Eugene Lata. How to Scale Your Blog: success story of growth to 200K monthly sessions and $100K annual revenue.
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1. How to Build the Content Factory: nurturing a full-time and remote team of editors and copywriters. 2. Employee Motivation Programs – setting goals for the team. 3. Best types of content that generate traffic and revenue 4. Content seeding: actionable ways to drive more traffic. 5. How to SEO Your Blog: launch of content projects for the growth of organic traffic. 6. Blog Setup Checklist: the first steps when penetrating new market.
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Eugene Lata. How to Scale Your Blog: success story of growth to 200K monthly sessions and $100K annual revenue.
- 1. How to Scale Your Blog: success story of growth to 200K monthly sessions and $100K annual revenue Eugene Lata VP of Marketing
- 2. Relatively cheap Easy to scale Good for SEO Build community Great source of leads Easy way to partner with opinion leaders Educate customers Why do we invest in content marketing?
- 3. In 2019 we invested more than 45,000 usd (incl.salaries) in researching and improving Serpstat content marketing performance.
- 4. These tips are based on experience of all Netpeak Group corporate blogs. Total traffic: 490K visitors / month
- 5. Unique visitors: Data source* January-September, 19 Revenue for period, USD Sales for period Multi-channel attribution 112,000 1,473
- 6. Blog editor career ladder and the team
- 7. 1. New content: what works well
- 8. Ratings: ● help you get in touch easily with opinion leaders. ● generate lots of traffic mainly because organic shares and calls to vote for participants.
- 9. Survey and research: ● help you better understand your customers; ● generate leads; ● build brand authority, because you share unique data; ● this content is easy to share - great way for link building.
- 10. Experts roundups: ● invite more and more experts to contribute to your posts; ● this content is easy to distribute on Quora; ● great for link building: many websites are ready to share valuable data.
- 11. Interview: ● wish to build relationships with specific opinion leader? Ask him for the interview. Run a Twitter chat with him to get more activities from your customers.
- 12. Entertainment: ● people love fun content; ● cheap to distribute on Facebook (paid); ● may become viral; ● rank well in Google Image Search; ● grows brand awareness; ● may be a good fit for remarketing list.
- 13. We collect results for the groups of content
- 14. Other types of a regular content: ● List: list of products / websites/ countries, etc. ● Promo: write about your tools and advantages; ● Tool update: write about news and updates; ● Cases: detailed cases and success stories from customers; ● How-to: content for beginners. Mainly for improving SEO.
- 16. How-to results, organic visitors from How-to content ● 1 Full-time Editor ● 5 Content Writers ● 295 new articles ● 6 months
- 17. 1. Collaborate with services; 2. Involve specialists and opinion leaders in proofreading; 3. Involve freelance specialists in writing; 4. Educate your team. How do writers with low expertise create content?
- 18. We run competitions between content writers. They always see statistics for every piece of content.
- 20. Quick facts and results ● 1 full-time employee; ● 7 months of optimization routine; ● 287 articles re-optimized; ● Organic traffic growth: +232% ● / first 6 months of optimization; ● Keywords: +800%; ● Bounce rate: -21%. Organic QI, 2018 = 9% of total traffic Organic QIII, 2019 = 56% of total traffic
- 21. Old content re-optimization check-list: 1. Export all articles to Google Spreadsheets; 1. Sort them according to organic traffic;
- 22. 3. Collect keywords for which this article ranks on the 11-30 positions in Google
- 23. 4. Collect missing keywords (your competitors have, but you don’t)
- 24. Old content re-optimization check-list: 5. Use collected keywords to optimize meta tags (Title, Description, headings). 6. Optimize pictures; 7. Update article; 8. Run technical audit and fix issues; 9. Set internal linking between similar articles; 10. Set up position tracking to control your performance.
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hello everybody, I hope you hear me well. Please give me a sign if the connection is good. First of all thanks for having me today. Huge honor to talk for Online Advertising and to share my experience. My name is Eugene, I run the marketing department at Serpstat, all in one SEO platform. Those of you who are familiar with Serpstat probably know that we invest a lot of money and effort in content marketing.
- There are many reasons. The most obvious of them you may find on this slide, but the crucial thing is money. To give a better understanding of how we operate, I should say that Serpstat is almost 2M ARR so far with 3,000 clients on board. This means that the tool has quite a low LTV and average check. So, taking into consideration these digits, we found out that this marketing channel is among the most effective and affordable for Serpstat.
