How To Get 12,000+ visitors & 800+ Free Leads From One Blog Post: A Complete Guide
A story about how one article and a couple emails got us 12,000+ visitors and almost 800 leads.
You are probably asking yourself:
“How come my competitor’s content is always outperforming mine?”
Or,
“Why do these crappy blogs have more shares than mine?”
You spend hours meticulously writing and editing content. You think of an excellent topic to write about, do your research, and write a 1200+ word guide on how to hack the world and start making $200k per month. Your ego will tell you, “Man you did a good job.”
So you and your masturbating ego feel extraordinary. You think that you did it. You are invincible. You think you’re equal to God. So you hit the Publish button in your Wordpress. And wait for it…
So how many leads did that get you? You head over to your Analytics to see the traffic explosion to your website. You get excited and click to the Real Time dashboard, to see how many are reading it right at the moment.
No one.
And leads?
Nothing.
Oh boy what I did wrong? Are they coming?
And then it hits you: Gotta post it to Twitter!
So you post it to your Twitter account with 60 followers. Bam. And still, nothing.
You’re starting to freak out.
“Oh yeah I know, let’s post it to Facebook,” you’re saying to yourself happily, “my friends will help me spread my post so it goes viral.”
So you head over to Facebook, write a tantalizing snippet with your link, and hit the Post button.
Still. Nothing.
WTF?
Yeah buddy, you’re friends don’t give a shit about your hacking guide. They are Facebookers. They want to see a little kitty cats. Did you include them? No? Here’s one for you:
Enough cute kitties. Let’s get to the business.
So why doesn’t the “hoping and praying approach” work? I’m sorry to tell you, but this is just you being naive.
Sometimes people get confused about this internet stuff. You read some expert’s articles on the internet and you see all the shares and comments and you think that it has to be easy. But it’s not.
So that’s bad news. But here’s some good news: You don’t have to be an expert in digital marketing to do what I did. You don’t even have to be a great writer (I’m not even a native US speaker :D) and you can still do pretty well.
So what do you need to get several thousands of visitor and hundreds of leads from one blog post?
The key is to promote your masterpiece.
Without that you’ll just waste your time. Since your time is your biggest asset, you directly are wasting your money. Actually you are throwing the money to a garbage can.
Some says that you should spend 20% time of creating content and 80% of promoting it.
Shocked? I was too.
Even though the internet provides certain level of ease in getting your post viral, you have to help it a little to get the momentum started.
In this post I’ll show you what I exactly did in order to get 12,000+ visitors and almost 800 leads from one how to blog post.
We’ve created #growmance — a Slack community built specifically for growth hackers to hash out growth ideas in real time, with input from around the world. You can sign up here (it’s free to join).
Let’s break it down to the sections:
- Research
- Writing
- Publishing & Reposting
- Outreach
- Results
- Mistakes (what I should have done differently)
In each section I’ll tell you what I did. Also keep in mind that there isn’t only one right way to do it. I’m just describing how it worked for me. And it still works for me because it’s an easily repeatable process. This is important, to create a process for everything you’re producing. It will help you discover effectiveness of your work and give you a starting point every time you launch a campaign.
1. Research
Our blog was running for some time and it was time for epic content. I had some ideas about what to write, but I wanted it to be something that our readers are interested in.
So I opened a website called buzzsumo.com and inserted our URL. Buzzsumo found one old blog post that did particularly well in the past. It was about tools for researching competitors.
OK, I thought, let’s find something that people could like that will be easily shareable. I searched the internet and found that there wasn’t any great content on how to spy on competitors. In Google’s SERP there were some blog posts but nothing really saying how to do it, step by step.
I did a lot of research and put together a complete guide on how to spy on online competitors.
I also checked other weak blog post backlinks and saved the websites that could give me a backlink to a spreadsheet, which I would later use in outreach.
2. Writing
Since I’m not a professional writer, this was a part that took me the most of the time.
I wrote a long list of actionable content that you can replicate by reading the guide. That was the strong point, and something that every person that can read and perform without academic degrees.
Basically all of these steps I presented in article are simple hacks, detailed usage of tools that my competitors were talking about, that nobody had ever actually bothered to explain how to use.
I knew the only way to outperform our competitors was to write the longest and most detailed how-to post. This would be the only way I could ask for a backlink or share from influencers and get a positive answer.
So I dug in and wrote a 1700+ words guide.
The hardest part was now done.
