This week I got 2 customers direct from one article and it restored my faith in content marketing
In March I started writing on this blog again after not putting an article on here for 18 months. I’ve really enjoyed getting back into my personal content. I’ve had some great engagement from people on some of the articles, and traffic has increased as well (see the full results here). At the same time you do always have that thought in the back of your mind… “is this actually doing anything for me business wise?”.
The dream with content marketing was always to create content that directly drives customers to your business. But the reality for most of the content marketing I’ve ever done is that it doesn’t really do that. It just broadly keeps you relevant, keeps you on people’s radar and builds trust and authority over time to position you as an option for someone when the problem you solve pops into their mind. I call it the Content Marketing Leap of Faith and I’m cool with it.
Even that is hard and I’ve been a bit down lately about how much content marketing has changed. I started content marketing back in 2006 via my little web design company sending out a quarterly industry newsletter. I wrote my first blog post in 2008 and have written reasonably consistently in the 15 years since in various places. Here’s my first blog post.
In the years since, I’ve used content marketing to build multiple 6, 7 and 8 figure businesses. But when I started again a few months back on my personal site, the game had changed. These days all the attention is on social media and mainly video, and I wondered how much my experience with blogging and content marketing would be worth.
Related: 5 things I got wrong about Content Marketing in my 2015 Book Content Machine & 6 More things I Got Wrong About Content Marketing in my 2015 Book Content Machine
But this week that all changed. I’ve been getting a little bit of traction on my recent content which has been nice (see the full results here). But more than that, I actually got 2 direct sales for my new WordPress support business WP Master, from an article I wrote. Here’s what happened.
To launch the business, I did all that I know how to do, I wrote a blog post about it. I figured anyone who’s been following me for a while would be interested in why I’m going back to the WordPress space with a new business. The article was called Why I’m starting a lifestyle business after almost 17 years chasing startup glory.
The article went well on my site with over 1,100 views, I then put it on LinkedIn (have a look here), and it got a decent amount of traction, 20 or so comments and 2,300 impressions. It got the attention of Eloise Keating, a News Editor from Smart Company and she emailed me. She was keen to publish it on the Smart Company site. I said yes straight away and minutes later it was up there live.
Getting re-published on Smart Company was pretty cool so I shared the news on LinkedIn, giving the story even more life. That post got 1,100 impressions and 11 comments. Smart Company obviously have a much bigger audience than I do so I imagine it had thousands of views up there. I got about 140 visitors from Smart Company to WP Master as a result. My chat was active for the first time on the site and 2 genuine businesses signed up within an hour.
Pretty damn cool and it goes to show that sometimes putting content out can get you some direct outcomes above and beyond the long hard road of years of writing and hoping for the best.
Keep creating!
If you have a WordPress site and you run an Aussie business, check out WP Master. If you want to follow my startup journey, jump on my weekly emails here.
Photo by Courtney Corlew on Unsplash
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