Mind Sharing your Content Marketing Journey? Length of time to some success...?
Hey IndieHackers, I know content marketing is likely hands down the best thing to invest in because unlike ads and etc it's not a one time hit.
My goal is to build at least 20k monthly views of traffic that is qualified potential buyers of my product. Obviously this can be achieved by producing a lot of content and some time for search engines to do their thing.
Curious to how long content marketing has taken some of you? Could be a good learning experience/benchmark to be ready for. Thanks!
Your should aim for a process, not a goal.
Process: "I'll publish 2 high-quality articles related to my product and promote it in relevant places online".
Goal: "I'll get 20k monthly views".
You have no control over how many monthly views you get.
You do have control over how many articles you write and how heavily you promote them.
20k monthly is ambitious. My blog got ~40k last month but I have it for over 12 years and I have a ton of content.
Looking at my analytics, it took me 2.5 years to get to ~10k and then shot up to 130k when I wrote a very popular program for Windows.
Which kind of illustrates that how fast you get there depends on how much hustle you put into it and what kind of quality you generate.
In general, rants and opinions are low value. If people will even find it, they'll skim it and then leave.
Posts providing concrete information (e.g. "how to use json in PostgreSQL") are higher value. People might find it via search and peruse your site for more articles like that.
And large, organized resources with concrete information (e.g. a whole book on PostgreSQL) have the highest value. People will find it via search and bookmark for future reference i.e. they'll be coming back.
Not surprisingly, it also maps to difficulty of creating the content.
You'll find a flood of opinion pieces. They are easy to write.
A large number of articles with concrete information. They are a bit harder to write.
And very few books. They are very hard to write.
Hello Matthew,
I have reached 52 000 unique visitors to my website last December. I was starting from scratch in July 2012.
It took me 2 years and 5 months to reach 20 000 visitors a month.
I have done all through SEO, I can tell you it took me 2 years failing and then 3 years to build my traffic (around 45 000 people a month now).
Also, you have to consider that at the beginning, the traffic you generate is not the most profitable you could do.
I confirm that SEO is a great way to build trust and business, but it depends on your knowledge and effort you put into it.
Do you already have any knowledge or plan to follow any training course about SEO?
You can also learn by yourself as I have done it. But personally I have failed and decided to follow online courses.
Yo Matthew!
In 2018, it's very much a quality over quantity issue.
Consumers are scrolling through content feeds more than ever. There's also more content (and noise!) than ever.
For my own shop, I work with a far smaller audience, but the conversions are quite healthy.
In other words, I don't need massive traffic for my agency to get fully booked.
For your case, it'd be useful to understand the cost of the product and your runway (or how much you need quick-wins).
Previous to starting my company I had the same realisation as you did, that content marketing and creating content in general (as well as it's distribution) would be vital to drive eye balls to what I was doing.
The way I went about it, and I am really happy that I (me and my co-founder) did, was to document our journey of building the company from day 1.
It's a term that Gary Vaynerchuk has called a "Document vs Create" tactic.
It has helped me immensely in terms of authenticity of content, volume of content, opportunity to create an audience previous to launch, as well as the ease of creating it.
Authenticity
It's going to be 100% authentic, raw and truthful, as it is just what we are actually doing, on a daily basis :)
Volume:
Every day, we work towards building the business, therefore every day we have something to share, talk about and write about.
Benefits at launch
We started documenting our journey from Day 1. By the time we had a market ready product, we had a small audience of people following the journey and anticipating the product. This helped in spreading the word, as well as a morale boost in terms of a strong start, once we started selling.
Easy
Again to my previous point, it's just saying/sharing/writing what you are actually doing.
It's also a great way to bounce off ideas and get feedback from the community, in real time.
Hope this gives you some ideas of how you can go about content marketing, I am definitely super glad we started doing this from day 1 (https://weardulo.com/blogs/origins/origins-1-origins) and we will keep doing it!
It's also super interesting and fun to be able to look back and compare where you were to where you are now :)
Good idea. How's the company going for you now?
We launched (the website) about 3 months ago, after about a year developing the product (with our manufacturing partners). The first month was very strong, because of the point that I mentioned about people anticipating the product etc. (also some people had samples, and most of them bought multiple shirts at launch).
Then there was the inevitable dip and a reality check that getting a business of the ground is not so easy :), so the second month was a lot weaker than the first. But, now we are starting to see a bit of an organic growth in terms of sales and traffic.
The whole thing of documenting and having a story to tell also helped us get on a few podcasts, and also have the credibility and some track record to get our first guests on our podcast.
In general that piece of content and the story behind it, has been very handy ammunition. And the more it grows, as an archive/history, the more valuable it will become.
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In what context/product/industry/platform are you planning to start creating content? Let me know, if I can help in any way.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
Yup, agreed.