The impact of writing blog posts for 12 hours straight and what we learned

More than a month ago, we set ourselves on a challenge. Write blog posts for surfkey.io for 12 hours straight to kick-start our blog SEO strategy.

This came after we did a challenge of writing 50 landing pages in 12 hours, which ended badly as we quickly realized there were not enough quality keywords. We would be just cannibalizing other pages.

On the other hand, in the blog post challenge, we focused on quality over quantity and tried to deliver as many high-intention articles as possible.

We decided to focus on highly intentional keywords with lower volumes, like How to use Reddit for marketing in 2023 or How to use find users on Reddit. This is because we want to cover keywords that have a chance to convert users and start building domain authority around Reddit Marketing topic.

We used ahrefs to scout these kws (so much worth paying!) and then kicked of the pillar blog post.

The content pillar

For the content pillar, we chose How to use Reddit for marketing in 2023. Pillar quite a detailed coverage of a broad spectrum of topics. Kind of a mother of all other blog posts. It contains the most important keyword, "Reddit for marketing," and all other blog posts are internally linked to getting the SEO juice going.

Then we got to the writing of the pillar piece and its subtopics. We haven't used Chat GPT too much as it tends to lock my creativity in its first draft of the blog, which doesn't feel relevant enough to our target audience.

It's great to help formulate specific parts or help with research and explanation.

Writing flow

After a few posts, this was my favorite writing flow

1. Blank sheet with the main keyword and all the contextual keywords
2. Outline with proper SEO structure (h1,h2,h3 and so on)
3. Writing the content, just letting it flow, not thinking if it's good or bad, just going with the moment as long as possible, not caring about grammar.
4. Cool down
5. Come back and do a proofread, moving things around so they make the most sense and cutting all the unnecessary parts.
6. Turning on Grammarly to make it correct > a huge help for a nonnative speaker

I could put out a blog in about 2 hours from start to end.

Then we started pushing all the written pieces to Webflow, creating OG images, structuring them to look nice, and backlinking them.

Results

Here are some results (but it's still way too early to judge; I will be posting a big comparison of the landing page performance VS blogs performance in about two months)

In the last 30 days, the blogs got
Total impressions: 1 046
Clicks: 5

It seems like a little result for a lot of work, most of the impressions and clicks are from the last week, and we haven't started backlinking properly yet.

All in all, I am super curious to see what shape will our SEO strategy take.

Btw. we recorded the whole challenge and did a video out of it. It has good vibes and energy! I would love to hear how you like it!