- In 2019 we did a lot of changes to our content marketing strategy. We grew up the team and set up a number of experiments to find out how we can scale the blog. Today I am gonna share the processes, the strategies and of course, the results.
- Serpstat is a part of Netpeak Group. The important thing is that these tips are based on the experience of all Netpeak Group blogs with almost half a million unique visitors monthly.
- The next slide shows the summarised key metrics of Serpstat blogs (both English and Russian speaking). IN 2019 we reached 200 thousand visitors per month and 100 thousand dollars in revenue for the previous 9 months. I want to pay your attention that we measure revenue results by OWOX BI multi-channel attribution model, which shows the blog`s revenue share and the real effect of the blog.
- This is the team involved in growing blogs and the career ladder. The minimum required number of editors is 1 per language. And for a very long time we had only one editor who was responsible for everything. From the beginning of 2019, we have 5 full-time editors and roughly 5 to 7 remote writers. To make this more clear I will briefly mention the main responsibilities of these people. The Head is responsible for money, strategy, overall growth, hiring people and planning. Editorial Head is the person who creates new content and distribute the content via newsletters. These two gentlemen called editors are responsible for temporary projects and experiments. One of them manages a team of freelance copywriters. So today's presentation is divided by 2 blocks: new content creation and old content optimization.
- I`m super limited by time and that's why I see no reason to explain to you in detail the processes of content creation. Instead, I am gonna share the best types of content. Please note that some content is created for attracting new customers and revenue while others help us build community. That's why the key metrics for these contents are completely different and you should consider this when you measure the result.
- So the first one and the favorite one is rating. People love ratings, all ratings are ego-baiting. If you allow people to vote for something, like let's say “Best specialist / company / event or whatever relevant to your business be sure you get traffic and social activities from those who are listed. On the other hand, you risk to receive tons of negative from participants who think that your rating is not fair enough. We run ratings 4 times per year and combine 2-3 different rank algorithms to make them more fair and avoid negative. The main problem is that none of these ratings ever gave us even a single large customer, but anyway I start with this content, because ratings give us collaborations with opinion leaders, partners, new blog authors and brand awareness.
- Unlike ratings, this type of content gives us good quality leads and top sales. We run a lot of surveys and analyze the market with our own data. We collect big data, aggregate, visualize and share with the market. Many blogs and business editions love surveys and researches, that is why according to our analytics this is the cheapest content in terms of distributing and link building. The crucial thing is that you get leads and personal data you can use for sales processes.
- If you have ambassadors, loyal customers and opinion leaders that want to contribute to your blog, use them to make your content more trustful. That’s the reason why we love ratings. They allow us to get in touch with experts and then use their names and brands in our content. Content with famous names gets more traffic and obviously a bit more social activities.
- Another option for communicating with experts is a personal interview. It should be someone really well known and from my data this type of content has worse results compared to articles with many experts and brands, but anyway it is steel good. We usually organize these interviews in Twitter chats where community members ask questions that's why we don’t spend much time on preparing them in advance. This is an example of well organized communication of two marketing departments: social media and blogs.
- The last type of content that works well is entertainment. We design and draw stories that may be relevant to our customers. We have noticed that people love funny pictures and these comics are a good addition to your content plan and social media. But pay attention that entertainment content is extremely time and money consuming and hardly gives you good quality leads, but always receives a lot of traffic and sometimes may become viral, which is good for your overall brand awareness.
- Very-very briefly I would like to mention that we measure not only the results for the single page, but also the summarized results for a group of content. This helps our editorial team to plan initial content according to the average data and avoid error caused by abnormal growth of a single article. So we look at the average price per demo or price per lead for a group of articles or for a cohort instead of single article.
- On this slide I have put five more types of regular content. I will not stop by them all, however gonna share my thoughts about the last one on this list called how-to content. If you remember the slide with the team and the career ladder, there was a guy who is responsible for managing remote teams. At the beginning of 2019 he started a project with the main goal to cover all relevant semantics with content.
- Starting this project we expected to grow organic traffic and educate customers, By the way, education is another important role of your blog. Serpstat is a very complex tool. Every 6 months we collect and analyze thousands of negative reviews on Serpstat and competitors. We analyze platforms like G2crowd and Capterra to find out what do customers dislike. And among the top 5 negative reviews we see “Hard Learning”, “Steep Learning Curve and Onboarding to the tool”. That is why we made a decision to write as many educational content as we can.
