“I’m ‘doing’ content, but it’s just not bringing me clients.”
“I’m posting and creating regularly – in fact, consistency is my middle name – but I’m still a one-person show with little funding to achieve my next level.”
Lately, I’ve heard this ALL too often – but the reality is, if you develop content strategically, you CAN achieve six-figure income months in your business.
Since it’s been almost two years since I created a case study on my brand (specifically, how we are our own content guinea pig: we’re able to make monthly six-figure sales happen from clients that found our content online), I decided it was time for a new one.
I started the research for this in February, and today – five months later! – the case study is all done and live, as of today.
Today’s case study focuses on how we actually earn real income (to the tune of six-figures per month) from the content and rankings we’ve achieved.
99.9% of our leads and business revenue comes through the content we produce. And the majority of that content? Well, it’s published on our blog.
Next, we interviewed a client we work with from time to time: Magnificent Marketing, a full-service marketing agency. We’ll share how they’ve boosted their client traffic numbers and rankings with great content.
If you read one blog of mine this quarter, read this one. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, and dig in!
[bctt tweet=”99.9% of our leads and revenue comes through the content we produce. And the majority of that content? Well, it’s published on our blog. Learn how we do it in our case study on #blogging #SEO success ” username=”ExpWriters”]
Why & How SEO Blogging Equals ROI for Any Brand
Blogging (a form of great content marketing) equals ROI, for any brand.
In itself, blogging is a key online content format capable of building a brand, attracting your ideal clients to your website, and growing your entire business. Especially blogging written around viable SEO keywords you want to rank for.
But here’s the caveat to that.
That statement is only true if your blogging strategy includes consistency, relevancy and quality.
[bctt tweet=”‘Blogging is a key online content format capable of building a brand… BUT… that statement is only true if your blogging strategy includes consistency, relevancy and quality.’ – @JuliaEMcCoy” on #bloggingROI username=”ExpWriters”]
Businesses who create content strategically achieve ROI in the form of:
Better, more qualified leads that convert at a higher rate than traffic from paid ads or paid search
How many leads? Our content marketing ROI formula can help you estimate your average monthly leads/sales from content marketing
Here’s the formula: Monthly Visitors x 16% Organic Traffic to Lead Conversion Rate = X Leads/Month)
According to that formula, an average of 1,000 visitors/month can get you at least 160 high-quality leads/month from strategic blogging
That’s not all, though.
Blogging also brings in:
Year-over-year site traffic growth that’s 8x higher than those at the back of the pack
6x the conversions of those who don’t publish content, according to a well-known study from Aberdeen and Kapost
Incredibly convincing numbers, right?
But, even better than stats, we have a prime, real-life example of what blogging ROI looks like.
Ready? Let’s dig in and see exactly what the power of blogging–and great content–can do for a business.
Express Writers’ Blogging ROI: $1,600 in Content = $66,700 Worth of Traffic & Organic Google Positions
Here’s a real-life, extreme example of how great, consistent content creation can work incredibly well.
Take a look at the current traction below for Express Writers. This is after six years of consistent content, with over 1,000 blogs published to-date on our site across those six consistent years.
(Remember, steady content creation has a dominoes effect: It does better over time.)
According to our data on SEMrush (pulled June 1, 2018), current paid search efforts to achieve our current month’s site traffic — 22,800 visitors — would cost $66,700. (This amount increases on a monthly basis for us. Lately, every month it’s been a 1-2k increase in traffic, with a fluctuating increase in rankings as well.)
If we were to buy this much traffic through Google Adsense, that would be an average paid search cost of $2.92 per visitor.
And, we haven’t even figured out how many of those are leads (buyers) yet. Expensive! $$$
How Much Content Do We Produce to Achieve Blogging ROI? + the Costs
We publish, on average, one long-form, comprehensive piece of content weekly, and we update content on a monthly basis, too. Besides that, we publish monthly podcasts with show notes, and monthly #ContentWritingChat recaps.
And here’s an example of a #ContentWritingChat recap post:
What does it cost to create this type of content regularly?
Our costs run:
Money: $400/month (this used to be $750, but we shaved off $300+ in costs by switching our Twitter chat to once/month instead of weekly)
Time: 4-5 hours of my time/month in blogging prep, publishing, writing, outlining, optimizing, & 3-4 hours/month in email marketing
If you qualify the hours I personally spend on our content into a “staff cost,” that alone could run $1,600+ per month.
How Do the Costs Compare to Paid Methods?
If paid search would cost $66,700 to achieve our current traffic in a month (22,800 visitors), and my cost of content marketing to achieve that traffic is $1,625, then paid search would be (at a minimum) 40x more expensive than my organic content marketing efforts.
Or, put it another way – a solid, consistent content marketing strategy over time could be 40 times cheaper than a paid marketing strategy. For business owners and higher-ups who think exclusively in dollar signs, that’s convincing.
What’s the Estimated ROI from Blogging at Express Writers?
Now, let’s put those numbers into the ROI formula (using my base visitor amount, to stay conservative — my site traffic is an extreme example after consistent years of targeted content):
And the majority of those visitors came in through search rankings:
Let’s estimate the leads and sales from that traffic once again using the content marketing ROI formula. Then we’ll compare the results to our recorded data for May 2018.
