SearchLove San Diego 2019 - Nadya Khoja - Growth by Content: Driving Massive Traffic Without a Big Budget
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SearchLove San Diego 2019 - Nadya Khoja - Growth by Content: Driving Massive Traffic Without a Big Budget
- 80. @nadyakhoja
Editor's Notes
- Hey everyone, my name is Nadya Khoja, and I’m the Chief Growth Officer at Venngage Going to talk today about strategy to scale up your organic blog traffic Twitter handle is on the screen, feel free to tweet throughout the presentation or to send me any questions that way
- Before we get started, want to tell you a little bit about Venngage Joined back in 2015- 4th person on the team At the time, generating roughly 400 leads or signups to the tool a week
- Today that number is closer to 40,000 signups a week And our strategy hasn’t changed that much- we focus primarily on content marketing and driving organic traffic We barely spend any money on ads
- But we’ve managed to achieve growth quite rapidly- in fact growing at an average rate of 150% YoY No series funding
- And more than 10% of those leads are coming directly from our blog with a direct conversion rate of nearly 5% from visit to registration Of course this was not always the case- initially lots of traffic coming in but not many people actually taking any action- and not the right kind of people
- Decided it was time to revise our content strategy in order to achieve more consistent and predictable growth
- Now for whatever reason- I’ve noticed that a lot of people are very opposed to trying content marketing. In fact I’ve heard lots of excuses from people as to why they choose not to double down on it “It doesn’t convert” “Takes too long to see results” “Isn’t scalable”
- So instead marketers rely on pouring money into ads because it’s faster and easier. But what happens when you don’t have a budget for ads? Or your LTV isn’t high enough to sustain them?
- Today want to share the exact framework we use at Venngage Prove that content marketing is actually a very effective and scalable means of growth- you just need to approach it the right way and think more like a growth marketer The framework we only started applying to our blog strategy at the end of 2017- and as you can see it lead to us 3x-ing our organic blog traffic in less than 1 year
- Now maybe you have decided to attempt content marketing- who here has at least attempted content marketing as a strategy? Write some articles, publish and wait, right? Probably dont see much improvement
- And maybe your organic growth looks something like this
- Or this
- Or maybe even this if you’ve had some luck with promoting content But still nothing to brag about Love looking at people’s charts on ahrefs- can always see the exact point someone is “getting it” or trying something new BTW All these examples are of sites claiming to be “experts” at content marketing Clearly none of them are practicing what they preach
- Today will cover 4 important aspects for preparing content strategy to achieve scalable growth- so traffic looks less like this and more like this Goals Research Authority Promotion In other words- GRAP ..like grape, but without an E First part of framework to understand is G How to set goals for content strategy to achieve org growth Not all content is created with the same purpose
- Today will cover 4 important aspects for preparing content strategy to achieve scalable growth- so traffic looks less like this and more like this
- Goals Research Authority Promotion
- In other words- GRAP ..like grape, but without an E
- First part of framework to understand is G How to set goals for content strategy to achieve org growth Not all content is created with the same purpose Here is a simple flow chart I created of what “winning” at google looks like It kinda looks like a one-legged stick man
- 3 simple end points- more traffic, higher DA, higher conv.
- Ultimately we all want at least one of those three things, the majority want all of those things However not all content can achieve all of those things all of the time
- Meaning, you need to stop relying on same process for content creation in hopes to achieve various goals Need to create specific types content that targets each of those goals. For instance, you might have a product or service that falls in a relatively niche industry- and maybe you’re really good at creating content that is optimized for conversions, or it’s generally easier to do that. But it might not be easy to get lots of traffic because of how niche your product is- right? So that content in question is only achieving one goal.
