How we grew our small business's blog to 1 million readers a month [x-post from /r/content_marketing/]

[georgearriolamusic]

Hey folks,

As a small business (22 people prior to being acquired), we kicked off a big content marketing effort. Since then our content team has managed to grow our blog to 1 million monthly unique sessions.

I put together a guide on it here: https://blog.capterra.com/b2b-content-marketing-strategy/

We've generally not promoted our traffic levels (we're an example of what Jimmy Daley of animalz.co calls successful "silent content") but thought our experience might help other small business folks struggling in the early days with their own content programs.

I also added a free download in the piece of all our original strategy docs, plus a bunch of process docs and checklists we use currently to help others jumpstart their content teams.

Quick summary of some main points in the guide:

• Hiring full-time writers ensures higher content quality and quantity than trying to rely on existing employees to write content in between their other full-time work. Hire for writing ability, not industry knowledge.
• Commit to an actual strategy on paper, because that helps with executive buy-in plus identifying gaps in your strategic thinking (also makes you come up with an explicit "why" you're doing content in the first place)
• You content should target the entire realm of your reader's professional life, not just the very narrow Venn diagram where their professional life intersects with your product or service.
• For distribution, pick one main channel and one or two ancillary channels. Content is a long game and if you spread yourself too thin, you won’t be able to devote the time and energy to build up the content you need in any one channel.
• Our internal data show that, on average, traffic to our content doesn’t really pick up steam until month five and doesn’t peak until 10 months after publication, so focus on the long term and don't try to monetize your content too soon, or it will distort how you write and make pieces too salesy.
• You should publish more content at first to see what sticks for your audience, then scale those content types. We publish 3 posts per week per writer, and update our top performing pieces every 6-12 months.
• You probably won't experience "hockey stick" traffic growth. Our traffic growth was all linear, and it took us 5 years, but we achieved content marketing success without having to discover “the next best thing,” or having a “viral” hit, or getting oodles of fawning tier one media exposure.

And the free downloads I link at the end of the piece are:

• Our original, two-page content strategy doc
• Our original, two-page promotion strategy
• The promotion checklist our writers use for each of their pieces
• The checklist we use to guide our quarterly topic planning
• A printable worksheet to help you think through and outline your own content strategy

Also happy to chat here/answer questions if anyone would like!