How to Accelerate the Growth of Your B2B Blog

HOW TO ACCELERATE THE GROWTH
OF YOUR B2B BLOG
Anum Hussain
Growth Marketer, Content, Hubspot
@anum
Hana Abaza
VP Marketing, Uberflip
@hanaabaza

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HOW TO
LAUNCH & GROW
A BUSINESS BLOG

@ANUM | ANUMHUSSAIN.COM
Anum
Hussain
Growth marketer, @sidekick
Co-author, Twitter for @dummies
#cookiecakelover

Once upon a time,
content took the throne
as king of marketing.

And as his highness grew
in power,

And as his highness grew
in power, a playbook for
success was dictated.

PUBLISH.

PUBLISH.
ALL THE TIME.

BUT NOW THERE ARE
OVER 152 MILLION
BLOGS ON THE
INTERNET.
Source: WPVirtuoso

Which means it’s time to
handle things a bit more
ﬆrategically.

1. Deeply understand your target audience.
2. Produce posts that attract & scale traffic.
3. Fuel growth of blog subscribers.
HERE’S HOW:

2. Produce posts that attract & scale traffic.

Before starting a blog, research your
target persona.

target persona.
Contact at least 10 people in your target audience.

target persona.
Contact at least 10 people in your target audience.
Schedule 1-hour interviews in exchange for free
coffee or lunch. If virtual interviews, send a gift card.

1.  Find out who they are.
2.  Find out what they do.
3.  Find out what they want.
4.  Find out how they see
themselves.
5.  Find out how they spend
their day-to-day.
Ask them ﬁve sets
of questions:

1. Find out who they are.
themselves.
their day-to-day.
Ask them ﬁve sets
of questions:
Company name? Age?

How long have they been in their
current role?

How large is their team?

Why do they do what they do?

2. Find out what they do.
themselves.
their day-to-day.
Ask them ﬁve sets
of questions:
What motivates them?

What is the end game for them?

What are their aspirations?

Why did they change from company A
to company B?

3. Find out what they want.
themselves.
their day-to-day.
Ask them ﬁve sets
of questions:
What are their hopes and
dreams?

What content are they attracted to or
read now?

What do they think about all day
long?

4. Find out how they see
themselves.
their day-to-day.
Ask them ﬁve sets
of questions:
How do they compare themselves to
co-workers?

Do they think there’s more to learn
about their profession?

Do they hangout with their co-
workers outside of work?

themselves.
5. Find out how they spend
their day-to-day.
Ask them ﬁve sets
of questions:
What do they read? What
do they share?

How do they learn about new stuff?
New tools? New articles?

What do they hate about their day?
What do they love?

During the interview, look for ...

Vocabulary, puns, references, tone, gestures, etc.

What makes them light up, what they hate discussing.

What makes them light up, what they hate discussing.
Their outfits, style, accessories, personality.

Aggregate your results
to build an initial
illustration of your
target blog audience.

We interviewed almost 100 people in
different industries and roles – each a
member of the audience we were trying
to reach. We learned that:
x  Their days are too packed to focus attention on
reading a lengthy article.
x  They want to see more content discussing ideas
they can take immediate action on.
x  They just want to own at their job – many had a
strong desire to control their own destiny.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY

So we took that qualitative insight and
launched a blog with three key focuses:
ü  Publish concise content that puts high emphasis
on direct tactics over fluffy explanations.
ü  Publish content from individual contributors,
not managers.
ü  Publish the secrets to success from top
performers.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY

Use these persona
ﬁndings when
planning your content
strategy and structure.

Content takes time.
Dedicate at least one
full-time employee to
tackle it.

13X
Marketers who have prioritized
blogging are 13x more likely to
enjoy positive ROI.
Source: State of Inbound

We now have a strategy.

We now have a strategy.
But what are our target readers ...
reading?

2. Produce posts that attract & scale trafﬁc.

Attract & scale trafﬁc
to content with these
20 optimization tips.

