Nothing is sweeter than creating a piece of content that really connects, meaning an article or blog that both tells a great story and achieves its business purposes of traffic, engagement and leads. These are great moments. Problem is, they are too few and far in between. Creating successful content that reads well, is written on a meaningful topic and drives strong performance is really hard. It involves both the left and right sides of the brain. And more often than not, it remains a hit-and-miss process that is hugely inefficient. Furthermore, the traditional approaches to improve the likelihood of success (like keyword research) are tedious and increasingly not effective. Not only is this frustrating to a writer, it prevents a content marketer from achieving his or her goals. New technologies have emerged to solve this problem. These applications range in capabilities from easing the creative burden of finding new topics to analytics that forecast the traffic performance of content before it is written. This session provides an overview of how writers and content marketers can leverage these advancements to remove the guesswork from content creation, and in the process gain significantly greater success with much less effort. This presentation was given at Information Development World on October 1, 2015.

1. InboundWriter
Work Smarter Not Harder - Remove the
Guesswork from Content Creation
Information Development World, 10/1/2015
Skip Besthoff, CEO
skip@inboundwriter.com

2. Agenda
Understand the explicit factors that explain why
some content works and others do not.
Learn about how to dramatically improve the
impact (ROI) of content creation.
Review actual case studies that show high impact
with data-driven metrics.
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3. What We Want
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4. This Is A Home Run
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Published: 2/17/14
Traffic ramp followed by consistent activity (43K+ sessions)
Scale = 600 sessions / day

5. This Is Typical
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Published: 2/20/14 (same site, same week)
Low level of sporadic activity; 48 sessions
Scale = 12 sessions / day

6. The Numbers Don’t Lie
Based on recent audits of InboundWriter accounts:
 The top 20% of content drives 60% of traffic
 Half of all content produced was driving nearly no traffic
 HUGE amounts of time and effort drive no value
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7. Perennials Versus Annuals
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vs

8. ‘Annuals’ Are Short-Lived
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‘Annuals’ might pop in traffic but then die off.
Lot of work and investment for limited value.
Promotion (social, email, etc) may drive a
pop, but anything can be promoted.
Scale = 300 sessions / week

9. ‘Perennials’ Drive Traffic Over Time
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‘Perennials’ tend to be content written on
evergreen topics.
They will develop more slowly
But over time produce order-of-magnitude
greater results
Scale = 2,000 sessions / week

10. Quick Takeaways
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Results are driven by a rare few, successful pieces.
Those ‘home runs’ are hard to come by.
Strong, consistent results are only driven by perennials (‘true
assets’), not annuals.
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11. Why
Does so much of my content
NOT work?

12. Traditional Approaches
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Do keyword research up front (rarely done)
Identify topics based on intuition, trends, etc
Write content
‘Optimize content’ with keywords
Tags and links (SEO)
Publish
Pray

13. Traditional Outcomes
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“A 66 percent failure rate might work in baseball … but
boardrooms won't tolerate this level of performance for
very long.”
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14. The “Science”
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15. The Rules Have Changed
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https://moz.com/blog/searchmetrics-ranking-factors-2014

16. ‘Topics’ Drive Performance
Key Takeaways:
 The keyword as such seems to continue losing influence over time as
Google becomes better and better at evaluating other factors.
 Search engines are moving away from focusing on single keywords to
analyzing so-called "content clusters" – individual subjects or topic
areas that are based around keywords and a variety of related terms.
 Please stop these outdated "Checklist-SEO" practices.
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https://moz.com/blog/searchmetrics-ranking-factors-2014

17. It Happens Before Pen Hits Paper
Topics drive performance
If topic choice is flawed, downstream efforts are wasted
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18. Many Factors Drive Success
How big is the audience for the target topic?
What is the topic and what are exact terms that
will drive traffic to a given piece of content?
What is the likelihood that the target website can
be in the top 50 results for the target topic?
Does the target topic overlap with content already
on the target website?
Competition
Uniqueness
Audience Size
Are you creating the type of content (e.g. news,
video, text) that your audience wants?
Topics (Terms and
Relevancy)
Audience Intent
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19. This Is NOT Limited To SEO
While these performance drivers in principal are not foreign to
SEO experts, when properly applied these factors affect all
forms of content traffic:
 Search
 Social
 Total Sessions (Visits)
 Total Pageviews
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20. What About My Spreadsheets?
Unless you take into account ALL those factors, it is probably
a waste of time:
 Most people cherry pick a couple of terms / a couple of
data points
 More often than not this does not create any data / insight
of value
This also tends to promote a ‘keyword’-centric mindset.
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21. What to do?