Infographic: Using the Content Marketing ROI Formula, Here’s our Real ROI Numbers for Blogging Results
Our Estimated Blogging ROI Using the Content Marketing ROI Formula
Our formula is grounded in two vital stats:
The average conversion rate for traffic to leads: 16% (Marketing Sherpa)
The average conversion rate for leads turning into sales: 14% (Business2Community)
Plugging those stats plus our traffic volume into a simple equation helps us estimate two huge content marketing ROI benchmarks: leads and sales.
First, we’ll estimate the leads we could see stemming from the month’s total traffic (93,000):
93,000 Monthly Visitors x 16% = 14,880Leads
Next, we can estimate how many of those leads will turn into sales:
14,880 Leads x 14% = 2,083Sales
Based on our traffic numbers for May, we could expect to see 14,880 leads and 2,083 sales resulting from our blogging and content marketing efforts.
[bctt tweet=”How much ROI does our business blog bring in? @JuliaEMcCoy shares how to use the Content Marketing ROI Formula in finding actual #bloggingROI” username=”ExpWriters”]
The Actual Blogging ROI
Here are our sales numbers for May 2018:
235 orders placed
2,140 “items” (content services) ordered
$186,128.50 in gross sales
Keep in mind: Many of these orders were from return and repeat clients, although many of them were new clients, too. Our average client retention rate is increasing, as well. Several of our recurring clients have stayed with us for 3-4 years now.
But, it’s 100% accurate to say that across all of our clients and lead generation methods, 99% of every client we’ve worked with to date has found us through our search rankings.
[bctt tweet=”‘99% of every client we’ve worked with to date has found us through our search rankings.’ – @JuliaEMcCoy on Express Writer’s successful #bloggingROI” username=”ExpWriters”]
Our ROI from Blogging Is on Fire
The 2,140 individual content services ordered matches up very well with our predicted ROI from traffic we earned through consistent blogging (2,083 sales from 14,880 leads).
The real kicker, however, is apparent in our gross sales number.
If $1,600 in content costs per month can generate $186,128.50 in gross sales, I’d say content marketing is a safe investment to beton if you’re considering every marketing avenue (keeping in mind these are gross numbers before we pay our team of 70+ people, and cover other business costs & taxes).
Even more importantly:
If we had to pay $66k in PPC ads to achieve our gross sales numbers, we’d be broke (there’s no way we’d make a profit after that high PPC cost and then the cost of delivering content services).
It’s safe to say that content marketing, mainly in the form of blogging, is the lynchpin for us in terms of drawing customers to our business.
Magnificent Marketing Case Study: Blogging = Steady Monthly Traffic Growth
I recently sat down with David Reimherr, founder of Magnificent Marketing, and their firm’s content marketing manager, Bre South.
Here’s what they had to say about how content marketing and blogging contributes to their client’s success.
“Our content strategy success begins with a deep dive onboard with our client to walk through targeted audience demographics, content mission statement, and their content tilt. In discussing the core messaging of the client’s product; we dig into the core of a client’s product and why it would resonate with its audience. We find which content angles will serve their audience, and how to reach their audience appropriately.
We help them figure out how to talk the talk their audience wants to hear.
All content efforts are driven by the content mission statement in addition to what our client already knows about their audience and experience. This gives way to the creation of determining main pillar topics and sub-topics the client commits to producing content for.
We help them create this mission statement for which all efforts will follow.
The main pillar topics are determined based on what a persona would actively be searching for as a problem they are looking for help to solve.
What topics will the audience care to read, interact and engage with?
All pillar topics funnel up to the brand’s content mission strategy and position the client as a thought leader in their specific industry. From here we are able to segment awareness, consideration and purchase pieces specifically and begin the roadmap of content construction and execution.
Blog writing is SEO focused which stems from a detailed keyword discovery and current ranking report to highlight the keywords to target for from their pillars.
We outline their content writing strategy by creating suggested headline topics built from our keyword report.
ROI & Success in Content Marketing
We’ve seen tremendous success, specifically in Emancipet, a national nonprofit veterinary service providing low-cost but high-quality care since 1999, through identifying keyword opportunities and crafting content around the terms to target.
We took over the account in January 2018 and through a strategic SEO focus around blog posts, consistent social media scheduling, and additional content creation we’ve seen a 16% increase in organic search. From that increase, 15% have been new users.
In addition, Emancipet nationally ranks in the top spot (#1) organically for the following keywords:
affordable heartworm treatment
Austin low cost vet
low cost heartworm treatment
cost of heartworm treatment
how much does heartworm treatment cost
how does microchip work for lost dog
free vet clinics in Houston
low cost heartworm test
heartworm shot cost
affordable pet care Austin
On a local level, we kicked off marketing efforts with Austin Dental Care, a company that has been around since 1997, with no previous strategic marketing in place, in November of 2017. Unfortunately, they did not have the proper Google tracking in place for us to historically compare but we saw the following continual uptick in organic search since our content plan kicked off.
Increase in organic search users:
November: 30 users
December: 112
January: 216
February: 263
March: 313
April: 337
May: 408
Magnificent Marketing continues to implement successful content for their clients–and Express Writers helps fulfill that content!”
How Can You Achieve the Same Results and ROI from Blogging?
One of our passions is to spread the word about content marketing and help people achieve amazing results with it, like our own success at Express Writers.
Because – fantastic news – you can absolutely do this, too.
Here are some solid steps to help you get to a real level of blogging ROI.
1. Write Down What You’re Willing to Invest in Blogging and Content Marketing – and Stick to It
The type of blogging that earns ROI requires a two-fold investment of time and money.
