In this week's podcast episode, Kinsta's CMO Brian Jackson shares creative sources for content ideas, talks about finding the right marketing channel, and discusses the potential of multilingual sites for generating traffic.
Listen to the full interview, and read about the major takeaways that followed.
01
Make Your Article More Visually Appealing and Get More Traffic
Web designers and content writers are continually searching for new ways to produce better-looking content. Enhance your articles with illustrations, images, and other visual elements. It will help you attract more readers.
Brian describes the redesign they did recently for Kinsta blog. They got rid of the sidebar so that people would focus on the content. They also added a generous margin and padding to the headers, which they found very helpful. Simply adding more white space between paragraphs and headers can actually make a real difference.
02
4 Sources for Content Ideas
Brian shares with us the different ways he comes up with topics for his articles:
- No matter what field you work in, always share what you learn online. This includes case studies, best work practices or lessons gleaned from trial and error.
- Support tickets that come from Kinsta’s support team end up being turned into articles, like tutorials for example.
- Blog comments. Brian manually approves every single comment that goes on the Kinsta blog, which is actually quite a lot of work. Those comments fuel him with additional ideas.
- A Frequently Asked Questions page on your site or a knowledge base can also be a source. Kinsta’s developer built a little feedback button asking the readers “Do you have feedback for this article? Was it good or bad?”. If the reader clicks on the button it actually opens up a box where they can write, “Here’s what was wrong with the article.” The amount of ideas Brian culls from this is unbelievable. He literally spends hours per week improving their knowledge-based articles. If you have a knowledge base, definitely add a feedback tool that allows you to gather some content.
03
2 Ways to Rank Yourself Better on Google
Brian shares two ways he uses to compete with other WordPress blogs, despite the fact that he doesn’t post on his blog so often:
- Going back to the idea of sharing things you learn that other people might not know, this seems to just do really well in Google. People are always searching for ways to fix problems in any industry.
- Don’t focus on the quantity. If you don’t have a lot of time, focus on the quality. If you can only write one blog post per month, make it a 10,000-word blog post, and that’s it. Google definitely wants to see that you’re pushing out content, but Brian doesn’t think it matters as much as the content itself.
04
Choose the Right Marketing Channel for You
Finding the right channels that work for you is a trial and error process when you first start out. You just have to experiment and see which channel works for you.
Brian describes how various networks worked really well for him in the past, even if initially, he didn’t think they would work. And then the opposite also happened, times when he thought something was going to work, but it just ended up backfiring on him.
Brian shares his experience with Linkedin, where he did not have success generating leads or good quality, for reasons not clear to him.
Twitter is Brian’s go to and his favorite social network, and he has managed to acquire many friends on there and sign up enterprise hosting clients, all from Twitter direct messages.
05
Multilingual Sites Have Huge Potential
A year ago, Kinsta started diving into multi-lingual websites, as they wanted to tap into other markets. When they started out, they were targeting the US market because that’s where the money is.
The problem was the European clients who were beyond Kinsta’s reach due to language barriers. So they decided to first branch out to the Spanish-language market, and today they have 13 different language versions.
They achieved this by hiring native speakers to translate on an hourly basis, through sites like Upwork, and other freelance job sites. Brian thinks translators are easier to find than good writers. Plus he prefers them over automated translation as you get better quality.
Above all, making Kinsta available in different languages definitely generates a lot of traffic. There are numerous factors involved here, because some regions have more competition so your articles will take longer to rank in that language. Or maybe your product isn’t as popular as you think in that language. Brian advises to do some research beforehand.
