We started off last year with this site — except it made no money.

Yes, we had tested a few ideas that brought in trickles of revenue, but we didn’t have a business model that could support either Devesh or me full-time.

On top of that, we had started a SaaS business, Wordable, that was only making around $400/month in recurring revenue.

Needless to say, the year started off somewhat challenging.

Devesh was supporting himself from his other agency Growth Rock, and I was taking consulting projects to get by.

This image pretty much sums up the beginning of last year for me:

But in the span of a year, our business changed drastically.

I share this personal information because oftentimes Devesh and I would get messages that said “congrats on all of your success.” That phrase became a running joke between us because everyone thought we were “successful” but we were barely keeping the lights on in this business.

That being said, I truly believe the reward is in the journey, not the end goal, and it’s been rewarding and humbling realizing how much we don’t know over the past year – and how much we’ve learned along the way.

I wanted to share some of our learnings and accomplishments with you, because as our business has grown, we haven’t been able to spend as much time sharing them with you. Hopefully this will change in the coming year.

But more than anything, I want to thank all of you for your support. Seriously.

We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. You stuck with us through all of our pivots, tests and mistakes, and still continued to support us, and share our articles with your friends and colleagues. And without this blog and community, none of this would’ve been possible.

Reflecting on 2017: Year in review and learnings

In January of last year, we started working on our Customers From Content course. It took us four months to build out all of the material for it. We filmed the entire thing and then scrapped it and did it over again, because we weren’t happy with the quality the first time around. Then we were super proud of our end product and thought we’d be the next online course millionaires (semi-kidding here) only to launch our course and have it flop.

If you’re interested in learning why it didn’t do as well as we had hoped, we wrote this full post on our learnings here. But in short we positioned our course to companies instead of individuals who wanted to learn content marketing, and the latter are the people who wanted the course from us! Big mistake, but we learned from it.

In May of last year, Devesh called me after the course launch and told me he was throwing in the towel on Grow and Convert. We had been working at this business for 18 months and didn’t have a business model that worked. After about ~2 weeks of not talking, he called me and pitched me the idea of doing a content marketing service because after reflecting on our failed course launch, that’s what people wanted.

In June of last year, we launched our content marketing agency with a single landing page (that very page we just linked to, albeit an earlier version) and landed our first 2 clients in 2 weeks. Then once we landed those clients, we had to figure out our operations as we went… At that time, it was only us, we had no writing team, no employees, etc.

June-August, we worked with those two clients, and achieved some pretty amazing results. Here’s a case study about how we drove over 10,000 visitors in 3 weeks for one of them. Here’s a case study about how we created a mega project for another and got them in Small Business Trends.

In September, ​we brought on another 2 clients and this is where we pretty much had to shut down and focus exclusively on running content marketing for these four companies. Hence why we haven’t written many posts towards the latter half of 2017. 

We also randomly received an email from someone interested in buying Wordable, so that started the process of us figuring out how to sell it.

On top of that, I wrote a guest post for GrowthLab entitled How we turned a failed product business into a $34k/month service business and our leads exploded (Note: When I wrote that we had 5 clients committed, but one fell through shortly thereafter). After that, we had more leads than we could handle, so we decided to pause taking on new clients and focus on improving our operations and delivering results for the clients we had.

In November, after two months of contracts and legal stuff, we sold Wordable. For many of you that have asked why we sold it, the simple answer is that we were spread too thin and couldn’t dedicate the time and focus that it needed to become what we thought it could. We sold it to another marketer that we’ve enjoyed working with and respect, and that can give it the love that it needs to grow.

In December, Devesh had his first baby, so we spent the last part of 2017 getting our operations in line so we could continue delivering results for our clients without him (just incase he was out for a month or two).

Here are some of the learnings we had in streamlining our agency operations:

First off, ​hiring is the biggest challenge that any company will have. It took us months to assemble a solid team, but we’ve been fortunate enough to surround ourselves with great people. Shoutout to Nathan Collier, Dave Peralta, Sandy Cao, Jera Brown, Olivia Seitz, Cody Slingerland, and Alyse Phillips for all their hard work.