Optimize the URL to speak with search engines.
Be sure to separate your target
keywords with a dash (-) so
search engines can read them.

But don’t make it so long
that it seems keyword-
stuffed. Google’s algorithm
is smarter than that.

Start with a clear, catchy headline.

But don’t write a catchy
title if it doesn’t accurately
represent the content
within the post.

Captivate with your ﬁrst sentence / meta text.

But don’t make your meta
description too long.
Google only displaces 150
characters on SERPs.

Let readers scan content with section headers.
Header
Header

But avoid keyword-stufﬁng
headers – Google’s algorithm
penalizes “repeating the
same words or phrases so
often it sounds unnatural.”

Use easy-to-read visuals to enhance experience.
This is simply email
copy in a compose
window to help
visually enhance
reading experience.

But don’t forget to include
keywords in the image
alt-text. Search engines
read them to better identify
what the post is about.

Integrate internal links where relevant.
Internal link to an
earlier blog post on
same subject.

But make the ﬁrst internal
link in the post the most
important – that’s what
search engines rely on most.

Generate click-to-tweet links for easy sharing.
Clicking this auto-generates
a tweet readers can publish
right away.

But don’t forget to include
a link back to your post in
the tweet copy. You want to
beneﬁt from the sharing.

20%
of all SlideShare views come
from Google.
Source: Alexa

This Google juice helps drive trafﬁc
from SERPs.
Link to blog post with
SlideShare embedded.
Link to presentation
on SlideShare’s site.

SLIDESHARE IS THE
HIGHEST CONVERTING
SOCIAL CHANNEL FOR
HUBSPOT & SIDEKICK.

The following
optimization tips
hone in on SlideShare
speciﬁcally.

Let the title show the post contains a SlideShare.

Embed the SlideShare into the post.

Keep visitors on your blog, not on SlideShare.
Remove these links to the
original SlideShare upload
when embedding to keep
traffic on your blog site.

97%
more leads are generated for
companies with an active blog.
Source: ContentPlus

TO GENERATE LEADS
FROM YOUR BLOG,
YOU NEED OFFERS TO
COLLECT THEM.

These final
optimization tips
focus on offers
specifically.

Include a text-CTA towards the top of the post.
The first URL
hyperlinked in the
post gets the most
weight from Google.

Build a form right into the ending CTA.
I love this.

There’s no need to drive
the reader to a landing
page when this article and
the value proposition of the
CTA clearly explains the
value of the offer. So
simple, yet so brilliant.”
@BobRuffolo

Or test smart CTAs to show relevant-offers.
CTA for general blog
visitors to offer.
CTA for leads to move
further down funnel.

THE ONLY WAY TO
KNOW WHAT WILL
WORK BEST IS TO
TEST IT.

Some web forms
require more ﬁelds.

We found that longer lead
generation forms generated
roughly 16% fewer leads than
simply using a CTA image
that navigates readers to a
landing page.
Case Study:
HUBSPOT BLOG
STRATEGY

But that wasn’t the case for our shorter
blog subscription forms.

These one-field forms converted 4X more
subscribers than the CTA image linked to a
separate landing page.
Case Study:
HUBSPOT BLOG
STRATEGY

But now we wonder:

But now we wonder:
Do we focus on optimizing for
leads or subscribers?

THE GOAL OF A NEW
BLOG IS GROWING
SUBSCRIBERS FIRST,
NOT LEADS.

76.9% OF VIEWS ON
SIDEKICK BLOG
POSTS COME FROM
EMAIL.
Source: Sidekick by HubSpot

A typical new post on the HubSpot
Marketing Blog generates ~70% of its
initial trafﬁc from email subscribers.
Traffic from
email.
Case Study:
HUBSPOT BLOG
STRATEGY

But over time, that initial trafﬁc leads to
views / social sharing that translates into
long-term organic search trafﬁc growth.
Traffic from organic search.
Case Study:
HUBSPOT BLOG
STRATEGY

THAT MEANS YOUR
SUBSCRIBERS ARE
CRITICAL FOR INITIAL
TRAFFIC GROWTH.

