content roi - Express Writers

Why Your Content Isn’t Performing, and 6 Methods to Refocus on for Killer Results

June 19, 2024October 9, 2018 by Adam Oakley

Despite your best efforts, your content isn’t performing. It might even be failing, and the reason(s) for it may remain elusive. This is frustrating beyond belief, not to mention discouraging. (Head, meet desk.) Need help with your content? Register for free as a client. You’ve heard over and over how successful content marketing can be (in CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Trends Report, 73% of respondents said their organization’s content marketing approach was either moderately or very successful) – so it’s even more disheartening when you can’t seem to get there yourself. Luckily, content problems are common enough that we might be able to boil yours down to one or two (or a few) reasons why your content marketing creations aren’t working. Read through these scenarios and see if any could apply to your content. Then, keep scrolling for tips to help you turn it all around so you see success the next time you roll up your sleeves to create. [bctt tweet=”Are you having trouble seeing results from your content marketing? Here are 6 methods to help you re-focus for killer results, via @JuliaEMcCoy ” username=”ExpWriters”] Your content failure might have happened because… 1. Your KPIs and Content Expectations Don’t Match Up If your content expectations versus the reality of your KPIs (key performance indicators) present two wildly different pictures, something is up. Either your content is flat-out failing or your expectations are too unrealistic to achieve. Both scenarios require a reassessment of your approach, whether your content needs an overhaul or your expectations need tweaking. 2. You Don’t Have a Strategy If you’re creating content on an ad-hoc, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants basis, this could be the major reason why it isn’t performing. Without a content strategy, you won’t have a roadmap that leads to achieving your goals. It’s exactly like driving on a dark road without any directions or headlights. One of the major ways a strategy helps your content is by laying out how each of your pieces maps to the buyer’s journey. When a customer is able to find the exact type of content they need at the exact sales stage they’re in, it helps them move steadily down the sales funnel – closer to a sale with your brand, in fact, since it’s your content they’re engaging with. Without this mapping guiding your content creation, you’ll be taking wild guesses about what types of content will nurture leads and encourage conversions. It just won’t work. 3. You’re Overly Focused on Selling Yes, your ultimate end goal is to get those conversions (traffic to leads, leads to sales), but you’re self-sabotaging if your focus is on selling your products/services, promoting your brand, or a mixture of the two. Overly salesy content is a cause of death for any campaign because it moves toward being interruptive and valueless for the consumer rather than helpful, interesting, or educational. Consumers (especially millennials and Generation Z) don’t like ads for a reason. They’re pushy, annoying, and can feel a bit slimy. 82% of Gen Z-ers say they skip ads whenever they can, according to a Kantar/Millwardbrown study. Do you want to be seen as an authority in your field and a helpful advisor, or like a shady used car salesman? Promoting yourself too much in your content will lead to the latter, which turns people off. 4. You Aren’t Talking to the Right Audience If publishing content feels like shouting in an empty room (*taps mic* — Is this thing on?), consider this: Are you speaking to the right crowd? Content targeted at the right people is more likely to hit its mark. The people you need to talk to are the ones who will care about what you have to offer, whether that’s your knowledge, your brand, or your products/services. If your content isn’t connecting, it might be because you’re throwing bananas at horses or apples at monkeys. 6 Tactical Tips to Turn Your Content Marketing Around 1. Study Up on Your Audience, Then Write FOR Them If your content isn’t performing, you should take a hard look at your target audience and buyer personas. Are they still relevant? Or are they off the mark? Go back and do your research. Do surveys, interviews, and polls with your customers and social media followers. Look at who your competition is targeting. Reassess who your brand ultimately seeks to help with content. Michelle Linn has a great method to help you refocus on your correct audience: Ask yourself who you can help rather than wondering who you can target. Once you have an updated handle on your audience, write your content FOR them. Put yourself in their shoes. Speak their language. Imagine talking to them across a dinner table and what you would say. Address their fears, pain points, desires, and questions. A good exercise to try if you struggle with content that’s too self-promotional: Eliminate all uses of pronouns like “I,” “we,” and “us.” Instead, use “you” and “your.” 2. Research and Capitalize on a Trending Topic If you understand your audience well, yet regularly hit “publish” and hear nothing but crickets chirping, you need to start getting more eyes on your content. You can easily do this by jumping on a trending topic. Their impact is fleeting, but it can be big once it hits. To find one: Check industry news. Look at top posts on competitor sites and search for patterns. Check BuzzSumo for current trending topics in your niche. You need to be quick to find a hot topic and get related content pushed out in a timely manner, but it can be worth the time crunch for the traffic potential alone. Plus, these types of pieces are great lead-ins or introductions to your brand for that all-important awareness phase of the sales cycle. 3. Return to Start and Put a Content Strategy in Place If your content creation is willy-nilly, unorganized, or undocumented, stop. Do not pass “go.” You needed a strategy yesterday. Reaching any type of goal requires … Read more