If you’re interested in learning more about the hiring process we used to build our team, read our writers hiring guide and a variation of that guide that I published on the Drift blog to hire other marketing employees.

Bottleneck #1: Sourcing story ideas for our clients, at scale.

We had a ton of content ideas but had to do lots of manual outreach to source stories. The process is super effective but it’s challenging when you’re trying to do it across multiple clients.

I decided to test an idea codenamed “Exposure” to see if we could flip the sourcing stories model on it’s head. If you remember, a few emails ago, we asked some of you to submit your case studies for us to review so we could write a story about you, get your story out there, get you a link from a reputable site and help you gain more brand recognition.

Since doing that, we shared stories such as:

• How Sarah Jones Grew SEO Traffic from 8k-30k by Binge Watching Rand Fishkin Videos
• How Mode Analytics built a microsite that drives 500+ leads per month
• How Sebastian Agren gets a 49% response rate from leads sourced from a conference he never attended
• How Pagecloud did $1M in Sales Before Launching Their SaaS Product.

We have tons more coming in the near future.

If you’d like us to write a story about you or your company, ​submit your pitch here.

Bottleneck #2: Editing

Devesh and I were editing all of the articles from our writers, managing clients, trying to promote articles, etc. – essentially running around like chickens with our heads cut off. Then one of our writers, Nathan Collier, flew out to San Jose to meet with us, stepped up and took over editing and managing our writing team.

We added processes around using a worksheet to help our team outline the most important parts to a story – since doing that, we’ve been able to scale our content production while improving the quality across the board. We’ll hopefully share this template in another post and how we’ve used it to scale.

Bottleneck #3: Content promotion

This is our current bottleneck, and to be honest, it’s a bear to solve.

We promise all of our clients 1,000 pageviews per post, averaged across all posts, in the first month after publishing. I know that’s kind of confusing, so to give a little more clarity, if we publish 3 posts per month, that’s at least 3000 visitors.

But this is the bare minimum, as the case studies linked to above show, we’ve generated a lot more traffic than that.

How have we been driving traffic to their articles?

By using our own community content promotion process.

But as we’ve added clients, it’s become harder and harder to promote at scale.

So we’ve been beta testing some paid promotion.

Our strategy has been to drive traffic using community content promotion that way we know we’re driving quality traffic, then use a FB pixel to collect audience information, segment off the traffic that we’re driving to our articles, create a 1% lookalike audience based off of that traffic, and then advertise to that lookalike to drive more volume with less manual efforts. The results have shown promising so far.

So that’s the next big challenge going into early 2018, to solve this issue.

So what’s next for 2018?

The Agency

Well hopefully we’ll get our head out of water so we can start sharing all of the learnings that we’ve had running content marketing for multiple companies. I can assure you that the agency has put all of the strategies we’ve written about to the test and that the strategies all still work. The only difference is, when you’re using these strategies across multiple clients at the same time, you have to tweak the approach a bit.

For example, right now we average about 12 posts a month that we publish for all of our clients. Say we have one “content promoter”. They are supposed to single handedly drive 12,000 visitors (12 * 1000 each) every month by posting in various communities and groups?

And then what if we want to double our client base? Then what? Yes people can solve some of these problems, but there are trickier challenges than that. In general though, this is all a lot easier if you’re doing it for just one company.

Overall, we’ve been able to show increases in site traffic, leads, and customers across multiple clients from our approach, and I look forward to sharing more of the details with you this year.

The Course

Since we wrote that GrowthLab article outlining the details of our course, we’ve had a number of you reach out asking us if we could purchase the course from us that teaches content marketing. The answer is yes, we’ve been thinking about it a lot, and we’ll be releasing our course again sometime in Q1 of this year. If this is something that you’re interested in, let us know in the comments– because I have to admit, I’m a bit nervous about course launches after the last one :).

