The Content Pivot, how to show content growth over time
The true measure of strong content marketing is its lasting power. An article that gets two thousand visits in its first month but only 20 visits each month after that is not as powerful as the blog post that gets 100 visits in the first month and grows over 3 months to get 400 visits a month consistently. Content has momentum, just like a recurring revenue business does. Its no wonder they are often a good match for each other when deciding on a strategy for growth.
Momentum:
If you look below you see two lines on a graph. One shows the big splash article, this one does well on social media in the first couple of days, it gets a bunch of shares.
The big splash graph looks like this:
The next shows the evergreen content. This does decent in the first month from social sharing, but the real power comes from later months when it has building traffic.
The graph for one piece of evergreen content looks like this:
These figures are based off of real data, but are not real. They are based on what I’ve seen in the past. This may vary too, some companies I’ve talked to have had evergreen content that has a really good first month (a couple of thousand visitors per piece), and then over time the content visits grow to match the first months value. The purpose here is to show how valuable it can be to have evergreen content vs content built for just driving traffic through social. Here is what happens when you map out the two types of content each month:
As you can see with evergreen, the power of SEO and other long term traffic drivers is incredibly valuable in continuing to building on top of itself. By the 8th month, the post that was built for long term traffic continues to grow at a fast clip and surpasses the short term focused post.
You can have both. It is very possible to have a good first month push, and then grow sustainable traffic after that. What happens often though, is that we post a new article, we monitor its traffic for the first couple of days and then we forget about it. When we do this, we naturally start to ignore evergreen sources, and so we fall into the trap of creating posts that drive most of the traffic they will drive in their lifetime, in their first month. That makes it very difficult to grow.
Measurement:
The power of SaaS is the recurring revenue that makes it easy to predict and it is quite profitable. Content works in much the same way. You can spend time working on one article that will continue to drive you traffic three years later. In many cases the Leads/Customers from that article will pay itself off in the first couple of months, so every customer from then on is profit.
The monthly cohorts work in a similar way where one month you bring in new customers, and the next month you build on top of yourself because of low or negative churn.
In the chart below, each different color represents a different Monthly Cohort of articles written:
Evergreen content will continue to pay dividends for months and years after it is written. It’s a powerful strategy because of how scale-able it is. The content cohort gives us better perspective into the time to payback and how we are progressing. This enables us to set better goals and have a better understanding of what we need to do in order to get there.
Here is a presentation I gave at #GrowthCamp on this.
P.s. — Pamela Vaughn, a Principle Marketing Manager focused on Optimization at Hubspot did analysis on their blog traffic. Through her research on optimizing old posts, she found that 76% of their views came from “old posts” and 92% of leads came from old posts. I really enjoyed her presentation and thought it was relevant. Enjoy!
