How to really build traffic and a social following

I had a great chat with a veritable don of the digital marketing space Neil Patel. Neil is the co-founder at Kissmetrics and CrazyEgg and operates a kick-ass blog at Quicksprout.com.

You should be leveraging social

Build up those channels by participating in your community discussions, not only will that enable you to build traffic but it'll also serve to build up your following on those platforms. Neil continues that having a strong following gives you readymade traffic when you are looking to push something of your own to that audience.

When building an online presence the primary driver of natural followers (who will engage with your message the most) is creating content that people continually refer back to. Neil has some great examples of this in-depth "pillar" content such as the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing.

Ensure you're gathering a list

You should aim to build value with your audience and create content valuable enough for your audience to exchange their contact information. Ebooks, online courses and video training all help to build a relationship by email, via an opt-in.

This all helps to build traffic as you have an engaged set of visitors in-waiting.

Build relationships

Neil recommends building relationships with other bloggers in your space. Reach out to them on social and on email, provide them with something valuable and mutually beneficial and build your industry connections in order that you can call upon them down the line.

10 more key takeaways

1. You should be leveraging social
2. Produce original content such as ebooks
3. Overlays still work but its all about testing
4. Sticky (fixed) call-to-actions in the sidebar really work
5. A free course converts better than an ebook
6. You should invest in building relationships with bloggers in your space
7. Link to people in your space (more likelihood of a retweet)
8. Its not rocket science, build natural followers by sharing great content
9. Infographics still work
10. How to guides work better for engagement on social

A really concise, punchy call which I'm sure you enjoyed. You can find Neil at Quicksprout.com