Why Your Content Is Underperforming
We know that not everything we put out into the world is going to be wildly successful. As a marketer, you learn to accept that some posts will receive very little traffic or engagement. The goal is to reduce the frequency of social media posts and blogs that do not generate interest. The first step to creating high performance content is to determine why your content has been underperforming.
Why Your Content is Underperforming
1. It has not gained traction yet.
Some posts take time to gain traction, especially blog posts. It may even take months. Research has shown that for blogs the majority of the views come from prior months. That is, posts that were published prior to the current month lead viewers to read older posts. Take this into consideration when tracking performance and set a time frame that is realistic as opposed to ideal.
2. You did not use internal links.
SEO is incredibly important to the success of all your content, and the use of internal links is instrumental to your post appearing in competitive keyword searches. Consider pages on your website that pair well with the content of that particular post, and include an internal link. The more relevant, the better. If there is a post you want to boost, this is one of the best ways to draw attention to it.
3. The content is not consolidated.
The combination of similar content that had a disappointing performance makes it stronger. Consolidate related posts and insert links to redirect the reader from one to the other. You will have created a piece with more value. Two for one!
4. You are not promoting the post
A passive strategy is to create content, publish it, and do nothing else with it. Be active and promote your content! Part of your marketing budget should be allotted to promotion, whether it is for Facebook advertising, Google AdWords, or any number of advertising platforms. Choose one that best fits your audience and the type of client that you wish to attract.
5. The material is not clustered
A topic cluster is a collection of semantically relevant content pieces that individually cover smaller themes within an overarching topic. Picture a pillar in the center as your general topic with smaller, more focused topics clustered around it. For example, suppose that you chose SEO as your pillar. Subtopics of this would be “Keyword Research Strategies,” and “Google Ranking Factors.” Note that it is not necessary for SEO to be included in the headline. The topics still related to one another, like items in a series.
Before you go on a rampage and delete every one of your posts that did not perform as well as you wanted it to, remember to be patient. Content can be promoted, consolidated, and improved with a bit of strategic creativity.
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