Flipboard is a well-kept secret for launching a blog. While traditional SEO techniques might take months to realize value from boosted SERP rankings, Flipboard is a great way to kickstart your digital marketing strategy and start building legitimate backlinks to your site that Google recognizes. Not only that, but that person sitting on the bus might just read the articles you’ve shared on your Flipboard and start following your blog!
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What is Flipboard?
Flipboard is a free magazine app that aggregates news and articles from around the internet. It boasts 145 million monthly users as of October 2018 and 500 million downloads. Following the shut down of Google Reader in 2013, apps like Flipboard and Feedly gained popularity.
Flipboard’s unique value is that it uses machine learning to curate content based on what you’ve “liked” on the platform and what you’ve read. Therefore, you’ll be shown content that you are likely to read which makes it a great marketing platform since the curation is automatic.
Flipboard gets its content from publishers all over the internet. It used to only accept top publishers like newspapers, but now almost anyone can join its Publishers Program.
They describe their users as “approximately one-third Millennial, one-third Gen-X, and one-third Boomer, and is split pretty evenly between Male and Female. Our users are influential, curious, and affluent readers who invest in themselves by learning more about what they love.”
How can you use Flipboard to boost your marketing strategy?
Now that you know what Flipboard is, how can you use it to boost your marketing strategy? There are a few ways.
Add Your Own Content to Flipboard
One of the easiest ways to start boosting your blog or website is to publish your content to Flipboard. You can do this one of two ways: by either creating custom magazines or joining the Publishers Program.
Create a Magazine
To create a custom magazine, simply open the app or website and go to your profile. Here you’ll see an option to “Create Magazine.” Click on that, then add a Title, Description, and Tags. Another option you have here is to make the magazine “Public.” If you want to use Flipboard to boost your SEO strategy, then making the magazine public is very important.
Now you’ll be able to add articles to your magazines from across the internet. On your phone, you can click the share button on your browser on any website and see the article. On your desktop, you can install the Flipboard Chrome extension or use the bookmarklet to quickly add articles to your magazines.
Become a Flipboard Publisher
Now that Flipboard has opened its publishing platform to the masses, anyone can create magazines which import content from RSS feeds. Just create a Flipboard Publishers account here and they’ll guide you through the process of how you add RSS feeds from your blog to your magazine. Everytime you publish an article, it will automatically be ingested into Flipboard’s content pool so that it might show up in others’ feeds.
Share Others’ Content to Flipboard
Flipboard is a community of publishers and readers, so you shouldn’t just be trying to push your own content on other people. You should also be reading and sharing their content.
A great way to do this is to create magazines that are broad enough in topic that you can “Flip” other people’s articles into your magazine.
This way people who organically find your magazine and start flipping through it will find a wide variety of articles from authors other than yourself. This will make it more likely that they’ll follow your magazine and keep coming back.
How does Flipboard help with SEO?
The best part about using Flipboard is it’s a great way to kickstart your SEO strategy. If you only have a few articles and your blog is still fairly young, you can create magazines in Flipboard to get backlinks quickly. Every magazine and article in Flipboard has a unique URL that is indexable by Google so as soon as you start adding articles, Google will start seeing them. AND Flipboard isn’t a blackhat backlinking website since they don’t sell links, they just aggregate them so you don’t have to worry that Google will de-rank you for having bad links!
So what are you waiting for? Create a Flipboard magazine now!