- Here’s an overview of how venngage approaches some of our content goals- this is specific to venngage but the framework still applies Viral /editorial content--- purpose is press links [mention webinar on principles of viral content] - domain authority Inspirational content ---> purpose to rank on various high volume keywords - traffic And actionable content/how to guides----purpose of solving customer pain point and education users -----conversions and activation
- At a closer glance, creating content to boost your domain authority might look something like this- In a nutshell, need high quality links- ideally press mentions from notable sites like Mashable, Forbes or Entrepreneur etc, pointing back to your domain. BUT, they probably won’t wanna write about your article on “simple backgrounds and design tips” or mine for that matter- so you need to think of something a little bit more appealing- something that will EARN you attention or links - something like “visual content marketing statistics”.
- And of course, the article that gets you that press link might not actually be optimized in a way that will drive a lot of organic traffic. So you might not get much traffic even if that awesome survey you worked on does get tons of links. But that “simple backgrounds post” is driving lots of traffic and ranks for tons of keywords but only has a few backlinks. See where im getting at?
- Closer look will show that even tho the visual stats article got over 1k links but driving very little organic traffic But the simple backgrounds article got only 8 links and is driving close to 15k in traffic
- So your content calendar can no longer just be a list of “fun ideas” to write about But rather needs to be strategic and needs to take each one of those different “goals” into account, individualy.
- So you see even if “user acquisition” is at the top of funnel, you kind of need to approach it like its own funnel or landscape. Make sense? (within a funnel) like inception Once goals are identified, next step is research
- Research We talked about the 3 types of goals to strive for with your content, but the next part of the framework is research- this means developing a system to identify which keywords to rank for Doesn’t make sense to me to approach content marketing without taking keyword research into account Lot of marketers spending money/time producing/creating all this content for acquisition- but getting little to no results because there is no strategy- so they’re flatlining
- But really, the creation process should START with kw research Because then at least you can guarantee yourself some benefit
- When figuring out which keywords to target, I like to build what I call a content organization system. Here is an overview of what a really simple COS looks like for my personal blog. [Will provide link to download/access more info and all these resources later] The purpose of this system is to brainstorm keywords and jot town their general search volume and competition And essentially give you a better idea of the range/diversity of content you can write about- as it pertains to people’s interests That way you are not playing guessing games and wasting time writing anything and everything- you are writing content that people are actually searching for Also great for coming up with ideas
- Your COS is broken down into categories, subcategories and longtail terms For instance you probably have primary or more general categories your blog covers- like leadership or marketing right? Within these bigger categories, there are slightly more specific subcategories that you can research For instance, Within leadership, might include “Management” “Company Culture” or “Productivity”- make sense? ---- Talk about sub-subcategories Ex. “Management” breaks down into related keywords- management skills, people management, etc.- more longtail, right? ----- Can breakdown into even more longtail content like “how to manage a business” or “team management skills” etc
- There are lots of reasons for creating a chart like this- but main purpose to better understand theme and depth of topics you are writing about It’s time consuming and can get very complex- but necessary part of the process to drive organic traffic and scale effectively Need to focus on creating quality content that engages audience [mention if time article on engaging audience] And super useful when establishing authority for your site--
- Authority Which is next part of GRAP framework Establishing content authority is really important if you want to maximize the way you drive traffic to your site. What is content authority? Similar concept to creating “content clusters”-- essentially consistently producing content that falls within a topic or realm Eventually you become more known as a brand and by search engines for that topic For instance- Venngage produces a lot of content about design and infographics- and as a result, we’ve established a significant authority for infographic related content.
- This is where your COS comes in handy If you notice here have column for “suggested title’ as well as “suggested editorial/viral’ title Can start to figure out what types of content to write about, and potential topics that build off of the keyword research you’ve done The research on those “categories” eventually guide the pillar content pages you create (or the ‘hub’ content)
- Eventually you build out this web of inter-related topics that essentually create bubble or “cluster” of content on your site related to the pillar/ category topic More quality content produced, the more complex these clusters become Eventually your cluster on leadership might look something like this And if you can keep up with my madness, you can start to see how your content goals tie in here
- Your actionable, inspirational and viral content all fall into this cluster Maybe you start with something called “What is leadership” as a pillar informational piece of content But you can write an actionable article called “How to be an effective leader” Inspirational article called “50 inspirational leadership quotes to get you through your day” And even an editorial type called “Leadership skills CEOs from Fortune 500 companies all have in common” You can keep doing this for a variety of different pillar pages and create more indepth content clusters like I’ve starting doing here, and they all tie into your goals of Winning at Google. Pretty dope right? But of course no point in creating this beautiful madness if no one is going to read your content
- Which is why you need to P -- as in Promote...the last part of GRAP framework Unfortunate truth is that too many people spend more time creating content, not enough time promoting Once you’ve created content with a goal, that is keyword-drive and authoritative - next step is getting it in front of the right people
- If we go back and look at this example from one of our “content marketing experts”, as you can see the top 10 pages driving organic traffic to their site start off with considerable traffic volume, but it fizzles off really fast.
