You’re writing, publishing, promoting and optimizing. You’re marketing content non-stop, but nothing seems to move the needle. Even when you have a big idea, it doesn’t work quite as you planned.

For a while, we had this problem at Process Street. We followed the best practices from the pros, like Neil Patel and Brian Dean, hoping but a big breakthrough. Looking back over the past year, there’s been a steady uptick thanks to 4 strategies we’ve been pushing hard.

I just checked our analytics, and traffic has increased almost 5x (474%) over the last 12 months. In this post, I want to unpack these 4 strategies we used to do it.

Content upgrades: turning organic search traffic into email subscribers

For better or for worse, we’ve all used and been on the receiving end of pop-ups. They interrupt our reading experience and usually get X’d as soon as they appear. In fact, the only convert at a rate of around 1%. Nonetheless we haven’t stopped using regular pop-ups (after all, they do ten times better than static boxes).

So, onto content upgrades.

If you’ve ever seen bonus content offered in exchange for an email address, you’ve seen a content upgrade in its natural environment. The reason they work so well is that the user asks for something extra — they don’t get it shoved in their face.