How We Outrank Every Competitor & Win Through Organic Content Without Spending a Penny on Ads (Express Writers’ Content Case Study)

June 19, 2024October 11, 2016 by Adam Oakley

Let’s face it. Getting traffic, maintaining traffic, and creating content they come back for—and keeping that cycle thriving for years—is hard work. Yet this is something we’ve been able to achieve successfully, day in and day out, at Express Writers. We’re a content writing agency that does what we do best for ourselves, before we sell it to others—creating winning online content that brings revenue, markets a business, and informs and helps an audience. Since I launched my website with a $75 investment in May 2011, Express Writers has relied on creating content for ourselves and publishing it online, organically, as the #1 source of all our leads, marketing, and revenue. We’ve focused on creating content without a thought to a sales funnel: and we’ve never paid a penny to advertise our services on Google. (You heard that right. We’ve never, once, invested in PPC. And the publications I write content for, guest blogs, don’t pay me a direct paycheck.) Instead, we’ve just focused on writing and publishing useful, outstanding content, on our site, consistently. Consistent guest blogging. Creating a Twitter presence that rocks out organically. Call me crazy, untypical, you-name-it… but it’s worked for us—extraordinarily well. I’m about to reveal it all to you, in a case study I sat down to create across a five-week span. We Are Our Own Success Story: How We at Express Writers Dominate Online & Outrank Competition Through Our Content Our major form of marketing is the actual service we sell: well-written, engaging, optimized online content. And for the first time, I’m pulling back the curtain in a major case study where we’ll reveal exactly where we stand with content, how we fare against our biggest competitors, and much more. (I’m using a pro account at SEMrush to pull every analytic.) Here’s a quick table of contents, so you know what’s coming: Ready for this? Sit back—you’re in for a ride! What does our organic online presence look like vs. competition? A five-year-old company (launched May 2011), we outrank our major competitors on average by 5% on Google. Check out this graph: We’ve climbed to over 4,100 total keyword rankings in Google. Our estimated worth of traffic and rankings is at $13,200 (what we’ve have to spend to achieve these rankings through sponsored ads). (Don’t worry about that dip in traffic. I have an upcoming post, How I Lost 30% of My Organic Rankings & Traffic (On Purpose) & Added 25% Additional Monthly Revenue By Going After the Traffic I Wanted, coming out soon to explain.) Over 300 keywords are indexed in the top 10 of Google (example in point, this is from the bottom of page 3, 100 results per page, in SEMrush): Back to our competitors. Here’s what a real-life look at our keywords vs. theirs look like—on Google, two out of four of our competitors don’t even have a presence for the keywords we rank #1 for: Overall, at first glance it looks like there is an extremely oversaturated market if you Google “writing agencies,” but only a few are worth really comparing ourselves to. Their funding: One of our two major competitors gained $700,000 and another $4.5 million for funding since launching in 2011; and the second competitor has been around for over 16 years, raising a private amount of seed funding in 2011. Our funding: We have zero investors. We don’t have a penny in outside funding. Yet we’re doing big things. I started Express Writers in May 2011 with a pocket investment of $75. It was a five-minute business idea born from a huge load of personal freelance writing I didn’t want to turn away. I learned how to code my first website; today, Josh McCoy leads our branding, building, and all our new upcoming development has been personally funded by ourselves. And without any outside funding, we’re launching a custom-built, 200% more efficient Content Shop that we’ve developed from scratch—coming out end of 2016/early 2017. Hand-in-hand with this will be the launch of custom writer team room systems we’ve built as well. (Get on the notification list for the upcoming launch!) And Josh is knee-deep in launching a boon to all content creators, Copyfind, which will offer the deepest content checking search for originality that’s on the web. (Get on that notification list here!) Yes, we have a lot about to launch. 😛 Today, we serve more than 1,000 clients worldwide, and we easily handle 300 pages in a given week. And we outshine most of our competitors’ quality because of a very personal, one-on-one mentoring environment we’ve given our writers—and because of incredibly dedicated, uniquely qualified experts I’ve been able to hire for our management staff. I won’t lie: to stay personally funded, I’ve put in many an 80-hour work week on my part, and invested 65% to 100% sometimes of our net profits from the company back in. It’s been hard to find good people, but thankfully, today I have just those people. It’s all been worth the intensive hard work to see growth happen this way. Organically, from hard work, without a huge million-dollar bank account solely responsible for and behind the growth—as is the reality with many, many other VC companies. How does our content perform? We have over 785 published blogs on our site, with the first one published live on our WordPress site in September 2012. The average word count of each is 1,500 (with the highest blogs at 3,700 words, and the lowest around 500—we’ve actually been working on adding more content to the shorter ones now). Our two most-shared posts are a blog published in December 2015, on how to do a website audit—coming in at 1k shares. An episode on my podcast with Sujan Patel, published in March 2016, coming in at 800+ shares. (But I don’t think shares mean everything! Here’s why.) The traffic, lead, and conversions that subsequently happen from our organic rankings bring in 90% of our company revenue. That’s right. That’s a six-figure gross yearly amount. The other revenue is brought in through cold lead … Read more

