It can feel impossible to fully maximize the effectiveness of your content; there are always more updates, edits, and SEO tweaks you can make. The life of a content creator doesn’t leave much time for fine-tuning every piece of content you make, and it can be easy to simply skip the process to capitalize on your content and get back to creating more.
Capitalizing your content means making the most revenue and getting the most traffic possible for each post; it takes a lot of work to publish even one piece of content, and you want to squeeze as many benefits as you can from them. You can track and measure these metrics using tools like Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics to ensure you’re on track and measuring every important metric like traffic, revenue, and page reading time.
Still, there are a few simple ways to capitalize on your content so that you can maximize your traffic and earnings, even if you’re busy with full-time jobs, content creation, or raising kids. The key is to identify which pieces of content are worth updating, then having an easy-to-use optimization strategy on each piece of content moving forward. Here’s how.
How to Know Which Pieces of Content to Capitalize On
Most content creators are experiencing burnout in some way or another, and don’t always have a lot of time to go back through old content and analyze which pieces are best suited for optimization. However, knowing what pieces of content to optimize is a critical skill for content creators. Every content creator has pieces of content that do well, some that don’t do well, and most that perform about average. If you can find the right pieces of content to optimize, you can turn as many pieces of content into high-performing ones, leading to an exponential increase in traffic and earning.
Here are some simple traits to look for in your content that can reveal which pieces you should focus on that are likely to yield good results.
Trait #1: Content on pages two, three, or four on Google search results
There’s an old content marketing joke that goes like this: what’s the best place to hide a secret? Page two of Google.
Content that is good enough to reach page one of Google experiences a disproportionately high volume of clicks and views, with 95% of users getting their information from content found on page one.
This means that if your content is routinely showing up close to page one, changes are you’re only a few edits and tweaks away from potentially hitting page one of Google searches for your term. Work to boost your content’s SEO ranking and quality (Ezoic’s Tag Tester Tool will also help) so that it has the highest chance to reach page one of Google…and the vast majority of traffic for your search terms.
Trait #2: Content that had a huge initial spike, but tapered off over time
This kind of content is great from a data/statistics standpoint, because you already know it works. Your audience already loved it, and the content proved that people would click on it. You can use Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics tool to measure those hard-to-find but important metrics to measure your content’s success like traffic sources and revenue stream development.
Now, you can use these same posts and optimize them to reflect newer, more up-to-date information for these posts. If these pieces of content can be updated, optimized, or edited to reflect newer information for readers, you can turn this content from a one-hit wonder to an evergreen piece of content new audiences will continue using for years to come.
Trait #3: Articles with a high-click rate, but high bounce-rate
In the words of the world-famous marketer David Ogilvy: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
A high click-rate means you had a great headline; a high bounce-rate means the content itself wasn’t what the audience wanted from that headline.
Articles that have high click-rates and high bounce-rates are a great piece of content to optimize. The headline worked; update the body of the content to better reflect the headline. That way when you promote it again, your audience will read it longer.
Use a Website Plugin For Proven Results
Google and other search engines have always been notoriously private with their algorithms and reasonings behind SEO. Even though we have nearly 20 years of SEO experience, it can be difficult to know what SEO strategies work, and which ones don’t.
Fortunately, there are a plethora of SEO tools content creators can use to remove the guesswork and give yourself the best chance to capitalize on your content to get more traffic and income. Website plugins like Yoast, Rankmath, and Article Optimizer are some of many free SEO tools that calculate your content’s SEO power before you even post it. They also give you up-to-date recommendations on how to optimize your content based on Google’s latest SEO updates.
Before, if content creators wanted to optimize their content as much as possible, they were forced to rely on inelegant, awkward strategies like stuffing in keywords and key phrases in their posts, or cluttering up their site’s metadata with keyword-heavy search terms.
These website plugins do most of the work for you, and allow content creators to continue posting high-quality content that still sounds like it’s written by and created for other humans (and not search engines indexing software). You don’t have to figure out all the SEO secrets yourself; rely on software that’s already done most of the work for you to help capitalize on your content.
Add on Income Streams to the Right Pieces of Content
Another excellent way to capitalize on your content is to combine income streams and other resources with relevant pieces of content.
There will always be a portion of your audience that wants to consume your content in newer, different, or more expansive ways — online courses, books, videos, podcasts, etc. If you can create other products/services that you can seamlessly attach to relevant pieces of content, you can expect to see a remarkable increase in income and traffic.
What you’re really doing is giving away more value, delivering your content in various ways that different types of traffic prefer. As multi-million dollar marketer Russell Brunson put it, “Because people who are on Instagram love to consume content on Instagram. The same is true for our blog: our superfans will move from Facebook and other places to read our blog, but our best blog readers are people who read other blogs. People who love to watch YouTube videos love to watch videos on YouTube, and people who listen to podcasts listen to podcasts.”
One of the best ways to capitalize on your content and maximize every single view is to give everyone who consumes your content more chances to consume your content in ways they prefer. It’s a natural, contextual evolution of your content through proven income models that work for websites.
In Conclusion
It’s not uncommon for content creators to spend hours, days, perhaps weeks on a single piece of content; of course you want to make sure you’re capitalizing on each piece of content you worked so hard to make.
Figuring out SEO and search engine algorithms can seem like an impossible task, but there are myriad website tools content creators can use to optimize their content automatically. You might not have a lot of extra time to optimize all your past pieces of content, so decide which pieces of content are the best suited for further optimization. Incorporate multiple income streams into your content so give your audience more value every time they visit your site.
The more value you give, the more traffic you can expect to see — and the more income too, once you capitalize on your content.
