Have you ever considered sourcing content ideas from whatever your customers are perusing on online learning platforms?

How many times have you published a great piece of content for your business, only to see it drowned out by the surrounding noise? If you didn’t know better, you might have started to feel that everybody else’s content was getting more attention than yours.

This is a challenge most content marketers face. They may spend hours creating epic content for their marketing campaigns, but somehow the masses of qualified sales prospects out there never make their way to the page. Even if it attracts some views, their number isn’t significant enough to make an impact.

So, how can you get more people to see your content? Or, in other words, what are the best methods of driving traffic to your content marketing assets? Here are three tactics you probably haven’t experimented with – tactics that I think you’ll find will do the trick.

1. Source content ideas from online learning platforms.

Content is king. But the king (or queen) must be someone people like before he or she can gain headway with subjects.

In the same way, you need to create epic content that will attract the attention of your audience. The question is: How do you know what your audience will like? Simple: Look for where they are willing to invest money to learn about their area of interest. The best sources to get that kind of information are online learning platforms like Lynda and Udemy.

An interesting statistic from shift elearning revealed that corporate training alone is a $200 billion industry and that elearning alone accounts for $56.2 billion of that pie. This makes online learning one of the fastest growing markets in the industry.

To source content ideas from online learning platforms, you’ll need a good sense of which keywords your target audience is typing into those elearning platforms, and which topics they want to learn about. You can probably guess what those keywords are, or else jump into the online conversations that your audience members are having and see for yourself.

This is possible with a social listening tool like SentiOne. While social listening is best known for online reputation management (ORM) and competitor-analysis use-cases, it can also be used as a blogger’s source of inspiration. You could monitor specific keywords on social media and across the web, listen in on what discussions are being held around those keywords and even estimate the emotions behind those keyword mentions.

Choose one baseline keyword to start with that you know is highly relevant to your industry. Monitor it, analyze the conversation around it, understand its context and write down additional relevant keywords that keep popping up in the same context. Once you have your keywords handy, go to an online learning platform and search for your desired keywords. The results will give you a hint of the types of courses available around those keywords.

In this way you will get to know how many people have enrolled in these courses and even see their reviews. This will help you determine if a keyword is just an interesting topic of discussion or a learning category your users are willing to invest their money in.

Work your way through the relevant course content to get ideas you can use to create content. The fact that people are paying for courses that cover these topics shows there’s a ready audience hungry for content on them.

2. Collaborate with niche micro-influencers.

Certainly, influencer marketing isn’t new. However, there is a subset of influencer marketing that has gone untapped by a lot of content marketers: When you think about influencers, the first thing that comes to mind is those with ridiculously large followings. But how about the micro-influencers?

Micro-influencers are whose whose audiences are between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. Those numbers may not be impressive by some people’s standards, but what you need to look at is the effect of their influence. If a particular micro-influencer’s fan base is so dedicated that about 70 percent of its members respond to his or her posts, you’ve hit the jackpot.

Connect with these particular influencers and find interesting ways to collaborate with them. Their influence will give your content marketing campaign the visibility and exposure it needs.

3. Get your employees in on the effort.

Employee advocacy is that rare gem that every content marketer should hold dear. The reason is the average viewer is more prone to engaging with content hared by a human being rather than a business.

In a survey conducted by Olapic, 76 percent of the participants found content shared by other consumers to be more honest than that shared by brands. Employee-advocacy marketing has proven to be extremely powerful. A PostBeyond survey revealed that brand messages shared by employees had 561 percent more reach than those shared via the brand’s social media channels.

But the challenge remains: How will your employees know which content to share tocomplement your content marketing efforts?

One way is to let your employees in on your content-marketing strategy and tell them all about the game plan: the content that will be written, the platforms you think they should explore and the number of people you want to reach.

The problem, however, is that you may find it difficult to track your employees’ results. However, a tool like Smarp can help put all the content you want your employees to share in one newsfeed. From this central newsfeed, your employees will be able to share the content, write their own captions and even schedule the posts.

The tactics above, when fully maximized, will ensure that you never run dry of regular traffic. These strategies may not make you a sensation overnight, but if you keep working with them, over time, they will help you generate the kind of buzz and growth you desire. 

Article written by: Toby Nwazor