5 Examples of How to Increase Engagement, Traffic and Branding

Did you know that there are currently over a BILLION active websites on the internet today? They keyword here is ‘active'. That means over a billion websites and blogs are constantly creating content and making it extremely hard for you to stand out from the crowd or even rank in the search results.

However, on the internet — all is fair.

Even the little guys can put in the time, work and effort to outrank multi-billion dollar companies, and even gain more attention and potentially go viral in the process. This is even easier to accomplish when you start using some of the best marketing and automation tools on the market today.

Still… it’s not easy to stand out from the crowd and create a successful brand or business on the internet. Unless you know what’s currently working and how to replicate the same processes for your site or business.

Good news! That's exactly what we are going to be cover in this article. Not only am I going to show you some great example of what other top sites, brands, and services are doing to stand out from the crowd, I'm also going to show you some exciting tools and resources to help you do the same.

Run a Contest

One of the best ways to gain massive exposure and attention for your brand is to simply run a contest or promotion around your business. However, if you are going to do this, you should make sure the promotion and prize are relevant to what your business offers. Often times you will see a brand giving away an iPhone or something that everyone wants, but has nothing to do with the business or service provided. This usually gets a lot of attention, but not real engagement or sales for the end business.

However, some brands are doing this correctly and seeing great results! A perfect example of this can be seen through a current promotion from Adcombo, where they are giving away a massive $200,000 prize to their top affiliate marketers. Not only are they giving away a massive grand prize, they also have a bunch of other smaller prizes as well… such as MacBooks, iPhones and even a bunch of Rolex.

What also makes a contest promotion unique and effective for your brand or business, is how long you actually run it. You need to make sure the length of your promotion will get enough exposure and results to make up for any significant prize amounts you might be giving away. Again, in the example of Adcombo, they are running their promotion from Dec to May, which gives them ample time to promote the contest and make sure they gain enough business and value for giving away over $200,000 in prizes.

While this might be an extreme example, anyone can get started with a contest of their own by simply using a social sharing and contest widget like Raffelcopter, or simply running an internal and customer rewards system like Adcombo has done here. The only way to find out how well a contest or social sharing promotion might work for your site, is to actually try it.

Check out: The Road to Recognition: The A-to-Z Guide to Personal Branding for Accelerating Your Professional Success in The Age of Digital Media

Infographics Still Work Extremely Well

I've always loved the concept of infographics, even years before I started used them within my own business. The great thing about infographics is that they make boring text contest and data fun to read. Nothing brings a boring data report or industry stats to life like the visuals of an infographic.

The only problem with an infographic is that you either need to know how to design one yourself or pay some decent money to get one created for your site. If you are willing to pull enough data sources together and spend some time on the graphic design part, you could easily throw one together using the free and premium templates available on Canva. I'm also running a promotion on BloggingTips.com right now, where I am having a few infographics made for free to my blogging audiences.

Once you have an infographic created, you can submit them to infographic directories, post them to your own site and also ask other sites in your industry to share it with their audiences as well. Also follow these recommended infographic marketing tips for 2017, to see what top brands and content marketers to doing today.

When you put in the time, work and effort into the promotion of your infographic, the backlinks, traffic and social sharing can really come in. This is where people simply don't put enough focus.

Use Whiteboard and Explainer Videos

We all know how easy it is to create text content and go live with it on our sites. However, many of us also know that only a small percentage of our audience is actually reading through all of our content.

Today it's all about online video. Attention spans are getting shorter and more people want instant gratification than ever before. With so much demand for video content, brands and content creators need to start thinking about creative ways to turn their best-written content into online video, while still keeping engagement and conversions in mind.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the use of whiteboard and explainer videos, and a solution like mysimpleshow.com actually makes the process easy enough for anyone to get started — no matter if you have any experience with video, animation, clip art or even voice overs.

I know I get stuck watching explainer and whiteboard videos all the time… even if it's something I'm not that interested in! There is just something special about these videos that makes an audience not want to leave after they start watching, and they really just suck you in and make you stay til the end.

The only problem with whiteboard and explainer videos is that they are pretty complex and can get expensive to make. The good news is that there are a few solutions out there for creating high-quality videos without the need to create custom artwork or animations.

Go Live with an Expert Roundup on Your Site

What if I told you that you could have a bunch of experts within your industry contribute content to your site, and then they would also share it with their social audiences as well?

It's true, and the process for making this work is called ‘expert roundups'. The concept is nothing new and we are actually seeing them all over the place right now. All a site owner needs to do is write up an email with a single question for an expert to answer, then send it out to as many relevant experts they can find. Once the site owner has received enough feedback, they can pull all of the information together and post it in one big article. The last step of the process is to email all of the experts again and let them know the post went live.

If you were to have 50+ experts within one roundup, there is no reason why you couldn't see a few hundred social shares just for this one article. In short, this type of content really does keep working for you for several weeks and months after the piece goes live on your site.

I recommend you take a look at these industry expert roundups to see how other sites are doing this same exact thing to quickly increase user engagement, social shares, backlinks and DA/PA of their own sites. Try it out and watch the engagement flow!

Build Your Own Community on Facebook

As much as I would like to have all of my audiences and traffic to come directly to my site, it would be a huge mistake to not take advantage of the billions of users who are actively on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. The value here isn't just in creating a social profile for each of your brands and websites (though it works extremely well), it's also to try and build out your own community and engagement groups as well.

This is something Ileane has done extremely well with. Her Friends of Ileane Smith Facebook group currently has thousands of members who are connecting with each other daily, while also bouncing right back to her blog on a daily basis. It's a great way for Ileane to connect with her audience through a platform that nearly everyone is already using on a daily basis.

Don't Miss This: Ms. Ileane's Patreon Community

Best of all, this method is completely free. While many people don't like the idea of building a platform on another third-party platform, it's simply too good of an opportunity to pass up.

How to Explode Your Business and Personal Brand in 2017

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to get attention and stand out from the crowd besides just creating “text content” for your site.

Why not spruce things up with a viral contest to attract new audiences and increase engagement on your site, turn your best text content into whiteboard or explainer videos… and don't forget about the many benefits of infographics and expert roundups.

If you already have a quality blog or following already in place, put some thought and effort into creating a Facebook Group like Ileane has already done.

No matter where you currently are, or what you might be working on… there are always going to be exciting and new ways to reach new audiences. These five methods are working great for brands, bloggers and content creators around the world right now, and they can do wonders for you as well!

And don’t forget… keep on following that Yellow Brick Road!