Whether you take content creation in hand or outsource it to experts, the best stuff depends on what you’re willing to put into it.
Thus: Budget for your blogging. Write down a ballpark estimate of what you’re willing to spend, then proceed to the next step.
[bctt tweet=”‘Tip #1: Write down what you’re willing to invest in blogging and content marketing – and stick to it.’ Read @JuliaEMcCoy ‘s tips in achieving real #bloggingROI” username=”ExpWriters”]
2. Calculate How the Investment Will Pay Off
Let’s say you choose to outsource your content.
At Express Writers, if you want our best writing level, that’s Authority Content. One authority-level blog costs $375, including full design, content, research, keyword strategy, and more.
You would actually receive SEO keyword research from our trained experts in each Authority piece, and have the possibility of ranking high with each blog. Investing in one year of authority blogging would cost about $19,500 if you publish one authority blog/week.
Or, if you want our next-best writing level, you could invest in expert writing, which is not as intensified, long-form and powerful as authority, but is also a high-quality, worthwhile writing level. You get an expert writer who knows your industry. No SEO research and full design, content only. This costs $395/month for 1 blog a week, posted on your site. Or $4,740 a year. (See blog management packages here.)
Since we write to appeal to your specific readers and search engines, we can estimate your keyword rankings. We can also use stats to figure out your click-through rate and traffic from organic blogging.
With an estimate of your monthly traffic in hand, we can then estimate potential leads and sales using our trusty formula:
As you can see, this is an easy and eye-opening way to determine how your blogging investment will pay off.
If you’re not satisfied with the potential ROI, play with the numbers and see what happens as your investment increases.
P.S. A note about blogging. You really need social media activity (posts, sharing of your blogs, relevant facts about your brand, etc.) from a qualified social media copywriter if you don’t have social media going on yet. It will really complete the full-circle picture. For example, our Twitter profile @ExpWriters is responsible for 10% of our monthly traffic!
If you were to add social media coverage from our social media packages to the blogging you do yourself, or the blogging we could do for you, this would start at $360/month to promote the blog and share other relevant posts about your brand consistently, adding $4,320/year in costs. Making sure you have activity under your brand name on social media is absolutely necessary for every brand.
3. Blog the Right Way (that Makes the ROI Roll In)
Here’s one caveat: You’ll only earn blogging ROI if you blog the right way.
The ROI formula only predicts what you’ll earn from consistent, high-quality, targeted blogging.
If you phone it in, you will not see the results the formula predicts.
We have lots of guides here at EW that can help you blog profitably. Here are a few for starters – read up to improve your game:
4. Remember That Cheapening Out Also Cheapens Your Content
Remember that investment you committed to in step #1?
If you flake out on it, your content will flake out, too.
Cheapening out likewise cheapens your content.
For example, if you cut the time you devote for blog creation in half without improving your productivity, you’ll start pushing out lower-quality blogs.
Similarly, if you cut the budget for your content, you’ll only be able to afford the cheapest content mills. Usually, this means bottom-of-the-barrel writing, or writers whose native language is not English.
With the latter, mistakes like these are too common:
Mistakes like these can kill your blog ROI, because content that’s thin, riddled with errors, factually incorrect, poorly written, or hard to read does NOT rank.
Need a visual reminder of poor blogging? Here you go:
Not only does this blog make your brain hurt, it’s also completely useless information. From one post, it’s painfully obvious that this business went the cheap route for their blog.
Yikes.
Ready to See ROI from Your Blog? Be Inspired from Our Success Stories
I’m the CEO of a content creation agency that has completed over 17,000 projects in content services (blogs, web pages, content planning), since 2011.
In my line of work forging and leading content creation to power many content strategies, I’ve heard just about every complaint and frustration you could possibly hear from content strategists, marketers, and content practitioners:
“I’m not sure this content is worth it.”
“Where do you recommend I publish my content?”
“I’m not sure I can do more than one month of blogging. I’ll look at the budget and get back to you.”
“I can’t afford an industry specialist writer.”
This is a small percentage of the clients that come our way, but I’m stillready to pull my hair out, every time I hear these phrases.
Why?
Because I personally know the value that a great content marketing strategy, and consistent publishing, can bring.
But I also know what it takes to get there: the path isn’t easy. It requires investment, time, and most of all, commitment.
The skills involved in the workload of a content strategist aren’t easy to learn.
But here’s the cool news…
Content can truly bring you 100x what you put into it.
I’ll talk more about that in a moment, but first, here’s a look at what I’ve managed to achieve here at Express Writers solely through high quality, original content creation.
A Content Strategist Success Story: Express Writers, Fueled Completely By Organic Content
[bctt tweet=”Content can truly bring you 100x what you put into it. Read all about @JuliaEMcCoy’s venture into #contentstrategy ” username=”ExpWriters”]
Today, under my direction and content creation as a self-taught content strategist and CEO, my little self-funded content creation agency and staff of 40 at Express Writers has managed to outrank competitors that have $9+ million in outside funding, by an immense 3%+ higher visibility in Google.
We rank organically for over 11,000 key terms, with a presence worth $57,000+ monthly in organic search.
And we haven’t paid a penny in ads—across six years—to gain the majority of our leads and clientele. They’ve come straight from these rankings.
Question…
How well does this content convert?
Because you can’t just have high-ranking content, right? It has to return.