22. Writing ‘Good’ Content Is Hard
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23. Intuition Isn’t Always Right
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24. Step 1: There Is No Magic Bullet
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25. Step 2: Think Before You Write
High quality
content creation
takes HOURS
to create.
90% of it fails.
http://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogger-research/
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26. Step 2A: Reverse Engineer
Like it or not, it doesn’t matter
what you think is valuable.
What does matter:
– What your ‘content
customers’ want
– How a search engine or
web platform (social) will
match your content to
users
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27. Step 3: Use Data/Analytics Carefully
It’s better not to use it at all than abuse it. Applications to
consider:
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CATEGORY REASON EXAMPLES
‘True’ topic research
tools
- note: avoid idea ‘generators’
Critical to get topic right InboundWriter
Content Management
Platforms
Personas, Calendars,
Workflow
NewsCred, DivvyHQ,
Kapost, CoSchedule
Analytics / ROI Have to measure Google Analytics,
Adobe, Uberflip,
Curata

28. Step 4: Use Common Sense
Write great content and take your time. When in doubt –
less is more.
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CRITICAL FACTORS IMPORTANT FACTORS
Answer important
questions
Length
Engage users Images
Understand user intent
<-> content type
SEO / “good hygiene”

29. Step 5: Measure
A simple test – answer these questions:
– How do you define, in specific terms, content ‘success’?
– What % of your content is successful?
– What are the specific metrics you use to measure this?
If you don’t know, you are not doing content marketing:
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30. Yesware Case Study
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Yesware is a fast-growing startup developing email
productivity software for salespeople.
Yesware’s website is the main touchpoint with its prospects
and customers.
Yesware’s content manager, Bernie Reeder, aimed to
increase traffic and eliminate wasted content efforts.
Yesware typically produces a piece of content a week.

31. Avoid ‘Red’ Topics, Do ‘Green’
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Original Topic: Sales Email Frequency Guide
Actual Title: The Complete Sales Email Frequency
Guide: Why It Pays To Follow-Up
Original Topic: Sales Follow Up Email Templates
Actual Title: 4 Sales Follow Up Email Templates That
Will Get Your Prospect’s Attention
Bernie and her team started to use InboundWriter to forecast
the traffic performance of her content.
Before spending hours on a piece, they spent 5 minutes in
InboundWriter to make sure their idea was worth the effort.

32. Yesware Results: Huge Impact
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The ‘green’ topic had 3x the traffic in 40% of the time.
Traffic to the Yesware blog almost doubled within 6 months.

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Yesware: 20x+ Improvement
13.1x
3.4x
8x
26.9x
4.8x
6.3x
12.2x
22.2x
3.4x
13.1x

34. Typical Results: ‘Predictive Analytics’
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InboundWriter has completed over 40 formal case studies,
measuring InboundWriter traffic versus status quo.
2.4x
3.4x
2.4x
4.4x
3.6x
7.3x

35. Concluding Thoughts: Jay Baer
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 Today’s content marketing success formula is a
lot different from 2013 and prior … [it] is about
home runs and strikeouts.
 You need to figure out what creates home runs
and do more of that, while purposefully and
surgically eliminating strikeouts
 You may feel like you accomplished something
because you made your three posts/week goal.
You are not. You are just lighting money on fire,
$900 at a time.
Jay Baer
NYT best-selling author
Content Marketing Expert
Founder, Convince & Convert

36. Questions and Thank you!!!
For additional information:
www.inboundwriter.com
skip@inboundwriter.com