Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 102

Distributing Content to Attract an Audience
Today, content plays an important role in all major forms of traffic generation.
Convincing cold (and even warm) prospects to visit your website is difficult without first
leading with valuable content.
The processes you develop to distribute content, and thus generate traffic to it, are as
important as the processes surrounding the creation of that content. Entire chapters of this
book are devoted to the nuances of traffic generation using the methods of email
marketing, search, social media, and paid traffic. However, it’s worth mentioning how
each of these major traffic generation methods interact with the content you produce.
Marketing through email
Email is still the best method for making offers and sending more content, so growing and
maintaining your email lists are critical tasks, which is why growing your email list is
built into your content strategy. After you’ve produced a content asset, such as a blog post
or a podcast episode, use your email list(s) to drive traffic to that piece.
To write the email for your new piece of content, first create the subject line of the email
message. Often the subject is the same as the title of the content, but there are other
strategies to naming your email subject line, such as scarcity headings like “FINAL notice
(Just hours left …)” or by piquing curiosity with subject lines like “THIS is why I do what I
do … .” We describe these strategies in more detail in Chapter 11.
Next, open your email with a short, punchy introduction that pulls people into the main
body of your email, where you pique the email subscriber ’s interest and describe what he
can expect from