After optimizing my strategy and increasing my content investment this year, we hit the highest sales month we’ve ever had this January. Now, we’re on track to break our first seven figure year as an agency.
99% of our leads come through organic content marketing.
I’ve never invested a single dollar in PPC.
The secret is all in how you go about it (your strategy), and your commitment. It’s not an overnight game, and it’s a steady, slow, but sure process.
It can feel like hard, low-return work in the beginning, but in the long run, content is the best marketing you’ll have ever done.
Content Strategists & The Proven Worth of Content to Advertisers
Today, SEO has basically merged as a part of the wider picture that is content marketing.
When you do SEO, you’re optimizing your content for high rankings in the search results: in content marketing, you market your product or service through high-value, audience-targeted content campaigns.
Optimizing your content for search (SEO) is a crucial, integrated part of content marketing itself. It’s a big part of the skillset of a great content strategist.
If you have the right strategy, the right SEO and the right content consistency in place, take a look at these success statistics that can happen.
Per dollar spent, content marketing generates more than 3x the number of leads than paid search does. (Kapost/Eloqua)
Content marketing costs between 31 and 41% less than paid search, depending on the organization’s size. (Kapost/Eloqua)
Website conversion rate is nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs. 0.5%). (Aberdeen Group)
Content creation ranks as the single most effective SEO technique. (Marketing Sherpa)
61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog. (FactBrowser)
Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than small businesses that do not blog. (ImpactBnd)
A Content Strategist Skillset Wheelhouse: 7 Keys to Success
Your content strategy is everything in achieving high-performing, high-ROI content.
Follow these critical steps, in order, for a baseline sense of how to navigate through and set up your strategy so that your content is knocked out of the park and you know you’re getting ROI when you publish content. (PSA: These steps take time. Don’t jump around or rush through them. PSA 2: This takes time. Don’t expect overnight success.)
1. Know your position of authority and differentiation in your field.
It all starts here. Know where your expertise lies, own it, and ten find your Content Differentiation Factor so you can officially stand out in your industry. To get to that, ask yourself, “what would make a customer choose me over my competitor?” Your answer is your CDF. Condense it to one or two key sentences to showcase on your home page (you may need a conversion copywriter to help you express this perfectly).
Brands that have a standout CDF in a variety of niches (scan their home pages—it should, quite literally, stand out there):
This is the first step of a true content strategy, and this step is a discovery that could take some time. But it’s absolutely worth it. Too many brands starting out don’t take the time to make sure they have a standout factor.
To set yourself up for content success, you have to have a reason for the reader (buyer, audience member, lead) to choose you and your content. Don’t skimp here. Having a CDF will 10x the results you’ll get when leads start finding your content.
2. Know your content goals.
What do you want to get out of content? Bucket in three key areas: 1. SEO rankings (you’ll define your terms later in the strategy), 2. Sales and connections, and 3. Brand awareness.
Direct your efforts in content based on where you’re at in your business. If you have leads and customers, you may be able to afford more time and creativity with brand awareness content. If you’re starting out, focus on finding your keywords and creating comprehensive, awesome SEO content—months down the road, when your leads start coming in, you’ll be glad you did.
Go by goals, and every content idea you have, you should be able to bucket that topic or idea into your goal areas. This heavily narrows down the chances of you creating undirected, low-ROI content.
3. Know your audience and who you’re talking to.
Get to know your audience, their language, the conferences they attend and the publications they read. Think of it like “friendly-stalking” the people you want to do business with and earn as customers.
A surefire way to find out persona data is to use surveys and get real-time feedback (use and pay for a Google Survey if you don’t have an audience yet). Ask them to fill out a demographic survey in exchange for a reward (gift card, a free service from you). If you have an existing customer list, pick a customer on that list and offer to have coffee with them, on you, in exchange for a few minutes of their time—or pick up the phone and ask to interview them.
Get comfortable with who your ideal customer is, their likes, dislikes, and you’ll be able to create content that is just for them.
4. Build a persona and a style guidelines document for your brand.
Once you have survey results in and have profiled your ideal client, build a persona. Don’t set it in stone—people change, and traits vary so much (we’re all so unique). So, don’t idealize just one person with a persona. Think of it like getting familiar with their likes and interests, so you can create better content that caters to them.
Then, invest time and resources into building a style guidelines for your brand. Keep it simple – include your audience persona, specify how to use (and not use) your company brand name and colors, the preferred style and tone of voice you want to maintain, linking and content rules. You’ll find this document invaluable when you start investing in content creators. Brand style guidelines can stop hired writers and creators from assuming different tones, in their tracks. And it’s crucial in winning leads and building a loyal audience that you adhere to and use your tone throughout every piece of content you publish. Brand familiarity is ROI.
Check out how Skype specifies their tone of voice in their brand book: “If your mum couldn’t understand what is being written, then it’s not the Skype voice. Humour is an important part of the Skype voice. We don’t tell one liners, but employ a gentle wit to engage our users.”
5. Know your keywords, content topics, & investments to make.
Keyword discovery should be a part of every brand’s content strategy. Go for long-tail keywords and use tools like KWFinder and SEMrush to find your best keywords according to how well they’re scored. Avoid high competition keywords on authoritative sites—they will be much harder to write content around and rank for, if you’re competing against someone who has already done an amazing job at writing content for it and Google is ranking that content #1. Look for relevant, low competition keywords.
Be thorough with your keyword discovery. It takes me about an hour to find eight amazing long-tail keywords that have a real chance of ranking, if I create comprehensive content around them. I look for a score of 40 and below in the SEO difficulty scores.
