social channels. Are you getting content in front of people on the right social channels that they spend time on? You can do this with robots. It does not have to be just shared on your own personal page. However, sharing your stuff does have an impact.

My Issue With Using Organic Search to Get More Eyes on Your Content

Then there’s organic traffic. We can spend a lot of time talking about organic search. Basically, when you are creating content online, you are at the mercy of search engines. So you need to make nice with the search engines because if you do, you create content around a problem that your audience wants to solve, getting on the first or even second or third page of Google search results will go a long way in terms of being able to get more eyes on your content.

When you’re thinking about what kinds of content the search engines want, the answer, unfortunately, is the very best. Search engines want the most comprehensive piece that you could possibly come up with.

So if you were to type in your keyword into the search engine yourself, what you would get in return is anything that’s on the front page is going to be great. From there, your goal would be to create something even better.

It’s important to realize that those 10 articles on the first page of Google represent the vast majority of that organic traffic. So what you have to do is somehow create something that’s as good or better than something that’s on page 1. This can be really challenging, especially if you are coming at content marketing as a must in order to feed the content machine.

Marketing Content When You’re Not Solely an SEO Writer

If you’re not a writer, it’s going take a lot more time than you want to in order to get more eyes on your content with organic search and keywords. Chances are, you are not strictly a content manager for your business. You probably wear a lot of different hats for your business. Still, you must do marketing in order to get in front of more people.

Thankfully, there is an easier way. If you can speak for 5 to 10 minutes about your topic, you can demonstrate your expertise and your authority, then you can get on the first page of Google results. Because do you know what else Google owns? YouTube.

So if you create a video where you’re talking through those points, you can see what the first, second, and third results are, you can summarize those, and put them in your own words. Then you have a great piece that can become a blog post.

Again, you’re going to have a little bit of formatting to do because you’ll have to add in headers and break up the content. You’ll be talking quite a bit in your video and you want to turn your transcript into something useful.

But video is so much easier. It’s the shortcut to getting good search traffic.

If you want to get more eyes on your content, not just your friends and your family, but people who might actually buy from you, this is the way to go. Creating a content strategy around organic marketing, organic search, search engine optimization, and all of that stuff will pay off for you in spades. If you want to talk more about building a winning content store, click here to book a discovery call with me. I’d love to chat with you about your needs.