Tag: content marketers

One of my biggest takeaways

One of my biggest takeaways from is the importance of knowing your customer / audience really well and delivering content for those specific people rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

We have different sub-niches and segments.

For example, people that are interested in high yield dividend investing are going to be COMPLETELY different from people interested in short term Options trades which are going to be completely different from people looking for cheap Marijuana stocks that are set to explode.

And really paying attention to open rates, CTR, and the behavior of your buyers and subscribers is paramount to changing your messaging around based on what they are reacting best to.

I’ll tell you that after a DECADE in this industry I am almost always wrong (still) in my assumptions of what content will or will not resonate.

Usually I write a few different versions of things to test.

Almost always, like clockwork, it’s the version I dislike the most that I have the least hope for that ends up doing the best.

And more often than not, it’s the most hyperbolic, most click-baity, lowest hanging fruit version — the version I imagine they’ve “seen enough of” or that “is too saturated” or “doesn’t work anymore” or that is “too salesy / cheesy.”

I have no idea why I’m still so surprised by it.

It’s the art of BS really. I’ve come across those “who reads that stuff???” people many times and they’ye been at high marketing/content marketing positions for a lot of years. Said the same thing and even got pretty offensive.

If you give people value they will read it and connect eith you (some books have 600+ pages and people still read it right?). If you give them bad content, they will notice right away it’s not worth their attention and leave. Don’t waste their time.

I guess doing things at this higher level needs a lot more understanding and knowledge of a ton of fields/skills. So when you propose something like this to people that are ignorant, you’re basically shaking their tree so they may fall down from it.

I’ve known for a while that +15 years of experience for A LOT of people means they’ve been able to gather 1 year of experience and just repeat that for 15 years.

Another solution is to find people that GET IT and work with them and never let go of them 🙂

I conducted a study of 1,117 content marketers to learn what successful blogs do differently. Here are the top takeaways.

In February I ran a big survey to find out what blogging & content marketing strategies are working best right now.

A full 1,117 people responded in total, including a bunch of redditors.

Two-thirds of them are blogging to make money or build a business.

Their responses have given us some really interesting data with a 2.9% margin of error at 95% confidence.

The best part: it’s segmented by income level, so you can see what bloggers who earn over $50K per year do differently from lower-income ones.

The full results post includes 19 illustrated charts and reactions from experts like Brian Dean of Backlinko, Andrew Warner of Mixergy, and more.

Here are some highlights:

  1. Blogs that earn over $50,000 per year put a lot of focus on email, using 343% as many email-collection methods as lower-income blogs.
  2. Longer articles are correlated with success. Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say their most popular blog posts are 2,424 words long on average: 83% longer than those from lower-income bloggers.
  3. Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year tend to put a lot of emphasis on SEO. Their #1 traffic source is typically Google organic search, and compared to lower-income bloggers they are 4.3 times as likely to conduct keyword research.
  4. Over 50% of bloggers say it has gotten harder to get traffic from Facebook over the past two years, and nearly one-fifth say it has gotten harder to get traffic from Google.
  5. Higher-income bloggers rate the importance of social media 19% lower than lower-income bloggers do.
  6. “Quality of content” is rated the #1 most important success factor among all bloggers. However, higher-income bloggers put much more emphasis on promoting their content than lower-income bloggers do.
  7. 70% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say they are active or very active promoters of their blogs, compared to only 14% of lower-income bloggers.
  8. Google AdSense is the most popular monetization method bloggers use, followed by affiliate marketing. But for higher-income bloggers, AdSense ranks third: they are 2.5 times as likely to sell their own product or service as they are to use AdSense.
  9. 45% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year sell their own product or service, while only 8% of lower-income bloggers do.
  10. The most common challenge bloggers face is getting traffic to their blogs.
  11. Successful bloggers know their audiences well. 73% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say they focus their content on the interests of a very specific group.
  12. Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year pay content writers 3.6 times as much as lower-income bloggers do.
  13. Compared to lower-income bloggers, bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year are 10.3x as likely to use paid promotion, 5.8x as likely to publish case studies, 5x as likely to have a podcast, 4.5x as likely to publish video, and 3.7x as likely to publish interviews.

There are a lot more insights in the full post, — for example, the first chart ranks the top 10 success factors.

But this isn’t a checklist of things that all blogs need in order to be successful.

Adopting an advanced technique too early may even make a blog less likely to succeed. (E.g. Unprofitable ventures will probably only become more unprofitable if they start using paid promotion for their blog posts.) These statistics are also based on correlation and not necessarily causation.

However, if you’re just starting a blog or having trouble making your content marketing perform well, it can be very helpful to see what successful bloggers are doing differently.

The key is to think about how those techniques fit in with the stage you’re at, as well as what you are trying to accomplish and what would best serve your audience/customers.

Thanks to everyone who took the survey!