Don’t just rely on keyword tools for content topics: use tools like BuzzSumo and question/answer platforms like Quora to discover trending topics in your industry. Choose a few you can write on with authority, and add your own thoughts on the subject.
Your topics can and should branch outside of SEO terms. For example:
SEO-focused post: we found out that the keyword “hiring the best SEO content writers” was a long-tail keyword with slim competition, so we created a 1,500 word post titled “How to Hire Your Best SEO Content Writers: 4 Key Qualities to Look For.”
Brand awareness-focused post: Outside of keyword research, I found that a common question on Quora was “how do I create a content marketing plan?” So, one of my blogs was a 2,000 word piece on that topic. The keyword had high competition, but since I have established rankings and leads, I wrote on the topic to focus on high level industry education, which can bring my agency more brand awareness.
Your content investments should be based on your commitment. Remember: it takes 12-24 months of consistent content creation to see results.
Hubspot did a study showing how much the effort of blogging can return 12 months down the road:
And, they did a study on why more is always better:
If you can’t write a consistent stream of content yourself, invest in an industry copywriter. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to find a writer that knows the industry they’re writing in—inside and out. Your reader is smart, savvy, and attracted to your brand/products because they’re in the same industry you’re in. Don’t leave the important process of writing the content your prospects actually read just up to any writer. Besides knowing the industry, your content writer should also know online optimization (keyword placement, format) and have engaging writing skills.
We’ve seen our clients 10x their rankings and results when they invested in an industry knowledgeable, authoritative copywriter!
6. Build your editorial calendar.
Keep this part simple so you focus on the other cores more (research, publishing, promoting). Guide your topics by the high-opportunity keywords you find and the brand awareness focused topics you discover from a web topic crawl (trending in Quora, BuzzSumo, etc.). Get creative and tie topics to seasons and dates (see next point). Use Google Sheets or Trello to store your editorial topics in one place, month after month.
7. Promote, maintain, and audit.
A content promotion strategy should be in your mind from the moment you create content.
For example: back in February this year I had the idea to write a list of women in marketing to follow, and tie it to International Women’s Day in March. I categorized that topic based on where I could best promote it, and ended up pitching it to Search Engine Journal, where it received the best reception in promotion and shares, out of all the publications I could have published it on.
Think of where you can place and promote your content, as you create it. Go outside the box and be creative and strategic. Tie topics to holidays, seasonal launches to guest publication feature dates, and more.
Content maintenance and auditing should be part of your strategy on a consistent basis.
Every month, I check my site positions in SEMrush, and ask three of my best agency copywriters to help me update the posts that start to rank. This has brought a serious return in the amount of lead inquiries we get.
The content I wrote back in 2013 that’s ranking #1 today isn’t nearly as good as the content I can write today, so it’s absolutely necessary for me to update content as it ranks. By improving the quality of that content, updating the meta description, etc., I can seriously improve the amount of visitors that turn into leads from finding these high-ranking posts on Google.
Content Strategist Skillsets: Success is In the Details
Remember: content marketing isn’t something that can be done once, or twice, or even for a few months. In a podcast I recently recorded with Joe Pulizzi, he recommended 12-24 months as the typical turnaround to expect with a content investment. So, as a content strategist, once you invest in a blog schedule, you need to keep at it at least a year to start seeing return.
I’ve talked to influencers and content strategists that have shared their personal success stories, and it’s always a story about long-term success that translates to long term ROI—combined with a serious investment in “10x style” content (content that is 10x better than anything already out there).
The success is in the commitment, and in the details of how willing you are to get good at your strategy and content itself.
Unbounce’ Content Director, Dan Levy: “Blogging was survival for Unbounce in the early days. It was the only way for us to raise awareness of our brand and the need for landing pages in general without spending a ton of money, which we didn’t have.” Unbounce blogged six months before their product launched. Today, they have over 9,800 paying customers—which they’ve acquired mostly through Oli Gardner’s amazing long-form content.
Sujan Patel: “Content takes time, and people just see success stories and don’t realize it’s not overnight. It’s taken two and a half years for me. After that length of creating content for my own site consistently, I’m at a point of earning speaking gigs without even seeking them out.”
Yet, it works. At a Content Marketing World conference, the former senior director for data, content and media at Kraft, Julie Fleischer, said that content marketing ROI was 4x greater than their most targeted advertising.
Get a Visualized, Step-for-Step, 6-Week Content Strategist Certification & Training
This 2017, one of my biggest goals was to turn what I know into teachable, easy-to-digest knowledge in a course format.
I’d taken a few courses, and the ones I experienced all lacked one thing—the practical how-to of “what do I do next in my content?”
Personally, I learned content creation ROI the hard way, through trial and error. And after training dozens of writers with content I wrote just for internal education at my agency, I’ve seen firsthand how this industry is lacking in a practical, hands-on, high-ROI education.
The hows, what’s, and when’s of content creation and strategy as it applies to content marketing–where do you go to learn them?
So, over the last three months, I put hundreds of hours (and all the knowledge from my last six years in the industry) into creating an ultimate Content Strategy Certification Course.
It went live last week. The points I laid out in the six keys above are what I teach, step-by-step, visualized in video lesson demos and taught in hands-on exercises throughout six workbooks that accompany my course modules. In the course, my students learn how to build a working brand strategy, complete with personas, keyword reports, editorial calendars, and more: and my team and I personally review and mentor their results before they progress to certification.
