How Should I Structure Thin Content for Traffic Leaking and Pinterest?

[online_wizz]

At the moment, it looks like Google likes my site. It's filled with How-to's, reviews, and a few long-form list posts targeted for SEO traffic. The thing is, I'd like to make a few posts solely for Pinterest and traffic-leaking, not SEO.

For Pinterest, these posts would likely be list-type, like "10 weird things that xxx people do", "10 tips for xxx" or something similar. I know that they'd perform well on Pinterest, but they definitely wouldn't on Google, because they'd be no more than 1k words long, and not too in-depth.

And for traffic leaking, the posts also wouldn't be too long and solely aimed for Reddit and forums. They wouldn't get any SEO traffic.

What's the best way to structure these posts? I fear that if I post them as usual, I'll get a thin-content penalty from Google. Should I noindex, publish them in a separate category, or publish as usual? How do you approach this on your sites?

EDIT: Here's an example. This post isn't performing well on Google, but it's doing pretty good on Pinterest.
Ordering 10 similar posts to this on iWriter would cost $200. I could quickly touch them up, make a few good quality pins for each article, and make more money from ads, and by tunneling a few people to my affiliate posts (Maybe.) Is it a good idea or should I scrap it?

 

[Ryuzaki]

There's no reason a post like that ketogenic one can't do very well in Google. As a matter of fact, I know someone that does almost exclusively image posts. It might have 200 words of text but 50 pictures. This person is dominating hard:

The problem is they're doing the opposite of what you're thinking about. They could be slamming Pinterest, Facebook ads, Reddit, and everything else, but they're complacent with their bad ass ~$20 CPMs and 3 million views a month from Google.

What I see you gearing up to do is something I did, and I not only regretted it but I later gutted my site of all that trash during a content pruning stage. Here's the thing:

Every post you make should be on-page optimized for a keyword, no matter the purpose of the post.​

Guess what happens when a post for Reddit gets 1000+ upvotes, 250,000 visitors, and is optimized for a term? You end up getting tons of links and ranking top 3 for the term you chose. My best performing Reddit posts are long-form anyways.

Same with Pinterest. There's zero reason a post can't have 500-1000 words of content alongside the 25 images you slap in there. It can rank, as shown by the traffic graph above.

The main thing is not to compromise on your vision (by posting thin-content). If you're posting something that you're not proud of to the point where you have to noindex it, then it should never be published. You can absolutely target these different demographics while still meeting your own expectations and those of Google. And each can continue to bring residual traffic once they receive that marketing push.

 

[CCarter]

Wait - 1,000 words is considered thin content? I've seen google's results, we aren't getting back essays.

Take look at the 220+ advertising units/requests on the page, that's probably got more to do with why it's not performing well.

 

[Ryuzaki]

They could probably do the bare minimum like get a logo too.

 

[online_wizz]

There's no reason a post like that ketogenic one can't do very well in Google. As a matter of fact, I know someone that does almost exclusively image posts. It might have 200 words of text but 50 pictures. This person is dominating hard:

The problem is they're doing the opposite of what you're thinking about. They could be slamming Pinterest, Facebook ads, Reddit, and everything else, but they're complacent with their bad ass ~$20 CPMs and 3 million views a month from Google.

What I see you gearing up to do is something I did, and I not only regretted it but I later gutted my site of all that trash during a content pruning stage. Here's the thing:

Every post you make should be on-page optimized for a keyword, no matter the purpose of the post.​

Guess what happens when a post for Reddit gets 1000+ upvotes, 250,000 visitors, and is optimized for a term? You end up getting tons of links and ranking top 3 for the term you chose. My best performing Reddit posts are long-form anyways.

Same with Pinterest. There's zero reason a post can't have 500-1000 words of content alongside the 25 images you slap in there. It can rank, as shown by the traffic graph above.

The main thing is not to compromise on your vision (by posting thin-content). If you're posting something that you're not proud of to the point where you have to noindex it, then it should never be published. You can absolutely target these different demographics while still meeting your own expectations and those of Google. And each can continue to bring residual traffic once they receive that marketing push.

Thanks for the advice, Ryuzaki.