Other Cool Projects

We’re working on some secret projects behind the scenes that we hope to release this year. We always have to try to stay ahead of the curve to stay competitive and will be sharing the details of those projects with you shortly.

Again, appreciate all of you who’ve taken the time to read this, and look forward to continued growth in 2018.

Like this article? We produce stories for our clients, learn more here.

For those that haven’t been following Grow and Convert over the last 6 months, Devesh and I embarked on a journey to grow this site from a brand new domain to 40,000 unique monthly visitors in a 6 month time frame.

There were four main reasons behind doing this:

1. I wanted to beat my previous achievement of growing the ThinkApps blog from 0-35,000 unique monthly visitors in 6 months.
2. We thought that it was important to build a loyal following and to build trust with our audience before we ever built the business side of Grow and Convert. We thought if we just focused on helping people as the number one goal in our business, that the trust and credibility would be there when we started building products.
3. We wanted to prove that we knew what we were talking about when it came to content marketing. Instead of just talking theory, we wanted to share case studies and things that we’ve actually done because we thought that was the most effective way to teach people. We also wanted to be fully transparent in everything that we did because we saw that being real is rare these days.
4. We thought that if we documented our journey growing our site using the same tactics we share with others, then people can follow along, see exactly what we’re doing, and it proves that if you follow a process, that you can grow quickly and acquire customers for your company at a low CAC (customer acquisition cost).

But about halfway through March we decided to forfeit our 40,000 unique monthly visitors in 6 months goal for the sake of the business.

While it is a hard decision to publicly admit that we aren’t going to hit this goal, we did it because keeping Grow and Convert alive was more important than hitting an artificial traffic goal.

We felt like we had achieved the two most important reasons for setting this goal, which was to:

1. Build a following and trust with our audience

2. Prove that we knew what we were talking about when it comes to content marketing

I was willing to swallow my pride and sacrifice beating my own goal so that we could both continue to work on Grow and Convert.

The fact of the matter is that I quit my full-time job to go all in on this. I’m currently living abroad off of my savings while trying to bootstrap this business.

Devesh has a thriving agency that’s doing better than ever before.

For both of us to continue to spend time working on this, we had to start monetizing Grow and Convert.

So we decided to switch our goal.

Before we get into what our new goal is, and how that impacts our site going forward, let’s recap what happened in April.

April – Our First Down Month, Why We Fell Short of Our Goal

I’m going to turn it over to Devesh to update us on April’s traffic stats…

Traffic: 14% Decrease from March

We only got 12,791 users in April, a 14% decrease from the 14,800 users in March.

As the kids say these days, “NBD” (or “no big deal” for those of you that don’t understand the kids these days).

Ever since we took care of these two big things up front, there have been few surprises:

1. Built a growth model, so we know (roughly) what traffic will be like even before the month is over.
2. Focus on one goal at a time, which for us now is not traffic, so we’re fine with that plot above.

Nonetheless let’s dive into the traffic details.

Number of posts published in April: Three

I’ll give you one guess what the #1 deciding factor of our traffic on any given month is…

(If you’re not sure, you can read this post introducing our straightforward traffic growth model, and this post recapping how we did versus the model in March.)

It’s the number of posts. This is because this site and domain are 6 months old and (although we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many links we’ve built “naturally”) SEO traffic is still a relatively small percentage.

We only wrote 3 posts in April. This is contrast to 7 posts in March.

Interesting Metric to Think About: Users per New Posts

An interesting, albeit non-scientific comparison is the ratio of traffic in a month (users) per new posts published that month. It gives you a general sense of how much traffic your existing content is pulling in without you having to crank out more and more posts.

For example, a site with a lot of existing links pointing to it and thus healthy SEO and referral traffic can get away with not posting a lot (or at all) in any given month and traffic should remain relatively steady.

Not true for a new content marketing operation like ours.

Here’s our users per new posts rate for the life of Grow and Convert:

Interesting.