25 Web Content Creation ROI Tips: Copy That Sells (Infographic)

January 1, 2021November 3, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Creating great web content online is the best way to help push site conversions and bring in awesome new clients. But, how can you create content that sells? In other words, have content ROI? Content that is crafted well has the ability to return on investment, or ROI, for your brand. In this infographic, we take a look at the top reasons you need great content, with 25 useful, fundamental tips to help you get knee-deep in the creation of copy that sells. Full transcript below. Enjoy! And if you like this, we’d love a share and comment! Transcript Why is Awesome Web Content Vital? You have approximately 8 seconds to convince someone to stay – after that, you could lose them. Around 96% of site visitors are not ready to buy yet, and content keeps them coming back until they do. If you create and publish around 31-40 landing pages, you’re likely to generate 7 times the amount of leads than those who don’t. And 40+ generates 12 times more. Visual content like product videos can increase purchases by 144%. Research shows that Google consistently ranks posts over 2,500 words. 25 Surefire Ways to Create Web Content that Sells (Content ROI) Here are some great ways to create wonderful content that can help boost your sales and bring you ROI. Emotions Help Motivate. Emotions are an incredible way to motivate clients to act. Peer pressure, self-improvement tips, and more are excellent motivators. Weave these in your copy. Create a Sense of Urgency. When writing your content, make sure you create a sense of urgency. Show that there is a demand for your product. Tie in brevity to urgency to compel your reader. Create a Case Study. 63% of UK marketers think that case studies are excellent marketing tactics. You can use them to show customers information about your company and product, convincing them to choose you. Create Evergreen Content. Well-researched, in-depth, long-form blogs that answer timeless questions are considered evergreen. These pieces can convert readers and rank you high in Google if done right. And, they’ll always stay relevant. Have Excellent Headlines. Half of your content creation time should be spent coming up with a persuasive headline. Make it useful, have urgency, be unique, and specific. Plug in power words and adjectives to transform an otherwise typical headline. Don’t Be Afraid to Have a Conversational Voice. Think of this like how you’d talk to a client who is also a friend over coffee. Enrich your content with a lively, fun, conversational tone. This can help immensely with building connections that will convert. Find Your One “Thing.” Each company has a “thing” that sets them apart – yours included. Find your “thing” and focus on it with your content. Research Audience Needs. Content that sells needs one crucial element – audience research. Know what your audience needs and create content they can use. Stay Authentic. Marketing now requires authenticity, especially if you plan to market to millennials. Be unique, for example showcasing pictures of your office on Instagram, and your daily grind—and have fun while you’re doing it. Your brand fans will love it! Create a Plan for Content. Plan out your content through various tools such as editorial calendars. You will find it easier to maintain a consistent content plan with one. Make Important Info A Focus. Simple tip, but a vital reminder. This goes for pricing, calls to action, and any other pertinent info. Don’t let it get lost on site or else you’ll lose visitors. Refine Your Approach. Compile a full list, or “brain dump,” of your ideas for content pieces. Next, narrow down and refine your approach. Create content on just a few of your narrowed-down, hot topics for impactful results. Make Vital Points Standout. People only read about 20% of all of the content on your page – make what you want them to see stand out from the rest. Remove Distractions. Too many choices can create higher levels of anxiety for visitors, which can negatively impact conversion rates. Focus on your highest seller or main pain point and dwindle down anything else. Make Your Content Easy to Scan. Only 16% of readers will read all of your blog content, but 79% of visitors will scan. Writing easy-to-scan content will help you reach out to every visitor and reader. Break your content up with sub-headers. Use the Power of One. The “power of one” helps you establish one big idea that you can focus on. This can often be your one “thing,” as well. Focus on one thought for every page or post. Know Which Content Types Work Well. Multiple content formats are excellent, but before you jump into each, make sure you know which ones will work the best. Test, analyze, and check the engagement of your content types; and tweak or change your habits accordingly. Utilize Visual Content. When an image is used, tweets see more engagement with 18% more tweets, 89% favorites, and 150% re-tweets. And Facebook saw a growth of 3.6x in the amount of videos used on the channel. Write Long-Form Content. Long content gives the perception of added value, making people more likely to trust and read. Posts over 2,500 words also do very well in the rankings. Create Relevant Content. You don’t want content that is outdated or doesn’t make sense to your audience. Instead, write content on trending topics within your industry as well as content you know your audience wants and needs to see. Bloggers, Include a Subscription Box. Email subscription boxes are a great way to give visitors access to content, eventually converting them into leads. (For every $1 spent on email marketing, average revenue is $44.25.) Test Different Calls to Action. Just by changing and testing the copy on their calls to action, Mozilla saw higher download rates for Firefox. They went from “Try Firefox” to “Download Firefox – Free”, and saw more clicks. Try and test actionable verbs and adjectives to convince people to click, purchase, and share … Read more