3. Publishing & Reposting
When everything was proofread I simply published to our main blog. Our Marketing Director sent it out with our weekly newsletter. We also posted on our company’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Since it was related to marketing and there were some useful hacks, I posted it on GrowthHackers.com. Still today we’re getting leads from GH, and that post was published a year ago. I also determined the content to be useful for the Inbound.org community.
Next, I found a list of relevant subreddits and submitted my post there. Some went well and others not so well. I don’t have a high karma and my posts are sometime removed or marked as not relevant.
I submitted it also to 20 relevant LinkedIn groups and tried to create a discussion with other people from there.
About LinkedIn Groups: be careful with these. Excessive posting to non-relevant groups could get you banned. That means that all your future submissions will have to be approved by group admin. And frankly nobody will approve your post. You can get banned easily. Some random user can mark your post as spam and you’re out.
4. Outreach
Outreach is probably the most important step in this process. Without outreach it would be hard for you to get it in front of all those interesting and converting people. This is the step that you should start thinking about even before you start writing the article.
Ask yourself these important questions:
- Am I including someone in my article that has strong social presence?
- Do I know someone who recently gave a backlink to some other similar resource that I did better?
- Are there any bloggers who do a blog post roundup that are in my niche?
- Do I know a high volume newsletters that sends out curated content?
Once you get answers to your questions start reaching out. Find people that you mentioned in your article and send them a tweet or email. Before publishing, give them heads up about that you write about them and ask if they are interested to see it when it’s out.
Then send them an email with the link. Simple as that. Don’t push it. Nobody has any obligation to share your content, so respect that.
Next step: open your previously created spreadsheet with backlinks of your competitor’s content. This step works if your article is newer / better / more extended. Find relevant contacts and send them an email.
(Again, don’t push it.)
Next thing that worked well for me while I was promoting my blog post. I found bloggers that are doing expert roundup blog posts. They are basically blogging regularly (weekly or monthly) about what experts said this week or what appeared as important on the internet.
Just get their emails and write them. Put your message in front of them. Of course it has to be relevant to their niche, But go for it.
Last step in my process was to read for myself several different kinds of newsletters. Then I narrowed down to the ones with the best content and/or most readers. Give these writers a simple heads up about your article. That’s what I did with couple of them, and I even got a positive response from Moz.
If you know Moz they are super targeted on inbound marketing. They send a weekly newsletter called Moz Top 10. I wrote them simple email:
And her answer:
Never got an answer but one day I woke up surprised with leads coming on and traffic spike on website. So that must be it.
Results
The results were good at that time since we (@WeAreAudienti) were a fresh new team and we were still figuring this thing out. However, reviewing all these results I can say this:
We captured leads with an untargeted popup and it wasn’t converting well. We got 250 leads from this popup, which puts its conversion rate down close to 0.4%. Here is a screenshot
The other 530 leads are from another one of our projects called Scorecard.
This actually worked really well. I mentioned this tool (Scorecard) in the article, describing it’s how you can spy on your competitor’s keywords and traffic. To do that, you have to enter your email address. We lost a lot of leads during the next couple months of downtime. (I was the one who was doing some of the development, I’m not the best coder though).
Mistakes
When I review my original thoughts today, I have to say I wasn’t prepared really well. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, so what’s obvious today wasn’t that crystal clear back then. One of the biggest mistakes was probably not including an element called content upgrade. I did go back and add it in a couple months ago and now it converts around 6%. So that cost me 720 leads that I lost without including it the first time around.
That link opens this:
I also should have prepared more versions of the popup for A/B testing. The old popup that I was using back then was converting 2.5% then, and currently converts around 5%. Another 300 leads I missed out on.
And what I consider the biggest fail was that we weren’t really engaging these leads. They got one or two emails and then we were sending them newsletter. We didn’t have much of strategy.
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong, growth marketing isn’t about trying all these tactics and hoping that it all will work. It’s about small compounding wins that will push you forward. Yeah, it’s small steps, but they make a difference and eventually the wins will get bigger and bigger. Most people on the internet are not patient about success. They want immediate success. And they often become disappointed because it’s not fast enough or they think that it’s just not enough.
The thing is that we’re living in fake world — the internet — where people are posting only their wins and not their failures. This blog post should show you that if you try hard enough there could be a big win between failure after failure. So note that and start working :D
We’ve created #growmance — a Slack community built specifically for growth hackers to hash out growth ideas in real time, with input from around the world. You can sign up here (it’s free to join).