- This site however, has over 5000 blog posts published, and is consistently creating new content on a daily basis. However, as we can see there doesn’t seem to be much of an impact. It looks more like they haven’t really bothered scaling up at all...
- What’s more surprising, is that less than 500 of those pages are actually driving any traffic at all...
- Meaning that only 10% of all their pages (not just blog content for that matter) is driving ANY traffic and the remaining 90% is essentially doing NOTHING for this site in terms of organic growth. Seems like a waste, right?
- A rule of thumb I often tell my team to stick to, is that the promotion of your content should actually take up more time than the creation of it,
- Of course we all know that there are a variety of organic ranking factors for Google- and the promotion strategies vary depending on where you’re focusing your efforts For the team at Venngage, we decided to prioritize our efforts on where we could there was higher impact on organic rankings- linkbuilding
- And even today, many SEOs still consider links to be the most impactful ranking factor - not just quantity of links, but quality and relevancy too.
- So In a nutshell- as Search/content marketers we are always searching for those precious backlinks, right? At least this is where my teaem decided to place all of our attention. I understand that there are many other methods to promotee content- diff things will work for diff people when it comes to organic rankings We decided to focus on ways to get more/better quality links directly since we saw it working Will share our exact process with you for generating backlinks, as well as some best practices for cold-outreach and cold-pitching.
- Of course, Depending on the type of content you’re producing, and the goal you have in mind- you should approach promotion and linkbuilding a bit differently in order to make sure it’s as targeted as possible/expect different results For your viral content- as we discussed your focus in on driving high quality backlinks but you probably won’t get a surge of organic traffic directly Or conversions for that matter Want to focus on reaching out to press sites/sites with high domain authority
- For inspirational or actionable content- you probably won’t get press mentions (doesn’t fit well as trendy or newsworthy) So want to focus on sites writing about similar niches and topics-- like blogs/marketing news and building links there
- [change this slide so boring pages are highlighted first] First The way I see it, with SEO/content strategy there are usually 2 types of pages that you are probably trying to promote- that’s IT And those are your “Boring pages” and your “not boring pages” Simply stated, your boring pages are typically those high converting landing pages that are super hard to build links to. And the Not boring pages are your blog content and other un-gated forms of content. I’m going to share a couple of strategies that we used to promote both of these kinds of pages. I’ll start the exact methods we used to initially build links to our BORING pages, since it’s typically more difficult to do. I’ll also end off with some additional best practices for link-building to the not-boring pages
- As I mentioned, when I first joined Venngage we didn’t actually have a blog at all, and our homepage was realistically one of 2 pages on our site that were driving any traffic.
- So my first goal was to build links to the homepage so we could rank higher on some more competitive keywords like “Infographics” and “Infographic Maker” and “Infographic Templates”
- Now I’m sure you know how difficult it is to build links to a homepage when you’re just trying to secure a branded mention. But it’s even more difficult to do when you’re trying to secure an anchor-text mention. And for someone like myself who had absolutely no experience and no network, it was EVEN harder because I was literally invisible online and therefore had no “authority” if you will.
