Content Marketing Tactic: Brainstorm and Create Content That’s 100% Guaranteed to Drive Traffic

Yes, you read that right. I am guaranteeing you 100% that you’ll get traffic from this exercise.

What’s the type of content that’s 100% absolutely guaranteed to get you traffic on your website?

FAQs

Yup, frequently asked questions.

Whether you already have customers, or just starting out, you will have a bunch of frequently asked questions (FAQs).

1. List them down.
2. Group them together.
3. Answer them.
4. Publish each.

It’s that simple.

You have two ways to do this and I strongly recommend you apply both strategies: create an FAQ page to put all your FAQs and create individual posts out of each question or topic.

I’ll go over this below.

But first, you might be asking this question…

Why FAQs Will Get You Traffic

FAQs are guaranteed to drive additional traffic to your website because people are actively looking for it. If you don’t know where to start in content marketing, this tactic is for you.

Let’s say you’re a cafe and you also sell your coffee beans online. Apart from the price, here are some questions that your customers might ask:

1. How much is the shipping fee? or is shipping included?
2. How fresh is your coffee?
3. Is it organic?
4. Where does your coffee come from?
5. How do you handle returns and refunds?
6. How long does it take to receive my order?

Creating FAQs and putting them on your website is a great way to get gain your visitor’s trust. It’s often an overlook marketing tactic.

Answering questions before they ask is the best way to win them over.

It sends a signal that you know what you’re doing and you are proactively communicating it.

On the other hand, if you do not answer these basic questions upfront, your visitors still have those questions in their minds.

They will try searching for it (additional work for them) or ask you these questions (again, additional work for them).

These unnecessary steps cause friction. And in the early stages of the buying process where you haven’t built any goodwill yet, they’ll probably just turn to another competitor who displays their FAQs prominently.

How to Brainstorm Ideas for Your FAQs

If you’re having trouble creating an initial FAQ list, I’m here to help.

No matter your industry or product/service offering, creating an FAQ page (or section) will benefit you greatly.

Let’s continue our cafe example earlier.

Apart from the initial questions above, here are some other questions target audience might ask that’s specific to your offering:

1. What’s the best grinder to use for my coffee?
2. What’s the best grind size for ______? (insert here the most common coffee brewing methods like drip, v60, Aeropress, etc.)
3. How do I brew using ______? (same as above)

Now, You Might Be Asking “How Can I Apply This for My Website?”

A good way to think through your FAQs is to use different frameworks in your thinking. There are a lot of ways to do this, but my favorite is using the stages people go through for the life of your product/service.

This is called the buyer experience cycle. It’s part of the buyer utility map from the Blue Ocean Strategy.

Here’s a quick overview of the different stages in the buyer experience cycle:

1. Purchase
2. Delivery
3. Use
4. Supplements
5. Maintenance
6. Disposal

For our cafe example, we already covered some FAQs around purchase and delivery in the first set of questions—like how much is the delivery or how long to receive the order.

In the second set, it roughly covers the use and supplements stage: how can I use your coffee with this grinder, or what’s the best way to brew your coffee.

Since we’re using this framework, you’ll realize that we are missing some questions and answers around the maintenance and disposal stages.

After some quick brainstorming, here are some questions I came up with:

1. What can I do with the used beans?
2. Can I use them as fertilizer in my garden?
3. How do I clean my ______ grinder?
4. Where can I have my _______ grinder fixed?
5. How do I clean my ________? (insert here the brewing equipment)

I’m sure you can do better at these questions since you know your business better than I do. Think through what your customers might ask at each of those stages and create a blog post about them.

Answering FAQs before customers ask you makes you look proactive and that you care about them. At the same time, this content can help you get additional traffic to your website.

Content Marketing Strategy Tips

Remember earlier I mentioned about the two strategies I recommend doing for FAQs.

1. Create short FAQs to answer specific questions; and,
2. Turn them into a long-form article or post

The reason for this is simple: you want to provide value immediately to the people asking these questions. Then you can link to your longer-form post about the topic.

(Click this sentence below)

[gs_faq id=”1000″]

This strategy helps with content creation. By applying this strategy, you make it appear as if you are creating new pieces of content every time, but in reality, you are simply repurposing your content in various formats.

Your SEO and traffic will also increase because you are covering different topics and keywords in each of these posts.

Another tip where creating short FAQs can be useful is on social media. Again, these are frequently asked questions. So, instead of coming up with a new (and hopefully not different) answers every time you get asked on Twitter or Facebook, you can simply share the short answer which includes a link to the longer answer.

You answered their question directly. You provided value. If they want to learn more, they can visit the link. You gained traffic because of it. And who knows, they might sign up for your product or software because of that.

Additional Resources You Can Use

The buyer experience cycle is only one of the many frameworks you can use to get started with your FAQs and content marketing. There are other models you can use.

The most popular is the buyer’s journey:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision

Another one of my favorites is the 5 stages of awareness:

1. Unaware
2. Problem/pain aware
3. Solution aware
4. Product aware
5. Most aware

Creating content by following these frameworks—to be used in your FAQ Pages or your content marketing in general—will greatly help you drive more traffic to your website. It will help you with other user metrics such as reducing bounce rates, which, eventually will increase your rankings Google.

Once you’re done brainstorming ideas, you can easily create an FAQ page in a matter of minutes. It’s part of my digital marketing tactics series that you can do in under 15 minutes.

Do you use FAQs in your website? How did you get started? Did it help you improve your traffic and other SEO metrics? I’d love to know.