Here’s to changing the industry—one complete, high-ROI content strategy at a time!
When Matt Janaway, CEO of England-based digital marketing agency Marketing Labs UK, realized he needed copywriting help, he knew just who to turn to.
Janaway had worked with us before, and had a number of good things to say about the experience. According to him, hiring Express Writers for his copywriting needs was a “no-brainer.”
The Story Begins: The Need for a Copywriting Team
MarketingLabs recently experienced an influx of clientele in need of digital marketing services. While an increase in business is never a bad thing, the workload quickly became too much for MarketingLabs’ two in-house copywriters to handle.
Janaway knew that forcing his copywriters to spread themselves thin would result in low quality work and – more importantly – unhappy customers.
And he also knew his company wasn’t ready to take on a third full-time copywriter. Not only would that lead to an increase in overhead, but it would also result in redundancy once client demand died down.
For Janaway, the choice was clear: hire a copywriting agency.
Not Just Any Agency
Janaway knew he had a number of copywriting agencies to choose from, but he ultimately decided to work with our team at Express Writers.
He explains, “The ability to have skilled writers on-tap and ready to jump straight into a project…is a vital part of the growth strategy of our business.”
Like we said earlier, this wasn’t the first time Janaway worked with Express Writers. What drew him back was our team’s ability to quickly turnaround assignments without sacrificing quality, as well as our writers’ in-depth understanding of digital and content marketing.
The Results
Janaway saw his own results, and his clients, grow to successful heights with our copy. Here’s what happened:
Marketing Labs’ monthly website traffic doubled from 25,000 to 50,000.
A single post on Marketing Labs’ blog gained over 2,000 shares on social media.
A client of Marketing Labs saw a 77% increase in revenue year-over-year after Express Writers optimized their product description web copy.
To Our Clients’ Continuing Success
At Express Writers, we don’t aim to just snag a client and make a quick buck.
Our goal is to provide value and forge a connection with our customers that leads to ongoing success for everyone involved in the process. And we make this happen, over and over, with every project we take on.
The other day, I was poking around in my favorite SEO analytic software of choice, SEMrush, checking on our rankings. My team at Express Writers has a Guru subscription there that allows us to see detailed analytics of our site–and I mean detailed. We see a ton of keyword position data down to the most recent keyword ranking change of our site in Google, as of just an hour ago. (If you haven’t already, go check out SEMrush here.)
Well, a couple days ago I was doing my biweekly SEO audit of all of our keyword positions and pulling keyword data for new content. I was shocked to see that the positions changes mapped a huge spike: as of October 28, 302 new keyword gains. In 24 hours. And our traffic had spiked up to the most I’d ever seen: 1,251 people on one day.
What Exactly Are We Doing In Google?
Let me give you a little look at exactly how we’re getting and maintaining our positions with Google before I delve into the recent major keyword growth.
1. Content
We write and publish about 3-4 blogs on our site a week, ranging from 1,000-3,000 words each. So since 2011, we have 642 blogs published on our Wordpress site (this one makes 643):
This isn’t counting the hundreds of guest blogs I’ve placed on places like SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, Social Media Examiner, and more.
Also, we have about 50-80 website pages, maybe 400-800 words each.
2. Traffic
So, with that insight into just how much we publish, now it’s time to see what the results are. We have some serious organic traffic. I’ve never placed a Google paid ad in all my four years of business; and never will. I believe in great content brainstorming, writing and publishing, and it is what is keeping us strong. And sometimes just this process can take me 40 hours a week. It isn’t easy, but it is thoroughly worth it.
SEMrush puts our traffic at a value of $6,800 (what we would pay if we were paying for ad clicks). We have 3,000 keywords indexed in Google, with over 100 in the top 5 positions of Google. We’re outranking a large number of our competitors in the content creation niche.
Let’s look at the graph on the right a little deeper:
Whoa!
This month we have the most site traffic we’ve ever had, with 1,251 people visiting in a single day the first week of November.
3. How We Gained 300+ Rankings In One Day
Here’s what I saw that stopped me in my tracks the other day. I clicked on Position Changes under Organic Research, in SEMrush:
See that? 302 new rankings in a single day!
Clicking on what was “new,” some of these showed we were position 11 for “modern copywriter,” #3 for “copywriting companies”, and #19 for “website content”:
The orange bar below showed we’d lost 200 keywords. But clicking on that, I saw they were mostly unrelated keywords—like “express for her,” “sprinkles icing,” and more.
Except for a few pivotal ones we’d lost a few positions on (looks like I need to refresh some old SEO content), the “lost” weren’t too bad.
How The Heck Did We Get 300+ Keywords In One Day?
I have a couple theories.
First, Google RankBrain is out. It came out two days before our rankings showed a major spike. Read my blog on RankBrain here. RankBrain is an AI system that basically could be replacing Google’s old way of doing its algorithm, and it exposed 15% of the web that Google hadn’t shed light on before. I’m sure RankBrain is showing a lot more website owners rankings they didn’t know they ever had.
RankBrain means we’ll all be able to see a whopping 15% more in analytics and positions online that our sites and content are ranking for—all the more reason to start publishing great content!
Secondly, Google has still been rolling out Panda, AND, topical trust flow has recently been making big waves (it’s replacing PageRank and focuses on reporting relevant content in higher rankings). Topical trust flow weight could be mostly likely why we lost our unrelated rankings, too. All this is probably tied into the quality of the RankBrain AI.