Why We Aren’t Fooling You About Good Content! Happy April Fools’ Day!

August 25, 2022April 1, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Happy April Fools’ Day! Depending on how much your friends or family like to prank, we’ll be considerate and avoid all pranks away this morning with this blog (you’re most welcome). We’re here to talk about having great content—which isn’t a joke developed by copywriters and Google, it is actually incredibly important. We promise we aren’t fooling you, and you will be incredibly happy if you focus on having great content. However, you might be wondering just how you can get excellent content all the time, especially if you are a very busy business owner. I am going to look at different content tips as well as services to help you create or receive excellent content you will be proud to share with your clients. Let’s take a look! 11 Awesome Ideas and Services to Help You Improve Your Content There are several ways to improve your content and make it the best, and I am going to look at a few of these. Expert Landing Pages are a Must. When you create your website, you always want to make sure that you have expertly crafted landing pages and web content. Having great web pages means that you have a higher chance of converting visitors into leads, and building your customer base. This is something that you obviously want because more customers means more revenue, and those customers might just tell others about your company and so on. Having these great, crafted landing pages is vital, and you need to find people who can expertly create them for you if you have any trouble whatsoever. Blogs Are Vital to Any Online Presence. When you want good content, you need to have an ongoing blog for your business. Blogs currently run the content world, and these are what will help bring people into your business’s website and convince those people to search the rest of your site. You can use your blogs as new, individual landing pages, which gives customers several places to choose and learn more about your company and services. Blogs provide a unique opportunity to help your clients out while encouraging them to choose your company for their needs. If you want to get the most out of your blogs, hire our expertly trained blog writers who will know just what to do for your blog and business. Get a Content Audit for the Best Content. Content audits are oftentimes overlooked because they can be time consuming. However, a content audit is a great way to make sure your content is still quality and fits with any new Google algorithms. A content audit is something I regularly encourage people to get because it really does help you learn more about the behind-the-scenes aspect of your site, and lets you know what you should change. You can take a DIY approach to content auditing, but it does take quite a bit of time, so the most efficient step is to hire our trained content auditors. Trained content auditors can help find everything you need to know to improve your website, making it the best it can be. Content Curation is the Way of the Content Future. Are you looking for excellent resources to share with your clients or to generate blog topics and titles? Then you should be actively engaging in our (recently launched service), content curation. This is a perfect way to find high quality resources that will help you create consistently great content. In addition, content curation will help you stand out as a leader in your field, and if you curate top quality material, you are more likely to be trusted by your customers. Trust is a great way to bring in more customers and keep your existing ones. Optimization is Still Important. While I have discussed all the different methods you need to use when creating content, optimization isn’t over just yet. It is still vital to content because those keywords can help with the big picture. Optimization implements your chosen or needed keywords into your blogs and web pages to help them rank on the search engine results page. Your website, with its multiple landing pages gives you many opportunities for optimization, which will greatly benefit your business. Keyword Research Helps You Find the Right Keywords to Use. When you use the above optimization, you will need to make sure you’ve researched the best, most impactful keywords for your site to get the best results. You can do this on your own through Google Analytics to see which words are bringing in more clients. One of the best ways, however, is to have our SEO experts do keyword research for you in your industry to find the ones that will have low competition while also being able to drive a lot of traffic and engagement. Depending on your business, there are a variety of keyword types that can work for you. There are the basic keywords that incorporate your services, but another form of excellent keywords is the long tail or local keyword for local based companies. This will help you come up on local searches easily, helping people in your area find your business. Hiring Niche Copywriters Helps Significantly. When it comes to your business, it is one of a kind and might have a very specific audience. Because of this, you are considered a niche industry, and you need writers who can write specifically for it. This oftentimes holds niche companies back from developing blogs because the owners and workers don’t have the time to dedicate to writing blogs every week, but they don’t want just a generic copywriter. This is where a niche, industry copywriter comes in. You can find one that can write for your industry to help make the biggest impact and bring in more clicks and leads. Have an Epic Social Media Presence. One of the best ways to have great content is to make sure you have an epic social media presence. This can help you … Read more

