Do you love new technology? Do you have a site or blog that you want to drive traffic to? Perfect! You can use one to help the other.
Keeping your blog current with news, interviews, and reviews of the latest gadgets can be a great way to keep readers coming back and drive your traffic numbers. Just follow these few simple steps and you can be on your way to increased traffic.
1. Know Your Niche
Why are people coming to your site? Take a look at your traffic numbers and figure out what search terms are leading people to your site. Compare that to the search terms you actually want to rank for. You can strengthen your standing with these target terms by strategically placing them in the timely, topical technology writeups you are going to start doing (more on that later).
Knowing your audience is also important because it helps you establish the voice you want to use. If you are getting a lot of action from industry insiders, people who work in IT, communications, and high technology, then you can afford to be a bit more technical. If you have a lot of hits from older readers or people who tend to be less tech-savvy, then you may have to tone down the jargon a bit.
Your audience needs to know you too. While posting special updates when news breaks should be a definite part of your content plan, you need to be putting out material on the same day every week. This trains your audience to keep coming back to you on the same day every week.
2. Keep Abreast of the Latest Tech Announcements
Now, this piece of advice may seem a little redundant/simplistic. On the one hand, you want to BE the latest tech announcement. You want people to look to you as a source on in-depth, inside information that they can’t get anywhere else. And that might be who and what you are. If you have connections inside major tech companies and startups who are willing to sit down with you and give you exclusive info, then great.
The fact of the matter is that there are a million places out there vying to be everybody’s one-stop-solution for technology news and reviews. Your readers are going to keep coming back because they like you and your site and because you speak to them in a way that they like. With this in mind, there’s no shame in riding the waves caused by TechCrunch, Mashable, and other large news blogs.
Supplement your stories with material from other sources and be sure to add your unique voice and take on the new piece of technology. You don’t want to look like a copycat. You want to establish yourself as a knowledgeable and trusted voice in the tech community. Take a moment to comment on how this new piece of technology changes the landscape, adds to the conversation, or note when you think that it doesn’t add anything. Avoid being catty, dismissive, or unnecessarily critical/abusive. “Slash and burn” writing may generate internet buzz, but you want to be known for being a professional, not a loudmouth.
3. Get Trade Info
If you can afford to visit trade shows like E3 and CES and get into special Apple unveilings, then by all means, go! Go and write as much as you can. However, just because you can’t go to the big show doesn’t mean that you can’t write about what’s going on in these events and report on what’s coming out.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, and just about any large scale tech company all have their own PR pages, with regular press releases and updates. You can set up an RSS feed or e-mail subscription fairly easy. When these announcements come out, they are an opportunity for you to sound off about why you think these events are important and what they mean to your audience. That’s what people care about when they read: “How does this affect me? Why should I care?” Spin it for your audience and link it back to other material on your site using core keywords that you want to drive traffic for. Keeping people on your site also reduces bounce rate and helps drive conversions and/or ad revenue.
4. Link It All Together
Writing about fresh technology allows you a regular way to have a conversation with your readers about why this stuff should matter to them and to the tech scene in general. This is its apparent use, first and foremost, and should be a factor in everything you write. If you are throwing up content just for the traffic, just because it’s trending, your readers will smell it right away and be turned off.
So again, make sure that your content is always meaningful and deepens your relationship with your readers. However, at the same time, use your new content as a way to ease target keywords into content and drive readers to other content and conversion opportunities. If one of your target keywords is “latest smartphone advances,” and you are doing an article about how the newest Android phones all have NFC (near field communication) chips in them, then you want to slip “latest smartphone advances” into your article at least 3 or 4 times (for a 300 to 500 word article).
Sprinkled throughout the article you also want to direct readers to other content. It can be “core” content, affiliate links, other blog posts, or anything else you want your readers to see and think adds to the conversation. There are no hard and fast rules about how many internal links is too many, just try to put yourself in your reader’s shoes – how many links can you look at before you start zoning out?
Also: linking to outside sources won’t totally murder your rankings, however, when you do link out, do it sparingly and always set the link to open in a new window. Otherwise you’ll be bouncing people off your site, and no one wants that. Remember, the longer a reader stays on your site, the better chance you have to make money off of them and make them a lifelong reader. A good place to link out is when you are quoting someone directly from a source article.
5. Be Social
This probably goes without saying, but make sure that your content is being broadcast over social media pathways. There are easy ways to link your blog with Facebook and Twitter so that it gets automatically broadcast when you post something new. When using Twitter it’s also important to know which hashtags are trending at whatever times, to take advantage of a quick uptick in activity. This can be tricky and won’t always work, but if you are watching Twitter action unfold on your Twitter client (Hootsuite, etc.), it could be worth throwing it out there again with the updated hashtag.
Regular content is a great way to drive traffic to your site or store. Taking advantage of trends in a field as hot and fast-paced as technology is a great way to make sure that you always have something to write about and that your stories stay topical and current. Make sure that you are giving your readers a reason to read about you, and that you keep the flow of news and information regular. Nothing kills a readership like them expecting a post the same day every week and being let down when one doesn’t appear. Think of your writing like a relationship with your readers. They need to know that you are there for them. If they do, then they’ll be there for you.