2 Steps to Gain 32,000 Visitors in, Yes, 1 Day

I specialize in getting people to click on content. Whether that content is a blog post, an interactive resource or even an infographic, my aim is to get as many people as possible to click on the content, engage with it and share it.

Related: How to Create Compelling Online Content That Gets Traffic

My main message here is that, generally, when you place a piece of content in strategic places online (forums/communities/social media), you increase the chance that it will be picked up by other websites. And, therefore, you increase the number of people clicking on it.

In this context, I'm going to share how I gained 32,000 visitors to a website in one day using two very simple steps.

Certainly, awesome infographics can get massive exposure for your website and lots of strong links for SEO purpose. But, first, let's talk about how to strategically post your content to guarantee you the huge level of exposure I'm talking about.

The content. For a client in the supplement industry, I recently created an infographic which, using a minimalist style, digs into the world's most popular diets. Here's a snippet:

Click to Enlarge+

Related: More Online Publishers Ought to Try A/B Testing

I wanted to demonstrate the hard facts about content promotion, and prove the process, so I placed the infographic on a seeder site to which I could gain easy analytics access. I say "easy" because I own the site, Mr-Tea.co.uk.

Pro Tip: When promoting content with the intention of making it "viral," avoid making it looking too promotional. That's why I avoided promoting this content directly on the client's site. Instead, I used Mr-Tea.co.uk. You can view the full post here.

The two-step process

Step 1: The first stage of any content promotion process should include identifying a reasonably large online community likely to be interested in the piece. Reddit is an awesome place to start. If you're unfamiliar with Reddit, it's a free-to-use link-sharing platform built on thousands of smaller "Subreddits" dedicated to niche interests.

There's a Subreddit for everything from cycling to Game of Thrones. On the occasion I'm referencing, I posted to /r/food, as it had the highest number of active subscribers in a relevant Subreddit.

Step 2: The next consideration was how to drive the right traffic to the page directly.

One of the best tools for this is StumbleUpon's Paid Discovery platform, which allows you to essentially buy relevant traffic by the thousands -- and very inexpensively.

The upshot

I already knew the content was strong, and relevant to the community, so it was no surprise when it began gaining traction almost immediately. In fact, within a few hours, with the two steps outlined above as a starting point, I watched the post become top of the /r/food subreddit and pull in large numbers of interested people from other channels.

With correct email-subscription tools and sharing tools, I was able to make the most of this content and make the most of the increase in traffic.

As I emphasized above, the post on Mr-Tea.co.uk was merely a test to demonstrate the power of seeding content in the right places. One instance of heavy traffic won't rank you No. 1 in Google, or get you millions in investment. There needs to be a sustained focus on SEO and content marketing both on your site, and off it.

Also, be wary of posting self-promotional things to Reddit too often. Reddit is an organic community, and if the users and moderators think they're being marketed to, they will ban you.

But in my case, the strategy worked. And, as a bonus, the infographic was also picked up by British newspaper the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail is the most visited news website in the world, so I'd call that a decent result for a few hours of strategic content promotion, right?

Related: 4 Easy-to-Use Tips to Get People to Click on Your Headlines

Do you have any content you could try this with?