10 Tips For Getting the Most ROI From Your Content In 2015

December 31, 2020January 5, 2015 by Adam Oakley

In the last year, 2014, we saw a growth in the overall amount of media content that was shared by users in all forms of social media. The amount of users that utilize social media grew enormously, leading to a larger number of users sharing content across multiple social media networks. In order to calculate the return on investment on content, we must examine the different factors that affect the interaction of the audience with the content and how much time the content resulted in a positive response. By using the metrics for these data we can build a picture of how well or how poorly the particular content performed in respect to the investment made on promoting the content. Due to the sheer number of different things that make up the calculation for return on investment, pinpointing a particular factor to change or to improve in order to raise the ROI would be nearly impossible. 10 Ways To Boost Your Content ROI This Year There are wide spectrums of small changes that can be made to your content in order to make it more marketable. Let’s take a look. Use The Human Element. In order to reach out to people in this day and age it is necessary to interact with them on a more direct level. Human beings tend to utilize social media as a personal space; meaning that they tend to like and share items that resonate with them most personally. In order to bring a level of humanity to social media, adding a human element is often necessary. In order to get users to appreciate your brand, you have to act less like a brand online and more like a person. The personal touch goes a long way towards having people like and share your content because it stops coming from a nameless, faceless entity. The world today has invested a lot in being impersonal and anti-social. Key among offenders is businesses, since they tend to isolate themselves from their clientele. By breaking down this barrier you establish a rapport with your audience which goes a long way towards getting your content out there and raising the ROI on your content investment. Keep Focused. In social media as with anything that requires you to cover multiple angles in order to be successful, you have to keep your focus throughout the time of your social media campaign. Your target is audience is what you should be focusing on. Knowing your audience is probably the most important thing in conducting a successful social media campaign. By knowing your audience you can direct your efforts towards this particular niche, using the jargon to make them feel at ease. Once again, establishing rapport is crucial to getting your content around. Knowing your audience allows you to build targeted content that your audience would find both interesting and useful. The other point that you need to keep focus on is the quality of your content. Creating good content is as important as having a grasp of what your audience wants. You should give your audience what they want but not compromise truth in order to do so. Balancing these two aims will allow you to create content that your audience will love and pass around, directly affecting your ROI on content investment. Target Your Efforts. There are a number of different social media outlets available to a company. Any company investing in social media should be aware that the figure for a single arm of social media doesn’t necessarily carry over to other arms. Thus the outreach of a post on Facebook will not be the same as the outreach on a social media such as twitter. In order to maximize your ROI, you have to treat each one of these social media outlets separately instead of lumping them all together into a “social media” grouping. Many times, when a company seeks to lump all of its social media activity under a single umbrella department, the result is erroneous results where one arm of social media that has a poor results skews the statistics negatively. By selectively focusing how you market to each arm of social media and taking into account each arm separately you can find out which arm is the most in need of assistance in order to maximize the ROI for that particular social media network. Be Engaging. Social media is all about interacting with the customer on their level and creating and sustaining a rapport with the customer. In order to get the most out of your marketing efforts you need to engage the user and convince them that your content is worth reading and worth sharing. Once your content is good enough, you break it down to convincing them that they should read it. Simply posting links and descriptions isn’t what being engaging is about. You need to have more of a presence on social media in order to increase your engagement level with your users. Proper engagement requires commenting on relevant posts by users, including your own input in debates, asking for feedback about your products or services and personally dealing with users as they speak to you. Creating unique content is also important in the quest to be engaging and the more unique and high-quality the content is, the less you’re going to have to convince the user to share and like it on social media. These, in turn, translate to a higher ROI on your investment in the content department. Keep in Mind Your User’s Device. Social media and all content marketing over the last five years have seen a shift away from computer-friendly methods to methods that are intimately geared towards mobile users. Tablets and smartphones have taken over as the most popular ways of accessing the internet and content marketing has shifted focus along with it. Creating content today is mainly about developing engaging content, but at the same making this content accessible by all your users … Read more