7 Easy Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Digital Publication
You have your content ready, packed in a nicely designed edition, and now it’s time to show it to the world. But how?
When it comes to driving traffic to your digital publication, you want to make sure to do it efficiently. The goal is to get the right crowd reading your publication. In one of my previous articles, creating a magazine that people love, the first step is to get to know your audience by leveraging data from your analytics. So let’s start by finding out where they’re hanging out.
If you’re new to Google Analytics (GA) or would like some more guidance on how to find this info, please let me know by dropping your comment below. I’ll be happy to write an article on deciphering key metrics in GA that will help you make your digital publication more successful.
1) Leveraging The Power of Social Media
Growing your readership before the internet was a slow and gradual process over many years. Many established newspapers and magazines that thrive have usually been around for a while, some for hundreds of years. Fortunately, these days it’s much easier to drive traffic to your publication’s website and generate revenue in a few months, even if you’re just starting.
Social media is definitely one way of reaching out to your audience. Moreover, it’s one of the most popular means of promoting yourself without paying that much. Some social media platforms, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, even provide you with their own analytics to measure the traffic and engagement of your posts. So, make sure to take advantage of this.
You’d notice that even the same post will have a variety of successes on different platforms. Each platform has its own signature style to grab users’ attention. So, it’s essential to keep in mind which demographics you are communicating with. Be flexible on adjusting your communication style, yet stay authentic and consistent in using your brand voice. Remember, you want to concentrate your effort on driving the right crowd to your digital publication.
You can post your articles, give teasers to your upcoming issue and other posts on your social media. This way, your followers can ‘share’ them with their followers, giving you an even wider reach. The goal is to become a trusted brand on social media within your niche. This allows you to cultivate your brand as a reliable source on your subject of expertise and interest.
2) Posts on Multiple Platforms
We’ve touched on Social Media, but there are quite a few other platforms people regularly access to consume content. Let’s take the example of YouTube, Medium, or Quora. The beauty of these kinds of platforms is that they ranked nicely on search engines like Google.
I’ll go through optimizing & leveraging SEO on the next point. But, for now, while we’re touching base about posting on multiple platforms, let’s address common concerns in managing these platforms: How much time and resources could it take to create content?
Here’s the thing, if you’re creating content just for one post on one platform, you’re wasting your time. So I’m a believer in content repurposing. You can reuse one key idea to create multiple content posted to different platforms altogether. When I said multiple contents, I mean you can recreate 10 to 30 content pieces from one of your top-performing articles.
Sounds too good to be true?
Check out this article from SEM Rush to learn how they’re doing it.
3) Optimize for Search Engines
Remember that search engine optimization (SEO) is your best friend when you want to get found by the audience you want to reach. However, it seems daunting to aim to be ranked on Google search’s first page. So, I’ll get real here; you may need the help of an SEO expert to get your content to rank higher on the results page. And yes, it may not be cheap.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do now.
You can start by simply making your content readable by humans and search engines: by having your content in HTML format. If you’re still publishing your digital publication PDF or print format only, you’re not doing yourself a favour. By converting your PDF content into HTML, not only are you taking care of your readers’ reading experience, but you also have a better chance to be found by readers through Search Engines. Once you have your HTML content, we can start talking about improving your on-page SEO.
4) Reach out for Reviews
As soon as you create an online publication, get it reviewed by the people reading your content. The reviews can help you in two ways: give you the proper feedback to keep doing your best practices and improve things that could provide future users with more incentive to subscribe. Look for comments in your social media account and reach out to your subscribers for their opinions.
And when you find a happy reader that welcomes your engagement, you may politely ask if they are willing to say a few good words that you can post and share on your social media or even in your next issue. Better yet, if they seem to have an excellent reach to your target audience, they might be able to help spread the word about your publication.
5) Collaborate with Other Publications & Content Creators
It takes time to build up your audience, so why not try to tap into an existing readers pool. You can try to reach out to other publications and content creators who share a similar market profile and offer a collaboration, for example, by writing a guest post or sponsored content.
The key to getting a yes from them is to make sure that you can offer a similar level of mutual benefits for the value you can get from them. Any collaborations have to be a two-way street. Perhaps, approach other publications that are not your direct competition but still share the same market. For example, if your publication is about empowering young entrepreneurs, you can write a guest post for the career or business section in a magazine that targets young demographics.
6) Promote through Online Advertisement
We’ve talked about leveraging social media power organically in the first point. Another thing that you can do with social media is to run paid ads for a specific targeted market. You don’t have to shell out a big budget right away; you can start with $1 to test the water.
Google Ads is another thing that you can and should explore. But, it’s another beast altogether that I’ll explore for you in a future article.
7) Reach out to your subscribers through email marketing
If you already have an email list from your existing reader base, stay in touch with them. If you’re currently publishing print-only, this is an excellent opportunity to introduce your current readers to your digital transformation. Especially if they’ve been your loyal subscribers for a while, I bet they’d like to be first to know what’s new.
There are a lot of platforms that could support your email marketing, and the price varies, usually depending on how extensive your subscriber base is.
Email marketing is also a big topic to talk about. But for now, I hope it’s useful for you to see it in this list, knowing there are many options to drive traffic to your digital publications. Whether you’re just starting in the publishing industry, transitioning into digital, or looking to improve traffic to your existing digital publication — there’s always room to improve.
Build Your Responsive Digital Magazine Today
As listed above, having your publication in responsive HTML will help improve your traffic. And whenever you’re ready to start an online publication, you’ll need a platform to support you. If you currently have a print-only publication and switching to a digital version seems like a terrifying business risk, you can try a low-cost solution that can help you start.
Make sure they also offer real human support to help you publish your digital publication efficiently.
Good luck!