What if the main keyword has no SEO search volume? I want to make a few posts targeted for specific subreddits. For instance, if my niche would be motorbiking, I'd write a post "10 Reasons Why Most People Think Motorbikers Are Brain-Dead" and share to /r/motorcycles/. Yeah, I could optimize that for really specific long-tails, like "why are bikers douchebags," or "why are motorcyclists so annoying" but it wouldn't bring any traffic anyway.

The goal of a post like this would be to gain some backlinks, some revenue from ads, and collect emails. Would you avoid writing a post like this because it wouldn't bring any search traffic, or optimize for specific long-tails and post as usual?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@online_wizz, I think you can write that exact post in a way that Google finds to be valuable as do the readers, while still finding a way to optimize around some kind of long-tail. This is a cool tool that could help you find some kind of phrase to work into headers, perhaps even the title tag: https://answerthepublic.com

I'd just be wary of trying to go full clickbait. The value in clickbait for the readers is the title tag and that's generally it. Reddit users are savvy too and will reject it. That's really not even the stuff that performs well for Reddit. That might work on Facebook though. At the same time you'll get a ton of worthless views (unless you're really set up for CPM ads).

You'd do far better on Reddit with linkbait, and if you knock it out the park it'll spread to Facebook and Twitter. You could create some kind of interactive post with charts and graphs that list the number of motorcycle accidents that happen with and without helmets, and the outcome of both scenarios. Then you could get into some polarization and speculate about why it is people would ride without helmets (or leather gear, etc).

There's a ton of angles where, instead of shitting out a 500 word clickbait polarization piece in 15 minutes that won't get you the links you want (like Buzzfeed and Viralnova), you can take a day or more to create an actual asset that can be optimized and attract links and then passive, perpetual organic traffic.

If you want links, think about what journalists and bloggers want to link out to and do their job for them. If you want to see big numbers of worthless traffic, you need to be set up with CPM ads and in-image ads and all that crap where you get paid by the page load, because the traffic is definitely worthless with clickbait, and they aren't going to generate you any good links. Maybe some nofollow forum links.

Edit: you could ask the moderators of the sub-reddit if you can sticky or at least just post a a survey to the users, and then come back with a very fancy post laying out the results, as described above. The flashier the better, the more interactive (hovering graphs and pie charts) the better. Interpret the results, etc. This would be a nice branding campaign too. You could easily use the upvotes as validation and do outreach to journalists who write about the same topic, etc.

 

[online_wizz]

Answers like this remind me why it's so valuable to participate in this forum. It's because of people like you, who take their time to teach something valuable to all the newcomers. Thanks.

I'm still fairly new to Internet Marketing, and I think that I got the wrong impression of what traffic leaking really is. In R. Holidays Trust Me, I'm Lying, he talked about polarizing content in a much more clickbaity form, which is where I took a lot of inspiration from.

I had already written down around 20 ideas for clickbaity posts that (I thought) would perform well on Reddit. With your example, I can see how a post with interesting, unique data would perform much better. Instead of feeling 'scammed,' my readers would be interested in not only reading the full post but also sharing it on other platforms.

Although I still think that there is some earning potential for 500-1000-word shitty pieces of polarizing content, I won't be doing it on this domain, which is aimed for search traffic. I might create a new domain in the future, where I experiment with low-effort clickbaity posts for Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit that are monetized with ads and affiliate links. But I'm not too sure of how worthwhile this is, so I'll keep it only as an idea for now.

This is a cool tool that could help you find some kind of phrase to work into headers, perhaps even the title tag: https://answerthepublic.com

I use answerthepublic almost for every post that I write. I'll usually use it over any other keyword tool, for finding relevant questions that could be answered in my post. For instance, if I were to write a post about motorbiking helmets, I'd look at all the questions about motorbiking helmets through answerthepublic and try to answer some of them in 100-300 word sections.

This strategy has been really successful for ranking 1-3 on A LOT of longtails. For example, a post which targeted a keyword with an Ahrefs volume of 70, ended up getting me 2300 monthly views. And one that had and Ahrefs volume of 10, gets 1000 monthly views.