Here's What Happened When We Wrote 6 Blogs a Month for 6 Months
In late 2017 when we were strategizing on how to best market TIV Branding, Eric, our Digital Director, suggested the idea of writing six blogs a month. And for some reason, everyone was on board with the idea…That night I went home and cried. I thought there was absolutely no way we could sustain that amount of writing on top of everything else were planning to do. It turns out I cried tears of ignorance because as of right now, we have written six blogs a month for the last six months. And here is what has happened to our web traffic and what we’ve learned from developing that much content.
Increase in web traffic (duh)
Blogging has most definitely helped our web traffic quite a bit because 20% of our overall traffic has come from our blogging. What’s interesting is that in the last three months our traffic is way up compared to the first three months of the year. Part of this could be due to seasonality, but another explanation is that Google and web users have rewarded us for writing relevant, engaging content. Our overall traffic quarter over quarter is up a solid 40%. People are starting to look for our content each week. The key takeaway from this is that we need to make sure clients that hire us to take a similar approach for their marketing need to understand that this is a slow build and give it time to succeed as a strategy.
We’ve hit our stride
One of the more exciting things about the amount of content we’ve written from April through June is our traffic is up 40%, but the paid marketing we’ve allocated to promote our content has gone down 17%. Simply put, while we were getting our content strategy off the ground we were using paid marketing as a way to jump-start our content strategy. Now that our content has hit its stride we no longer need to allocate as much budget to our content strategy. This allows us to allocate budget to other channels and experiment with new campaigns without inflating our marketing budget. Additionally, the blogs we’ve written this quarter have brought in a lot more traffic than the blogs from last quarter. Which means we’ve gotten a lot better at structuring our content for SEO friendliness along with a good user experience.
It isn’t nearly as hard as I thought
One of my biggest surprises is we haven’t run out of things to write about. We can partially thank all the Google and Facebook updates that have happened in the last six months because we’ve written a number of blogs to explain the way we’ve shifted strategies accordingly, but we live and work in an industry where change is constant. We research changes and more importantly our clients want to know what these changes are and how these changes impact their business. It also helps that Brandt and Eric have a combined 40 years of knowledge around digital and branding between the two of them. That’s a lot of content.Above all, it's important to realize that content marketing is a long-term strategy. You have to give it time to work. But if you are disciplined and write on a consistent basis, you will see results as long as it is relevant, interesting content to your consumers. In six months your writing will come a long way, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t work rather quickly, and you can become a thought leader in your industry. You just have to stick with.