When you look at it like this, April was our best month yet, by a lot. Why is this?

April’s traffic decreased 14%, but we published 62.5% fewer posts, so our users/post metric is actually really high.

How is it that we got so much more traffic per post in April?

It really comes down to two options: (1) Did the posts in April just get crazy traffic (i.e. go viral)? Or (2) do we just have a solid amount of traffic coming in to our existing content.

We can simply look at the top 10 posts in April to verify.

It looks like the 3 April posts (2 of them are pointed to above) made up about 34% of April traffic. That means existing content comprised 66% of our traffic in April.

Is that good? Who knows.

Deciding whether this is “good” is not about comparing to some “industry standard”, it’s just about comparing to where you were last month. And clearly from the users/new posts published graph, we are doing better and better. That is, we are increasingly less reliant on new posts to drive traffic.

Now let’s look at where the traffic is coming from and see what we can uncover…

Acquisition: Still mostly communities, SEO slowly rising.

Here’s where April traffic came from:

Communities still dominated for us in April.

The most interesting (and exciting) stat, though is that SEO traffic crossed 1000 sessions for the first time. Getting a steady stream of SEO traffic is one of the biggest successes in content marketing. Once that happens, the traffic continues to roll in, even if publication rates slow down.

Here’s how our SEO sessions have been trending since we bought this domain 6 months ago.

That graph is not exponential, and April showed a decrease in slope for the first time, but it’s steady month over month growth in SEO traffic.

It’s also interesting to observe “leading indicators” of SEO like impressions, CTR, and average position. Average position is particularly interesting since cracking the first page on a few keywords is often the key to steady SEO traffic.

Here’s how are average position has changed over the last 90 days:

In intentionally hovered my mouse over a date in May so you could see we’re now bouncing around 15, which means the second page…on average.

What’s interesting is that comparing this to other blogs that have substantial SEO traffic, I’ve noticed that even the most “SEO-ed” blogs don’t have an average position below the teens.

So it seems it may be a game of getting a few key keywords to crank up to the first page to start driving more SEO traffic.

Also our MOZ domain rank is now 33. Shortly after we started, it was at 22, so this is also a great sign.

Email List

This is the convert of Grow and Convert, which is my responsibility, and to be honest it’s not stellar. Like I mentioned in our last update, for the type of content (and quantity) that we publish, it’s largely a function of content upgrades. If we have a content upgrade on our article at the time of publishing, we grow our list, if we don’t, it’s not good.

Here’s where we are relative to our curve:

As usual we have posts that got a ton of traffic that we didn’t make content upgrades, nor did we PDF the posts and offer those.

Considering the post we linked to above talks about the problem of time in making content upgrades and how we could just PDF the post to solve this problem, this is simply inexcusable.

It will need to be fixed going forward.

In addition our homepage could be made into a proper homepage gate, which should increase conversion rate there. These are all priorities which are getting pushed off due to product development.

Which leads me to handing it back to Benji…

What is our new goal?

We’ve stated the importance of having one singular goal many times.

Having one singular goal has made it really easy for Devesh and me to stay on the same page about business decisions and keep us focused and motivated on one outcome. For example, since traffic has been our one goal for the past 6 months, we’ve slipped on list building as Devesh mentioned above.

Now, since our overarching goal is to turn Grow and Convert from a site into a business, we revised the previous goal that Devesh had outlined in our March recap “SEO and List building,” to one that more aligns with our new focus.

Our new goal is 30 paying customers across all of our revenue generating activities. This includes Wordable, coaching, and our new training program (which we’ll share below).

Why 30 paying customers and not a goal tied to revenue?

At the early stage of building a company, we’re not solely focused on revenue. We’re focused more on the validation of our idea and ensuring we have product/market fit with whatever we build.

Revenue targets will become more important once we’ve validated that we’ve built the proper products for the proper audience and that the products have the potential to scale.

Because we haven’t validated our ideas or pricing yet, our product offerings may change.

