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InboundWriterWork Smarter Not Harder - Remove the Guesswork from Content CreationInformation Development World, 10/1/2015
Skip Besthoff, [email protected]
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential 2
Agenda
Understand the explicit factors that explain why some content works and others do not.
Learn about how to dramatically improve the impact (ROI) of content creation.
Review actual case studies that show high impact with data-driven metrics.
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What We Want
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential 4
This Is A Home Run
Published: 2/17/14 Traffic ramp followed by consistent activity (43K+ sessions)
Scale = 600 sessions / day
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential 5
This Is Typical
Published: 2/20/14 (same site, same week)Low level of sporadic activity; 48 sessions
Scale = 12 sessions / day
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The Numbers Don’t Lie
Based on recent audits of InboundWriter accounts: The top 20% of content drives 60% of traffic Half of all content produced was driving nearly no traffic HUGE amounts of time and effort drive no value
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Perennials Versus Annuals
vs
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‘Annuals’ Are Short-Lived
‘Annuals’ might pop in traffic but then die off.
Lot of work and investment for limited value.
Promotion (social, email, etc) may drive a pop, but anything can be promoted.
Scale = 300 sessions / week
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‘Perennials’ Drive Traffic Over Time
‘Perennials’ tend to be content written on evergreen topics.
They will develop more slowly
But over time produce order-of-magnitude greater results
Scale = 2,000 sessions / week
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Quick Takeaways
Results are driven by a rare few, successful pieces.
Those ‘home runs’ are hard to come by.
Strong, consistent results are only driven by perennials (‘true assets’), not annuals.
WhyDoes so much of my content NOT work?
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Traditional Approaches
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential
Do keyword research up front (rarely done)
Identify topics based on intuition, trends, etc
Write content
‘Optimize content’ with keywords
Tags and links (SEO)
Publish
Pray
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Traditional Outcomes
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential
“A 66 percent failure rate might work in baseball … but boardrooms won't tolerate this level of performance for
very long.”
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The “Science”
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential
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The Rules Have Changed
https://moz.com/blog/searchmetrics-ranking-factors-2014
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‘Topics’ Drive Performance
Key Takeaways: The keyword as such seems to continue losing influence over time as
Google becomes better and better at evaluating other factors. Search engines are moving away from focusing on single keywords to
analyzing so-called "content clusters" – individual subjects or topic areas that are based around keywords and a variety of related terms.
Please stop these outdated "Checklist-SEO" practices.https://moz.com/blog/searchmetrics-ranking-factors-2014
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential 17
It Happens Before Pen Hits Paper
Topics drive performance
If topic choice is flawed, downstream efforts are wasted
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Many Factors Drive Success
How big is the audience for the target topic?
What is the topic and what are exact terms that will drive traffic to a given piece of content?
What is the likelihood that the target website can be in the top 50 results for the target topic?
Does the target topic overlap with content already on the target website?
Competition
Uniqueness
Audience Size
Are you creating the type of content (e.g. news, video, text) that your audience wants?
Topics (Terms and Relevancy)
Audience Intent
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential 19
This Is NOT Limited To SEO
While these performance drivers in principal are not foreign to SEO experts, when properly applied these factors affect all forms of content traffic: Search Social Total Sessions (Visits) Total Pageviews
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What About My Spreadsheets?
Unless you take into account ALL those factors, it is probably a waste of time: Most people cherry pick a couple of terms / a couple of
data points More often than not this does not create any data / insight
of value
This also tends to promote a ‘keyword’-centric mindset.
What to do?
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Writing ‘Good’ Content Is Hard
© 2015 InboundWriter, Confidential 23
Intuition Isn’t Always Right
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Step 1: There Is No Magic Bullet
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Step 2: Think Before You Write
High quality content creation takes HOURS to create.
90% of it fails.
http://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogger-research/
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Step 2A: Reverse Engineer
Like it or not, it doesn’t matter what you think is valuable.
What does matter:– What your ‘content
customers’ want– How a search engine or
web platform (social) will match your content to users
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Step 3: Use Data/Analytics Carefully
It’s better not to use it at all than abuse it. Applications to consider:
CATEGORY REASON EXAMPLES
‘True’ topic research tools- note: avoid idea ‘generators’
Critical to get topic right InboundWriter
Content Management Platforms
Personas, Calendars, Workflow
NewsCred, DivvyHQ, Kapost, CoSchedule
Analytics / ROI Have to measure Google Analytics, Adobe, Uberflip, Curata
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Step 4: Use Common Sense
Write great content and take your time. When in doubt – less is more.
CRITICAL FACTORS IMPORTANT FACTORS
Answer important questions
Length
Engage users Images
Understand user intent <-> content type
SEO / “good hygiene”
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Step 5: Measure
A simple test – answer these questions:– How do you define, in specific terms, content ‘success’?– What % of your content is successful?– What are the specific metrics you use to measure this?
If you don’t know, you are not doing content marketing:
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Yesware Case Study
Yesware is a fast-growing startup developing email productivity software for salespeople.
Yesware’s website is the main touchpoint with its prospects and customers.
Yesware’s content manager, Bernie Reeder, aimed to increase traffic and eliminate wasted content efforts.
Yesware typically produces a piece of content a week.
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Avoid ‘Red’ Topics, Do ‘Green’
Original Topic: Sales Email Frequency GuideActual Title: The Complete Sales Email Frequency
Guide: Why It Pays To Follow-Up
Original Topic: Sales Follow Up Email Templates Actual Title: 4 Sales Follow Up Email Templates That
Will Get Your Prospect’s Attention
Bernie and her team started to use InboundWriter to forecast the traffic performance of her content.
Before spending hours on a piece, they spent 5 minutes in InboundWriter to make sure their idea was worth the effort.
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Yesware Results: Huge Impact
The ‘green’ topic had 3x the traffic in 40% of the time.
Traffic to the Yesware blog almost doubled within 6 months.
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Yesware: 20x+ Improvement
13.1x
3.4x
8x
26.9x
4.8x6.3x
12.2x
22.2x
3.4x
13.1x
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Typical Results: ‘Predictive Analytics’
InboundWriter has completed over 40 formal case studies, measuring InboundWriter traffic versus status quo.
2.4x
3.4x
2.4x
4.4x3.6x
7.3x
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Concluding Thoughts: Jay Baer
Today’s content marketing success formula is a lot different from 2013 and prior … [it] is about home runs and strikeouts.
You need to figure out what creates home runs and do more of that, while purposefully and surgically eliminating strikeouts
You may feel like you accomplished something because you made your three posts/week goal. You are not. You are just lighting money on fire, $900 at a time.
Jay BaerNYT best-selling authorContent Marketing ExpertFounder, Convince & Convert
Questions and Thank you!!!For additional information:[email protected]