- So I had to figure out a way to convince people to give me these anchor links- and more specifically I wanted them to give me these links happily and willingly so that I could establish a good relationship with them in order to continue communication with them in the future. The LAST thing I wanted to do was come off as spammy or irrelavant. So what I did, was I started to offer people a free CUSTOM infographic. They were skeptical of course because no one was doing this at the time- why would I be so willing to give someone a FREE infographic when it was a service one often paid for- and usually paid a considerable amount for But people were definitely intrigued
- Now at the time I was the ONLY person on the marketing team, so I didn’t have a lot of resources to leverage, and I also had a lot of things to figure out as you can imagine. But because Venngage is a template based infographic tool I figured I could just make these custom infographics myself.
- Eventually I tweaked the process and I figured out a way to scale it up. Able to push out around 10 guestographics a week Without spending any time personally on the designs As the team grew, onboarded people on the exact process so they were ramped up quickly and able to execute quickly And we still use this method as a way to drive good quality anchor links to our most “boring” pages.
- First things first- these are the two tools myself and my team use most frequently when it comes to link building for both the boring and not boring pages. The first is Ahrefs and the second is Mailshake. I’ll show you how I use these tools to drive quality links to various pages.
- Like I said I knew that I needed to drive good anchor links to Venngage’s homepage- but I wasn’t getting great feedback from cold outreach alone, and I was blowing through quality leads like crazy. So instead, I started to look for content that was ranking for a range of different keywords, but that were lacking in visual content. I used Ahrefs Content Explorer tool and tried to find articles that included phrases like “10 tips” in the title. Or variations of that - “5 examples” etc.
- The reason for this, is that I knew list-based articles would be a really easy target to create a custom infographic. The content was already formatted for simple navigation I could reuse the same infographic template multiple times and just automatically change the brand colours to fit different site’s needs. [show example of doing this in Venngage with a gif]
- Here’s a closer look of what that looked like [show example of doing this in Venngage with a gif]
- So I would scrape the lists of articles from Ahrefs and identify the sites with higher traffic (filter) and domain authority (filter). I wanted to leverage sites that could potentially send referral traffic my way as well. Content that included recipes or “best of” lists (think sneaker heads or fall fashion as a topic) were also great candidates for an infographic since that kind of content performs well on Pinterest. And for US they were relevant because were able to turn those infographics into templates we could use on our site later on. Two birds, one stone.
- Then I would reach out the the writers and ask if they wanted a custom infographic to add to their article. Here is the exact template I would use: [template of free infographic and mention collaborated with venngage] I would also get an outline from them of the exact copy they wanted to include in the infographic. This helped me ensure that there was less back and forth in terms of the actual content in the infographic, and any edits would just involve small design tweaks.
- Pro tip: make sure you ask for a link or mention that is embedded within the content and not as a footer beneath the infographic. The link needs to appear natural, and embedded footer links can come off as spam. In fact this is a reason a lot of people doubt the credibility of infographics. But really, it’s because they aren’t thinking outside the box.
- You’re probably wondering how I could possible scale this up, plus get all my other work done. Even if it just took me an average of 20 minutes to edit the infographic, the reality is a lot of time is invested in the back and forth communication.
- So we created a trello board like this to track all the projects that we were working on, and we hired a virtual graphic designer off of upwork to use our tool and create custom designs based off of the outlines I got.
- The cost for a designer was minimal, and she was able to produce an average of 2 infographics an hour. And only cost me $8 and hour. So really, what I was paying per link at the end of the day (not including my time) was just $4. Here’s an exact breakdown of what the cost per specific anchor link looked like over the span of a month [show high output and low output versions which are at about 2 infographics completed a week, high end 3 a day] Even on the really low output end I was driving 8 links a month at an average cost of $7 per link. On the high output end, I was driving 60 links a month at an average cost of $6 a link. $8/Hr x 8 work hours a day x 5 days a week x 4 weeks a month = 1280 + $49/m for unlimited use of software = 1330 2 designs/hr = 320 designs 1 design/hr = 160 1330/320 = 4.15 1130/160 = 8.17
- And that’s with one person working on link building at about 50% effort a week. So imagine if you had one person dedicated to that full time, or managed to scale up your team to follow a similar process? What if 10 people were doing this 50% of the time? Since this worked, we built out more and more landing pages to target a variety of keywords. We’re quickly ranking higher and higher on all these pages.