- Here is the result page. We had 1 full-time editor, roughly five copywriters. After a deep keyword research this team has written and published 295 articles in a 6 months period. We have covered the whole semantics and got 2 results. The first one is on this chart. The constant growth of organic traffic which is stable even after the project is completed. And the second. We have totally fucked up with leads. Our ideal customer is a representative of an SEO agency with high expertise in search marketing. These people understand the value of the product. When you create a How-to content be ready to get leads with low or no expertise at all. As a result of six months run we received a flood of demo requests. But the conversion from demo request to lead qualification has dropped significantly and we have been forced to make changes in qualification processes. Another problem that we have faced is educating and growing expertise of the team. When you need to write so much content in a short time with a team of copywriters who are not specialists, you may face a real challenge.
- This slide includes recommendations on how to reduce costs on content and grow the quality of your content. The first one is super obvious. If you write an article relevant to partner or another not competing tool, ask them to write about this for your blog. In this case you get a free piece of content with high expertise. The second tip requires good communication skills from your editor. The idea is to find specialists and opinion leaders among your community and to arrange them to proofread and approve the content. In every piece of how-to content we add a photo of the specialist with his credits and mention that this check list is approved by this guy. In this case we get an edited by the specialist high quality content. Our proofreader gets a mention, a backlink and even free access to the tool. The third hack is to give the content to specialists rather than copywriters. I mean, if you write about machine learning, go to Freelancehunt and find a freelance programmer who develops machine learning and pay him for writing about programming, but not the programming itself. Believe me, it works well, but you need to edit and rewrite the text and in most cases it costs more. And the fourth is very obvious: educate your team. Before the project we have never worked with remote teams and freelancers that’s why we have faced the problem of managing and educating the remote teams. Serpstat is famous for well organized team structures, automated processes and very clear metrics and KPIs for every single employee.
- So we organized a sort of competition between our freelance copywriters. We share them all the data including traffic, registrations, demo requests from their content. The data has live updates and available for everyone who writes content for us. The idea of this gamification is to involve the copywriter in company’s processes. We all understand that this rating is not fair enough, because copywriter does not have the full impact on the article results, that’ s why this statistics does not affect the final salary of copywriter unlike the editor. But this graph makes the most important thing: recognition. We give different valuable presents, recognize achievements, grow rates according to quarter results. As a result we get motivated part-time employees who are interested in growing and even working full time.
- Another great project that I want to mention is an old content reoptimization. The main idea here is to collect a list of old content, analyze how it performs and update structure, meta tags, screenshots, and internal linking.
- First of all the results. We have spent 7 months on this project. During this period, our editor has re-checked and re-optimized almost 300 articles. As a result it gave us 200% organic traffic growth in a 6 months run and comparing to the IIIQ of 2018 we have raised organic traffic share from 9 to 56% of the total traffic. Here I have prepared a very brief check-list for content optimization.
- The easiest part: collect all your old articles, export them to Google spreadsheets and sort them according to the traffic.
- Then collect all the relevant keywords that rank these articles on the second and third Google webpages. These are positions 11-30. Of course we use Serpstat for getting this treeview report. Optimizing these keywords you'll probably get to the first ten results with the lowest effort, because you are almost there.
- The next thing: we collect the missing keywords at Serpstat. Algorithm analyzes other web pages that are competing for the traffic and collects those keywords that your competitors have in the article’s structure, but you don’t. Some of them may be rubbish so you should check out the list and manually leave only those keywords that are relevant to your article.
- So after these steps you get a list of articles and keyword recommendations. On the next steps you should organically add these keywords into the text structure. Headers, titles, description, alts. Besides playing with keywords, pay attention on updating the content and screenshots and of course I highly advise to run a webpage automatic audit to see if you have any optimization issues that you have to fix up. Find similar to each other articles and put the links between them. It will increase the average time on the site and Google definitely loves it. And of course set up a position tracking to monitor your progress.
- All these steps gave us great results in 2019. As a conclusion, I would say that comparing to the previous year we have raised the blog revenue from 3 to 9 % of total company revenue and that's a great result That`s all for today. I want to wish you and your families good health in this difficult time and I want to wish your business growth.