so you think you can write

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