short-term

“I blog all the time and I’m not seeing any traffic — why bother?” Okay, there’s a lot wrong with that sentence. First of all, define “all the time.” Does that mean every few months, every month, weekly, daily — hourly? The fact is — and you can quote me on this — the truth about how long it takes to get noticed in your content marketing… hurts. The Painful Truth About Content Marketing ROI — and Why You Should Grin and Bear It Anyway The honest-to-goodness truth about content marketing ROI is you’re not going to see content success the moment you press the launch button on your website and post your first blog. In fact, you’re not going to see success with your content in the first month — and maybe not even in the first year, depending on your post frequency (and the quality of your content, of course). Nope. If you’re looking for a significant return on investment (ROI), then you NEED to be in it for the long haul. In fact, this study from HubSpot outlines the magic number quite clearly — it’s around 400. After approximately 400 blog posts, HubSpot’s statistics showed that traffic just about doubles. For the savvy content marketer, that means you need to be prepared to deliver consistent, long-form content to drive the results you desire. [bctt tweet=”Publishing content consistently but not seeing any positive results? @JuliaEMcCoy discusses the truth about short-term vs. long-term success in #contentmarketing in this blog post #contentroi ” username=”ExpWriters”] And when I say consistent, I mean you have to have an editorial calendar and stick to it. No ping-ponging around with posts — posting twice a week one week, skipping a week, then posting again. I know, it’s not easy. Even Content Marketing Institute has found that more than half of marketers struggle with it. And yet, visitors want reliable, consistent, frequent updates — that’s what drives traffic. So, if you want the traffic, you’ll need to buckle down and find a schedule you can adhere to. Now, back to posting frequency. To get that traffic revving, you’ll need to not only be consistent — but frequent — with your posts. It’s a proven fact that companies that posted 16 or more pieces of content per month had 4.5 times more leads than those who posted 0-4 times. [bctt tweet=”Companies that post 16 or more pieces of content monthly have 4.5x more leads than those who publish 0-4x/month. @Hubspot ” username=”ExpWriters”] And that just makes sense, since all that posting means these businesses are providing their sites with four times the indexing and backlinking opportunities. You just need to be sure that all those posts are contributing high-quality content in order to keep visitors — and Google — happy. That means that even posting once a week, which many bloggers do, is likely to keep you in the realm of blogging hobbyists who don’t expect high traffic. So once you’ve decided you’re serious about moving forward with your content marketing, you’ll need to determine your goals. Want the maximum traffic? Consider publishing 4 posts a week, which will bring you up into that high-traffic-driving stratosphere. Looking for slower but steady growth? Consider 2-3 posts per week. If you don’t mind taking it very slowly, posting once per week is fine. Just keep in mind it will take you more than a year to see a significant jump in traffic. Once you’ve got your frequency and consistency down pat, you’ll need to concentrate on the meat-and-potatoes portion of success — and that’s your content itself. [bctt tweet=”What’s the recommended posting frequency for #contentroi success? @JuliaEMcCoy shares her insights, plus studies from @hubspot @cmicontent @backlinko @unbounce and others #contentmarketingroi” username=”ExpWriters”] Long-Form Content Provides Consistent Success Content return on success is not just about churning out random thoughts in 500-word posts. You have to consistently provide visitors long-form, comprehensive content that’s relevant to their needs. Multiple studies have proved this, and we’re a case study on this (stats on our own content marketing ROI coming up soon). To underscore the importance of this, BuzzSumo studied more than 100 million articles and found the posts most likely to be shared were over 3,000 words long. Image: Search Engine Journal And high rankings were tied to long-form content in a Backlinko study that examined more than a million blog posts. Of course, it’s not just the quantity that counts — it’s quality, too. Higher-Quality Content Brings Higher Content Marketing ROI Seems intuitive, right? And yet so many people miss this critical part of the content ROI equation. That’s why I conducted a case study using my own company as a benchmark. Why? Because Express Writers has managed to pull down six-figure earning months on the basis of our content alone. We did it by publishing over 1,000 blog posts with consistent, long-form content over six years. Yes, you read that right — six years. As of this post, we’re at 1,142 blog posts, total. That content, which is published weekly along with a few podcasts with notes and recaps from our #ContentWritingChat, costs us about $1,600 per month. It’s a very long time, a lot of investment, and a lot of content — but worth every minute of the hard work. If we bought that kind of traffic versus generating it ourselves, it would set us back a mind-blowing $66,700. But just by rolling up our sleeves and finding ways we could provide serious benefit for our reading audience, we were able to create a business that frequently breaks the six-figure threshold in a month — while spending under $2K. Of course, as I mentioned, our content isn’t just long, it’s high quality — and that’s what you need to strive for. E-A-T Your Words — How to Create High-Quality Content to Win at Content ROI High-quality content needs to adhere to Google’s quality rater guidelines, which require that it’s got a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T), a nice … Read more