- We even used this process to boost organic traffic to our international sites as well [show screenshot of spanish and portuguese sites]
- Which in a year has contributed to us nearly trippling our site’s organic traffic without ad spend
- Needless to say promoting boring pages doesn’t need to be as complicated as it seems as long as you’re providing people with value and giving them a reason to link to your site. This process has allowed us to establish good relationships with businesses that have made it easier to also drive links to our content, or Not boring pages. But there are some other best practices that can contribute to earning links faster for content.
- Ahrefs content explorer tool is one of many ways one could use ahrefs for link building Assume we have article written/optimized for term “infographic design” this what I want to rank for Use content explorer to see who has written on subject Filter by domain rating so I am sure to focus on generating better quality links
- Get list of content that mentions that term But you can Can also filter to see if that term was mentioned just in title OR just content or everywhere Pro tip Actually makes more sense in a lot of cases to see if term is mentioned just in content and NOT title People don’t want to give u a link to a term they are trying to rank for Instead they already mentioned the term within content that you want to rank for Much easier to add link there than figure out how to include your content etc.
- I mentioned before that one of the other tools we use is mailshake. Mailshake for cold pitching Use mailshake to create outreach campaigns Can set up multiple custom and personalized follow-ups rather than sending one email at a time manually
- A few best practices for outreach- want to keep in mind you are still interacting with real people/point is to build relationships Try not to sound like a robot And be confident about the content you are promoting (dont be overly apologetic) Example of Falguni on Linkedin- bad grammar, very vague reference to content, and WAY to enthusastic about a blog post he read.
- Make sure you are culling your lists and that any content you are referencing in your pitch is actually relevant to the link you want. Don’t want to accidentally pitch a competitor - want to also make sure what you are pitching is within context of what that person wants
- Inject your personality in your email- you should be yourself (unless “yourself” sucks...then be someone better) Ex. of a followup that has worked well for me- typically have a pretty sarcastic and often self-deprecating sense of humor- so I actually provided ways people could reject me based on what I’ve seen in the past.
- Most importantly, Give them a reason to care about what you’re doing. The more they care, the better your chances are of getting that link. Which means short and sweet doesn’t necessarily work ALL the time. Sometimes longer emails where you can share a bit of your story can actually help establish a connection with someone else. If you can make it personal enough.
- Main thing to remember is Always wanna think about the relationship first and view link building as a long-term strategy, not a quick win. You can reap better rewards down the line if you invest the time and effort early on. And it always helps to offer something of value first or in return. Linkbuilding is iteratie process Keep tweaking and improving technique to see consistent results and growth
- Now you might be thinking- I don’t want to come off as spammy and bother people- isn’t cold outreach a bit pushy?
- I’ll say this- Not if it’s targeted and provides value for the person you are reaching out to- obviously doesn’t make sense to send out a mass email to 1000 plus people if they aren’t the audience who will likely be interested in the content you are promoting, right? So my perspecetive is that no- linkbuilding- at least, good linkbuilding is not spammy if you are executing right. Of course- you also can’t sit back and wait and hope that results will come without asking for help, right? Just be smart and precise about how you approach cold outreach.
- And realistically- good execution is based in making data driven and iterative decisions- Many marketers may not consider content marketing to be the same as growth marketing. But all growth marketing really is, is a data-driven and iterative approach to growth. The goal is to get big results by taking calculated risks. If you can apply this same logic to content marketing, and follow this framework closely, I’m positive you’ll get results and avoid an organic traffic flatline.
- And here is a brief summary of the GRAP framework, and if you want any resources or templates that I mentioned throughout this presentation- send me an email with the subject line searchlove- this is my ACTUAL email and I will get back to you. My twitter handle is also at the bottom of the screen- so feel free to tweet at me or simply heckle me if that suits you. Thank you.