It has been two days since we published the 150 Posts in 50 Days recap blog, and the response has been tremendous. We’ve been bombarded (in a good way) with questions about our methodology and strategy for content. Here are some questions from our readers and some of our answers.
How long are the blogs?
The blogs average between 600 and 700 words in length. We wrote over 105,000 words during this process. That’s a lot of words 🙂
To read the blogs just visit Blog.LogMyCalls.com. You’ll see blogs on a variety of marketing related topics.
How did you plan topics for the blogs?
Before we began the content push we created a spreadsheet of blog titles. This Google spreadsheet was shared with the entire marketing team, the entire sales team, and executive team. Everyone was encouraged (required:) to suggest several titles for the blog. We had about 175 titles on the spreadsheet before we even began the blogging process.
Interestingly, we only used about 80 of the titles from our list. The other 70 titles we ended up publishing were things we thought of on a daily basis.
Did you choose general topics about your business or did you get more specific?
Our keywords revolve around call tracking, marketing ROI and call recording. We wrote about 40% of our blog content specifically around these keywords. Our audience likes to read about this stuff, and we’re experts in these areas.
We focused the remaining 60% of the content on general marketing topics. We wrote about everything from mobile click-to-call (which is directly in-line with call tracking) to content marketing and social media marketing (which isn’t really related to call tracking).
My only suggestion is this: regardless of title, make sure that your content is going to appeal to your audience. DON’T WRITE FOR SEARCH ENGINES, write for people.
How much engagement did this produce?
Engagement went up at approximately the same rate as traffic. The more people came to our site, the more people visited other pages. We tried to make sure that we had links to other blogs sprinkled throughout every blog. We also made sure that the most recent or most popular posts always appeared near the content so someone could navigate from the blog to another page easily.
Did posts with a specific number of words generate more engagement?
Not sure. We really didn’t track that. We tried to stick between 600 words and 700 words because that’s what all the content experts suggest.
What specific lead gen benefits did your efforts generate?
We generated 400% more content leads in Q1 than we did in Q4 of 2012. Not all of it was as a result of the content marketing blitz, but some of it was.
We made sure that we had a very clear CTA at the end of every blog. This CTA is typically for a White Paper download.
Are you ignoring SEO?
Many people asked this question because we went out of our way in the blog to discuss how we fired our SEO company.
We are not ignoring SEO at all. Rather, we felt like the SEO firm we hired was doing a crappy job. We paid them for 9 months and saw minimal results. We also found out about some rather gray hat tactics they were employing. When we added all this together and combined it with the fact that our blog was starting to generate significant traffic, we decided to fire them.
Does this replace SEO?
No, it doesn’t. Technical SEO is still critical. But Matt Cutts himself has said that if Google’s algorithms were given a choice between a technically strong SEO site with duplicate or old content, and a technically poor site with high quality fresh content, they would choose the site with new and fresh content.
Ideally, of course, a site should have both.
Keep the questions coming!