Companies pivot all the time (as you have just seen).

So, we don’t believe in having monetary goals at this point.

The #1 goal for us to validate is that we’ve built enough trust to get 30 people within companies to pay us, either for our training or for our software.

Content Marketing Training? Introducing Customers From Content

Where we feel like we have the upper hand against other marketing sites is that we’re focused on getting customers for existing businesses using content marketing. Not using a blog to build a personal brand, or “break the 9 to 5”, or “start a side business” for individuals, but using content as a customer acquisition channel for existing businesses that have to compete side by side with all other acquisition channels (like paid media).

And the best part? We have real experience doing so. I’ve grown content-based traffic (often from next to nothing) for Vistage, ThinkApps, and Everwise, and Devesh has converted traffic to content for companies like ValueWalk, When I Work, and Backlinko.

When brainstorming how we could further help businesses with content marketing beyond just writing in-depth case studies, we kept coming back to a differentiating factor in what we’re doing: systems.

Our strategies aren’t just a buffet table of “throw spaghetti against a wall and see what sticks”. It’s instead a system:

• A system for aligning content with customers along their journey
• A system for filtering the multitude of promotion tactics into a select few to focus resources on
• A system for modeling growth and making it predictable
• A system for distilling the conversion tactics into a select few that work best

We want to teach this system to companies looking to grow digital lead generation through content or start lead generation through content.

That’s what Customers from Content is: our system.

It walks through detailed strategy around the four areas we feel define our system:

1. Content Strategy – How to produce the right content

2. Content Promotion – How to promote that content efficiently

3. Content Conversion – How to convert blog traffic to customers

4. Measurement and ROI – How to model and measure your acquisition rate and cost so lead generation from content marketing becomes precise.

But before we release this system to a wider audience, we want to validate it with 10 early adopters, whom we will personally walk through our system via recorded video calls over the course of 8 weeks.

Since this is hands on, we can only accept a limited number of companies for this program. We’ve set this number to 10.

Update: We are currently full! 

What Does These Changes Mean For Our Monthly Updates?

Don’t worry – We’re going to continue to deliver our monthly updates which we know many of you have grown to love.

But they will be changing a little bit.

Instead of providing just traffic and list growth information, we’ll be providing information about the metrics we think our most pertinent to our business.

That way, you’ll be able to see how we think about how content marketing ties into our business objectives.

But this brings up an important point…

How Transparent Are We Going To Be Going Forward with Customer and Revenue Information?

While transparency is a core value of our business, we do have to draw the line somewhere on the information we share publicly.

We don’t think it will help our audience to share revenue information from selling courses because our audience doesn’t sell courses. If we were a site that targeted solopreneurs then this type of content may be interesting to them. But we’re not. There are plenty of other sites that do that.

We do think it makes sense to share revenue & customer information on Wordable, because Wordable is a SaaS business and more closely reflects a business that our target audience would be looking to grow.

Therefore it makes for interesting lessons to see how we’re able to grow Wordable with content marketing.

Division of Labor – Splitting Our Roles

As a business starts to grow and take shape, it’s important for us to leverage each of our strengths to scale this business to it’s fullest potential.

Going forward, I’ll be responsible for everything related to our site growth. This means I’ll be writing a majority of the blog posts going forward so Devesh can focus on other aspects of the business. I’ll also be handling our content promotion, social media, responding to our welcome e-mails and sending out emails to our list.

Devesh will be responsible for everything related to conversion and revenue generation. This means he’ll be focused on increasing our email subscribers by implementing more content upgrades and testing new conversion methods that we can implement. He’ll also be focused on validating our course, building sales pages and communicating with our paying customers.

Since we have a lot on our plate right now, I’m also going to be looking for some outside contributors to start sharing helpful advice with our audience. However, we will not be sacrificing content quality.

As always, we’re looking for actionable case studies from practicing marketers. If you think you’re up for the task, check out our blogger guidelines.

