If you are paying attention to all advice on the internet, you have noticed a focus on making content engaging and social. While this is arguably (very arguably) the most significant part of creating high quality content, this doesn’t always mean profitability for a website. To be fair, not all websites want their content to make money (after all, some companies have a product or service that brings in the profit). For the many that do, there are quite a few things that can be done to bring profitability back into the content equation.
Top 5 Ways to Increase the Profitability of Your Content
If your website focuses mainly on content as opposed to a product or service, it makes sense to optimize it for profitability. However, it is also necessary not to lose content value just to bring in a profit. Below are a few of the most popular ways to make this happen:
1. Good Positioning on Your Site
Determine which content pages are driving the most conversions and then see where they are located within your site’s structure. The visitors to these pages often come primarily from organic searches, which means that visitors who go directly to your homepage might not navigate to those pages on their own (maybe they have to go from the home page, to a category, to another category, and then finally to the page – which can be confusing). Make pages with the highest conversions rates easy to reach by adding another tab or a direct link on your homepage. This will help your most profitable content get seen more and help it get crawled more often by the search engines.
2. Move the Content to Popular Pages
With this tactic, you’re doing the opposite of the tactic discussed above. Instead of moving the pages with the best content, move your best content onto the best pages. This will change the way you page looks, but because content is so important it should be a huge positive (test to make sure!). It gets that juicy content in front of more eyes and gives readers more information about you.
3. Lots of A/B Testing
This is probably one of the most popular ways to increase the profitability of a piece of content. By testing different layouts and structures for pages with high traffic, you can determine which content or layout gets the most views. A/B testing can seem daunting and is certainly a large undertaking for a smaller business, so try using a tool like Unbounce if you are testing for the first time.
4. Organize User Tests
This method is often forgotten, but for some websites it is the best way to improve content profitability. Instead of watching user patterns and testing different layouts, you asking users directly to see what increases conversions. UserTesting.com is one of the most popular options for user testing, but it does come at a small $33/user cost.
5. Back to the Basics: Don’t Forget Internal Linking
Of course, you also can’t forget about internal linking. This is a great SEO practice to help readers navigate easily to related pages. Find your big money pages and add internal links to your top content – but only if it is relevant.
Do you have a creative way to make your content more profitable? What has worked for you in the past and what has failed? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below.
Photo Credit: strategies.com