Lastly, we’ve been working hard on our content. Over the past month, I’ve revamped and improved our blogging and content publishing quality.
Here are just a few of the changes:
SEO audit of our blogs (I just corrected 35 “bad SEO” blogs, rewrote their meta descriptions and edited the copy, over the last 3 weeks, and took them to green SEO on the Yoast plugin)
More SEO research and keyword planningwith SEMrush for each post
Heavier research and analyzing of topics and what goes into each post
Custom drawings and illustrations, like this one, for many of our posts
At least one infographic written, designed and published per month
Re-purposing of infographics into SlideShares, RSS content to pull guest traffic
Email marketing bi-weekly that sends a blog roundup to our subscriber list
We Know What It Takes To Help You
To end this post, I’d like to emphasize that any one of our clients can see these results. We’re not only writers with pens over here. My team not only writes great SEO optimized content, but we plan it, too—and we use SEMrush! Our team includes strategists that map out monthly editorial calendars for our clients, audit websites to remove anything that could be hurting websites, and similar services.
We’ve seen content success truly happen for us – this post proves that – and we know exactly what it takes to get even a brand new website client onboard with publishing great content that gets both the eye of a reader and Google (albeit if Google, a robotic eye).
If you’re ready to get serious about content and thus, your rankings and readers, check out our Content Shop!
Understanding how powerful copywriting, and in a bigger picture, all of content marketing is doesn’t require you to look any further than the sheer amount of content that is produced on a daily basis.
Content marketing has long been considered a mainstay of digital marketing and marketers.
Considered a cornerstone of the industry, content marketing allows businesses to attract and keep a customer base.
And a fundamental part of content marketing is copywriting. It’s like the ham to the eggs.
Think about it: if your content marketing is a good blog, than your ham to that egg is the written blog. Design, SEO optimization with your plugins, correct categorization, etc. all tie in.
Let’s think back to the overall picture. Now as most marketers can tell you, saying something without showing what it looks like in cold, hard facts is simply spouting hot air.
The statistics of the matter bear out our original hypothesis: content marketing makes a major impact in the world today.
Content Marketing by the Numbers
There has been a constant reminder by content marketers that content is king, but only until you realize the statistics that exist behind the statement do you realize how powerful a king content really is.
On average per minute—
Nearly 2.5 million pieces of content are shared by users on Facebook
Instagram has 220,000 new photos posted to its servers
YouTube gets over 72 hours of new video uploaded
Twitter is used around 300,000 times
Over 200 million emails are sent
Over $80,000 worth of sales is generated by Amazon
And that is only PER MINUTE.
Every sixty seconds for the whole day this kind of change happens.
And it’s appreciating these massive movements of data that make us realize exactly how powerful social media is to the production and distribution of content.
How Has Copywriting & Content Marketing Contributed to These Numbers?
It is estimated, according to Content Marketing Institute, that nine out of every ten businesses today utilize content marketing in tandem with their sales force to generate awareness and increase their profits.
And you know what the foundation of content marketing is? Good copywriting.
Based on what we understand about the interplay between marketing and sales it’s not a stretch to see why these companies have adopted digital content marketing as an aid to raising their sales. The expenditure in advertising compared to the return on investment makes it a no-brainer to use content marketing.
Case Study: Express Writers (We Call Ourselves a Content Agency, Right?)
Hey – if we sell blogging and content, we better be good at it, right?
Yes. But you’d be surprised how many writing agencies don’t care about maintaining their blog.
Here at Express Writers, we’ve truly utilized content marketing to a degree of success. We adopted the idea in an effort to increase lead generation and sales through a targeted strategy incorporating guest blogging and SEO to a massive extent.
The results we got were far better than many of the competitors in our very industry – we outrank 95% of them – and proves the potency of content marketing in the framework of a modern developing company.
I would recommend any business that wants to see significant growth over time to consider content marketing as the vehicle to achieve that goal. You could say we’re among the 89% of companies that use content marketing and testify to its effectiveness.
The development of our content marketing plan is:
Four 2000-word pieces per week for our own blog, along with 4-6 more pieces per week for major guest blogs including such high-authority sites as Search Engine Journal, Site Pro News, SEM Rush and Content Marketing Institute.
We also have over 80 site pages, 50 of which are our main service pages (one for each of our writing services) and are about 500 words or more each.
I could tell you all day long how well our content does, how great our team does at compiling it, how we research the topics and develop the concepts, but here’s some cold hard stats for you to digest.
We average 500-700 visitors in organic traffic daily, from Google keywords.
We have 165 keywords indexed in SEO, 100 of which are in the top ten positions (screenshot from SEMRush):
Also from SEMRush, a screenshot of some of our keyword positions as of June 2015:
Many of our individual blogs are doing very well in search.
For example, this blog written in 2013, “Website Copywriting for Dummies”, ranks #4 in organic search (screenshots via SEMRush):
When we take into account the amount of growth our own company has seen over a single year, it’s not impossible to imagine how much content moves per day and how it can affect a company’s exposure and generate leads based off its content marketing strategy. It’s a testament to the kinds of things that we can expect from content marketing in the coming years.
Now that we’ve disclosed how much content marketing has helped us, let’s delve into…
The Cost of Content Marketing
As an industry, content marketing is responsible for a massive amount of expenditure.
