I recently celebrated my one-year anniversary managing the Crazy Egg blog. No dinner and roses, though. For this anniversary, I did a thorough review of the numbers.
As with all marketing, a blog should be worth the investment. The challenge is knowing what to measure. Remember, a blog isn’t for selling. It’s for building relationship. So you can’t measure success with sales or profits.
On Crazy Egg, my priority is publishing high-quality content Monday through Friday. While we could measure success in several different ways, we chose blog traffic as the measure of success.
Fortunately, the blog was already in good shape. In its first two and a half years, it had grown to just over 100,000 in traffic and nearly 2,000 subscribers.
My job was simple: keep it growing. Happily, I did that—and more. At the end of my first year, we had well over 200,000 in monthly traffic and more than 5,000 subscribers on two lists. In other words, in one year, I matched the growth of the previous 2.5 years.
How did I do it?
- I put a focus on quality: quality ideas, quality writing and quality behind-the-scenes management.
- I prioritized brand perception and reader engagement.
- I took a few risks, testing new strategies rather than relying solely on “best practice.”
Keep reading to learn the strategies that worked best and how you can get similar results.
Listen to your audience
When I inherited the blog, I was appalled at the number of negative comments in social media, on unsubscribes and in comments. What appeared to be a very successful brand showed signs of a growing negative brand perception.
Mind you, this isn’t a problem exclusive to Crazy Egg. The internet has spawned a new breed of hecklers, people who take out their frustrations by criticizing everyone else. They like to hate. I don’t understand it, but when they see success, they turn mean.
When these people don’t see a person behind the brand—or rather, they see a guru and a lot of automated marketing, but no breathing, tweeting person—they get cocky. They start mouthing off because they think they can get away with it. And a negative trend begins.
One of my first priorities was to turn this around. My goal was to present a friendly, approachable face to the public—in social media, in emails, and on the blog. I wanted to make it clear that there were real people behind the brand. Not just a guru or two, but a team of ordinary people.
It helped. When I responded to people’s Tweets, for instance, they realized there was a person manning our Twitter channel, and they softened the snark.
I also wrote an autoresponder series for new subscribers with a goal of creating community and engagement. It worked, and unsubscribes were no longer filled with expletives. But it wasn’t the perfect fix. Over time, I saw unsubscribes simply from getting a second email during the first week. Apparently, readers wanted email alerts and nothing more.
After several months, I decided the autoresponders weren’t fulfilling the goals I set for them. I kept two of them and took the others down. Since then, unsubscribes have slowed considerably. And none of them have been hateful.
Deliver quality
My focus isn’t just on providing great information on the blog. I also want our articles to be well written and fun to read.
I encouraged writers to write like they talk, to let their personality show. I engaged experts to write from experience, not to recycle what everyone else is saying online. And yes, I turned away writers who were primarily interested in getting published or impressing people with their wordplay.
I experimented with different types of content. Throughout the year, we produced a few “guides” and “epic posts.” We did how-to’s, round-ups, list posts, interviews and crowd-sourced articles. I also included video, SlideShares and other engagement-boosters in the posts.
Behind the scenes, I took time to find relevant images, break down each post into sections and subsections, break up long paragraphs, and improve introductions and conclusions. These are the details that increase readability and engagement.
I also optimized for search. I took time to include appropriate meta data for each article. Then, by selecting appropriate categories and tags, I made it easier for readers to find the articles they want to read. And I included links to related articles on the blog to help readers get more information about the topics they’re interested in. These were the details that kept people on our site longer.
Give more choices
The area of the blog that got the most negative attention was the newsletter. Apparently, after signing up for a daily newsletter, people were surprised to get a daily email. I’m not sure what that’s about, but I don’t think it’s worth the cussing and name-calling it inspired.
I decided to add an element of choice. That way, if people were truly overwhelmed by their daily emails, they could choose a weekly roundup rather than simply unsubscribing.
I did this the hard way (of course). I turned the daily list into a weekly roundup, then created another daily list that people had to opt into again.
Granted, it would have been easier simply to create a second list. But the negative atmosphere on that list was palpable. I preferred to make people choose a daily email, knowing the weekly was available, thereby making it clear that we weren’t abusing their subscription.
Ironically, subscriptions immediately went up. Lots of readers hadn’t subscribed because they didn’t want a daily email.
But since most people were choosing the weekly list, I was afraid daily traffic might stagnate. I needed a way to persuade people to choose the daily list.
Provide premium content
If people only have a choice of one email a week or five to six, they’ll choose one. But if you add a gift to the mix, they may be willing to put up with more emails to get the gift.
While PDF downloads and ebooks are nothing new, they do still work. I ran a survey on the blog to find out what topics our visitors were most interested in. Then I created an ebook and some resources related to that topic. This became the opt-in gift for daily subscribers, and it significantly increased subscriptions to the daily email list.
By the end of the year, the original list (which became the weekly roundup) had grown 150%, and the new daily list (which was started from scratch) was 10% larger than the original list. Put together, I nearly tripled subscriptions simply by giving people a choice and incenting the choice I wanted them to make.
Always be testing
Don’t blindly adopt the tactics you see other content marketers using. While they may work for your blog and audience, more than likely, they won’t.
Always ask yourself why your audience responds the way it does, then find possible solutions. After implementation, give your solutions enough time to work (or not) before deciding whether to keep them, adapt them, or reverse them.
For example, I gave the autoresponders approximately six months before deciding they weren’t building engagement as I’d hoped. And I watched the reaction to changes in our newsletters for several months before settling on the next step.
Test types of content, topics, and length. Test different types of headlines and the structure of your blog posts. Test images. Test voice. Test everything.
The process is simple. Come up with your own ideas based on your own audience. Then test.
Copying yields average results at best. Testing your own ideas, while creating a real potential for mistakes, is the only way you get above average results.
In short, you can increase blog traffic and subscriptions in a short time frame. But you must dare to be different.
Image source: Placeit.net