WITHOUT THEM,
YOUR ORGANIC
GROWTH WILL
PROVE DIFFICULT.

When ﬁrst launching (or re-launching) a
blog, invite people to read it.

Before sending out email invitations, ensure you have a
crisp message for why your blog is different than others.

ü  Can you describe your blog in one sentence?

ü  Can you describe your blog in one sentence?
ü  Would your researched persona read it?

We sent email invitations to three
cohorts of people:
1.  Content Contacts: Anyone who discovered our
other content through forms on landing pages.
2.  Churned Users: People who may no longer
care about our product but may still care about
our industry / best practices.
3.  Email to Non-Users: Leads who may one day
use our product, but haven’t yet.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY

We sent invitations to our current database.
The copy reflected a well-thought out message that
our audience research indicated would resonate
with who we ultimately want reading our blog.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY
We shared titles of the
types of blog posts they’d
find on our blog.

And we didn’t send them to a different
page or form to subscribe – we already
have their email, why ask for it again?
Instead, we tracked who clicked on the CTA to
subscribe and automatically added them to our
subscriber list.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY
We automatically
collected any email that
clicked on the CTA.

OUR READERS
SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO
ANY EXTRA WORK TO
DISCOVER OUR CONTENT.
WE SHOULD.

Keep growing your subscriber base
with two core methods.

Calls-to-action on the blog’s native real estate.

Calls-to-action on the blog’s native real estate.
Calls-to-action on your other content assets.

Experiment with
a prominent CTA
at the top of your
blog homepage.
OKDork’s above-the-fold homepage CTA
converts at 8%.

Test a CTA to
subscribe at the
end or side of
each post.
DIYTheme’s subscriber opt-in converts
at an impressive 2%.

Try a slide-in
CTA appearing
as readers scroll
down a post.
HubSpot’s slide-in CTAs generate 27% moresubmissions than end-of-the-post CTAs.

Popups on Dan Zarrella’s blog didn’t reducebounce rates and increased conversion by
more than 100%.
Try pop-up CTA
that hovers over
the blog post.

This sweeps in free subscribers from peoplealready interested enough to share a comment.
Provide an option
to subscribe
when readers
leave comments.

HubSpot’s landing page forms increased blogsubscribers by 128%.
Allow visitors who
shower interest
elsewhere on your
site to subscribe.

Surfacing the blog to every new user helped theSidekick blog increase subscribers above
50% M/M.
Try sending
invitations with
your best posts
during customer
onboarding.

Sidekick achieved an average 4% CTR onemail invites from people who previously stopped
showing interest.
Or test a one-time
send to re-engage
churned users
with content, not
product.

We tested each CTA type and quickly
generated nearly 10K blog subscribers
within six weeks.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY

WARNING:
Watch your engagement
rates. You don’t want to
send content to people
who don’t want it.

Eventually we reached 60K subscribers.

But only 22K of them were actively reading our
content. So we removed the others from our
subscriber list.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY

We sacriﬁced subscribers for success.

We believe having a healthy list of engaged readers
is far more important than having a large list of
inactive readers. This also ensures our strategy is
directed by those who care about us most.
Case Study:
SIDEKICK BLOG
STRATEGY

REMEMBER:
Our goal isn’t to shove
content into inboxes, it’s
to provide something
worth reading.

THE PEOPLE WHO
CARE ABOUT YOUR
CONTENT CONVERT.
FOCUS ON MARKETING
TO THEM.

That’s our playbook
for growing the
Sidekick Blog.

Don’t just start writing.

Don’t just start writing.
Start thinking critically about your
actual blog ﬆrategy.

Queﬆions?
(After this event, feel free to ask more at
anumhussain.com/presentations/how-to-
launch-blog.)

FindouthowBookerdecreasedtheir
costperleadby71% withcontent.
READCASESTUDY

How to Accelerate the Growth of Your B2B Blog

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