In 2013, brand management site Brafton estimated that the total expenditure for new content creation for the year would reach about $118.4 billion. That’s billion, with a B.
Although based on the amount of new content is produced daily and factoring in a cost like this into it, you can see why content creation itself can cost very little but the sheer volume of its production can add up to so much. Mashable approximates that as much as twenty seven million pieces of content are shared on social media per day. That’s a LOT of outreach for something that could cost you a couple bucks to make.
Why Content Marketing Has Such An Impact
With twenty seven million shares a day you’re probably starting to see how content can influence consumers to such a level that a message can go viral. As much as 58% of consumers trust editorial content, according to Nielsen.
If you could tap into at least half the people that make up your core audience and have them share your content it can go a long way towards making your brand or company a household name.
Taking this into account, your aim should be to build your base of dedicated users and play the numbers game to get your content out there. Social Media B2B states that as much as 61% of US marketers utilize social media to increase the amount of leads they get. Using it correctly is as important as using it at all. Stephen Fairley writes that companies that blog 15 or more times a month see as much as five times as much traffic as those that don’t. It’s the perfect strategy for getting the word out.
3 Success Stories of Content Marketing
We know that content marketing has the power to reach out to the masses and raise awareness. We know that it guarantees sales increases after an extended content campaign. All of these things have been told to us time and time again, but short of doing it ourselves, how do we know that content marketing works? We can’t just take the word of the people who are trying to sell it to us. If you need proof of how well content marketing has managed to work for some companies, here’s a few of the more successful content marketing successes and how it’s managed to enhance their business. 1. Influence & Co. – Influence & Co. utilize knowledge-based tactics in order to help companies achieve their branding objectives. It has managed to place itself as the largest provider of thought leadership content that is shareable and relatable. This stemmed from an aim to empower companies and thought leaders to control the message they send to the masses, something fresh and new in the field of public relations. The company growth is palpable, expanding rapidly from a two-person operation to employing as much as seventy five people on its payroll. 2. NewsCred – Content marketers should at least heard of NewsCred, even if you haven’t had anything to do with them expressly. They are one of the most influential up and coming content production companies, employing over two hundred people currently. What started off as a news wire service has shifted gears and gone into full content marketing giant mode. They offer content strategy solutions to companies based on their level of service, including access to images from Getty and premium articles to help their clients along. Their analytical system also allows for them to aid their clients in suggesting content creation and distribution options in line with the company’s target demographic. 3. Express Writers – Yes, at Express Writers, we’re a great success story of content marketing. Our Content Shop receives about 700 visits a day, and we supply content writing, planning, and strategizing services for clients like Bank of America, PayPal, Shopify, GAP, just to name a few. On average, we’re writing close to 500 pages a week; our team of 60+ includes trained copywriters, marketing writers, PR writers, content strategists, social media managers, copyeditors, and our content managers and client account managers. Think you need great content? We can provide! Talk to one of our Content Specialists.
Exponential Growth
What these case studies of content production companies have in common is the demonstration that content is a juggernaut, unstoppable and uncontainable. As companies around the world switch over to digital content, it only promotes the growth of the industry many times over. It’s a self-fueling process as fresh content is what forces companies to update their content in order to stay relevant in the eyes of the search engines and the users they cater to.
The Battle Between Content Marketing and Old Media Style
Once upon a time, not so long ago, marketing was focused on fitting ads into media in order to encourage users to click.
While there is no shortage of these sites on the Internet, the truth of the matter is that they are slowly being phased out in favor of the new kid on the block, content marketing.
Old media depends upon a different type of revenue stream and their metrics for success vary vastly from content publishers. Some of the bigger content publishers around can do a number on the heads of old media.
The crux of the matter here is that content production and marketing leverages something that slips through traditional marketing media’s fingertips – that of human loyalty.
Content marketing is based on the idea that good content will attract and keep an audience because that audience starts trusting the brand and makes decisions based on that brand’s suggestions.
Old media never considered the idea of owning customer loyalty, rather “borrowing” it through an extended media campaign, meaning they would have to reinvent the wheel every time they had a new product to get the word out on.
The onus, therefore, in this case is on the publishers that promote this content rather than the brands themselves to monitor branded messages and keep the positive message going.
There have been situations where marketers have been less-than-stellar with their management of brands and possible negative fallout. The Atlantic is a good example of this poor brand management and a good example for companies where the faults of content marketing can lie.
The Future Looks Bright
Content marketing, and the bottom line of copywriting, has come to mean a lot to businesses.
It gives smaller businesses the ability to compete (and in some cases surpass) much larger brands by giving them an equal platform where their content is judged on its relevancy, not how much money has gone into its production.
Visual content has managed to boost the visibility of many sites, with The B2B marketing Mentor stating that images and photos make up the most effective way of optimizing social media posts to raise levels of interaction. This only underlines the fact that content marketing is a great way to raise levels of engagement with an audience and grow a company’s capital in the new currency of the Internet, user loyalty.
Over time the demand for content that is relevant and importantto different demographics will rise.
More and more brands are noticing how well content marketing is helping their business grow.
Economic giants such as Burger King and Coke have already dipped their toes into the water of the content marketing ocean and have found great returns on their investment.
Although it may take some time before such massive brands come to embrace content marketing as a viable method of their marketing strategy, they will continually add content that keeps them in the game although not at the top of it.
Content marketing is the true leveler, a meritocracy where your content determines how well you do as a company. Check out our Content Shop and start shopping for your online content today!
