Content is Still King

First of all, let’s agree not to mention AI or ChatGPT for the entirety of this article.

Thanks.

I write a lot.

I write a lot for SaaS businesses, websites and all the supporting online properties organisations can leverage to gain attention and bring potential customers to their business.

I write for our lead generation business and get involved with paid ad campaigns and I firmly believe:

Organic Content attracts better customers.

There, I’ve said it.

It might be because potential customers find your content when they go looking for you or your service, whereas ads either interrupt people not looking for your service, or ads get blocked or ignored due to “banner blindness”

When they take the time to read your articles or long form copy, they are making a micro commitment to you psychologically.

The impact of steady consistent content brings steady consistent results.

Take for instance this client I started building content for a couple of years ago. They had maybe a dozen blog posts in total and no real structure to their website.

In the first quarter of 2019 the site was getting an average of 94 visits a day.

We started by refactoring the website, establishing some pillar content based on the main keywords (problems they solve) which was in a quite obscure highly technical niche. We then started building 2–3 blog posts a week and the supporting web2 and social content to support it.

The addition of content was deliberately slow and extremely consistent.

Fast forward to today and with over 550 blog posts the site now gets over 1.1 million search impressions per month resulting in 10–12k site visits per month.

This equates to around 450 site visits per day from highly engaged prospects interested in what the client can do for them.

The 100x increase in site traffic has resulted in similar increases in MRR.

Content works.

Supporting the 2–3 blog posts or product feature announcements (Its a SaaS platform) that go out per week I also surround each piece of content with 10–12 supporting posts leading people back to the blog posts.

This includes up to 27 pieces of content that goes out before the post, the same day the post goes out and then drips out up to 6 weeks after.

I can’t take credit for this follow up strategy. That honour goes to Justin Welsh (Mr Linkedin)

The amount of follow up content seems daunting unless you have a system in place and Justin’s Content Operating System is an excellent starting point to learn how to systematise content output.

It just works.

Now since it’s how Justin feeds his family, I won’t lay out the process here, that seems a bit disingenuous. You can check it out here

It takes about an hour (videos) for a full run through of the system and costs $150 which given the results is insanely cheap. He also applies price parity which is something I haven’t seen before, so if you visit Justin’s site from say India, you might end up paying $30.

That’s pretty cool.

You can invest in paid ads which bring a quick spike in traffic. Whether it’s the right traffic is debatable. Our experience is the quality isn’t as good.

Ads are also gone as soon as your ad spend budget runs out, so as soon as the ads stop, so does the traffic.

Organic content continues to bring in visitors for years. Of course it needs to be well considered, quality content that is formatted correctly and targets the terms likely to bring in buyers. (Which is why we aren’t discussing things starting with chat in this post)

If you want to tackle the addition of content to drive long term traffic to your website, I’d strongly recommend getting the Content OS.

If you have better things to do and would like some help, you can contact me at theonlinegroup.com.au to discuss your requirements.

Thanks for reading:

Alan.