When you come across articles on how to drive traffic to your website, you often get a set of core suggestions that include the following:
- Make sure your website is rich in meaningful content
- Maintain an engaging, regularly updated blog
- Get valuable links back to the site, and
- Stay active on popular social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn
These are all crucial ways to drive traffic to your website, and you should make sure they're incorporated into your marketing strategy. It can, however, be difficult to keep coming up with original content that people would want to read, link to, and share. One way of producing something new and memorable is to find respected experts and other influential people that your prospects would find interesting to interview on your site.
How could interviewing subject matter experts help bring new perspective and potentially drive more traffic to your website?
Original content from their perspective
Asking experts in your field to contribute to your blog or website content gives your website visitors something original. Take some time to come up with thoughtful and creative questions that draw out the knowledge of your subject matter expert. Generally, people who've made it to the top of a given field have a lot of interesting insights and information. If the interview is memorable enough it will be linked to from other pages and shared on social media sites.
By reaching out to subject matter experts (SMEs) in your field or your prospect's field, you'd be networking and spreading the word about your business and your website. Maybe you'll begin a profitable working relationship with your interviewee.
Sharing with their network
The person you interview is likely to talk about it afterwards, emailing the link to friends and colleagues, for instance. They may also post it on social media websites and link to it from their own website, which creates opportunities for traffic generation.
Consider your target audience
When implementing different traffic-boosting strategies, there's a tendency to consider only your business: what you have to say, what your business does, etc. You have to think about your target customer and what information they are seeking. When you invite a subject matter expert to participate in an interview on your website, be sure to consider the expert's reputation and what you want that expert to say. Your questions should focus on leading the expert to answer each question in such a way that resonates with your target audience.
Pro tip: If you record or video your subject matter interview, you can not only write a blog post, but also create a podcast or a YouTube video that you can promote and drive more traffic.
Offering subject matter experts a new venue for sharing their expertise can be mutually beneficial. Their expertise can be an interesting way to build your company's credibility and give your website a traffic surge.