Need an example of the high quality content we’re looking for? Check out our past guest posts:

Breaking SlideShare: How I Got 2,000,000 Views from Only 16 Presentations – by Eugene Cheng

The 3-Step Bulletproof Formula To Writing Kickass Blog Post Headlines – by Danavir Sarria

How to Turn Your Blog’s Thank You Page Into a Lead Generating Machine – by Emil Shour

Where are we relative to our new goal?

So now you’re probably wondering…

“Where are we relative to our new goal?”

As of writing this post we have 7 paying customers. We’re 23% of the way to our goal.

We now have 3 paying customers from Wordable – two on the standard plan and one on the starter plan. And 107 trial customers.

Out of the 9 people that have finished their trial, three people have converted to paying customers – 33% conversion from trial to paying customer… Not bad!

At this point, we haven’t focused on scaling Wordable yet (all of the trials and paying customers so far, came from our one post about Wordable). Nonetheless, over the last 3 weeks we’ve focused heavily on getting user feedback and we’ve uncovered two really valuable lessons:

1. People either love Wordable
2. They’ve had a bug that prevented them from using it

So over the last few weeks we’ve been working on making bug fixes and feature improvements to ensure we have a solid product before we try to scale it.

I’ve filled two of the five coaching slots for my coaching program in the last week since launching, and Devesh has sold 1 seats for the training program.

Emotions

We realized we skipped this part in our last monthly roundup but we’re bringing it back because it’s really important that we share how we feel throughout this whole process. Starting a business from two sides of the world, while doing other things, isn’t easy and we’ve definitely had our ups and downs.

Benji:

This past month has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me. But first, to answer the question that many people have been asking me:

“Is it hard to stay productive while traveling?”

Yes, It’s been extremely difficult. The first two months of doing this “digital nomad” thing were easy for me because I stayed in one location for a majority of the time. But since April 8th, I’ve been in a new location pretty much every few days and the combination of adjusting to a new place, exhaustion from travel, and trying to keep up on work, is draining.

Therefore I’m switching up my travel strategy. Instead of trying to see new things while growing the business, I’ve decided that it’s best for the business if I stay in one place for the rest of my trip. I’ve realized I’m more focused, have a better routine and get more done when I’m in one place.

That’s why today I bought a ticket back to Bali and will stay there for the remainder of my trip.

Back to the rollercoaster of emotions part…

When I got to Vietnam in late April, I had a mini panic attack. For some reason, I woke up one day and started to doubt myself.

I was almost 6 months into this business and in my mind I had nothing to show for it. We’ve had people saying how much they loved what we were doing, we’ve been able to grow traffic nearly 100% MoM, but I started questioning if we could turn Grow and Convert into a real business.

And it was paralyzing.

Every time I sat down to write nothing would come to my mind.

Every time I tried to promote a piece of content I couldn’t come up with any ideas to do so.

I felt like all of my strengths were suddenly gone and I thought the business was just going to spiral downward until it failed.

I kept thinking:

“What happens if no one wants to buy our services”

“What happens if I have to go back to the states with no money”

“What happens if I have to go back and get another job”

I gave a call to Devesh and told him the problem I was having. I said I was sorry I haven’t been able to do anything lately but I’ve just been in this weird funk and haven’t been able to shake it. To make matters worse, Devesh was going through some serious family health issues of his own, so I didn’t want to push my problems onto him.

But the next day after telling him, we closed our first Wordable customer and Devesh and I talked for two hours and came up with a plan of action for revenue.

Then I mustered up enough self confidence to rewrite the Airbnb post that I had attempted to write 4 times. And after I put that out there, things started falling into place.

Devesh helped me launch my coaching program, we worked on the outline for the course and started to validate it, and more customers started purchasing Wordable on their own.

All signs started pointing to this working after all.

The learning for me was that it’s so important to have a partner that compliments your skill sets and that can be your support system. Had I not been able to communicate with Devesh about the challenges I was having, I likely would’ve still been suffering from a lack of self confidence.

The second learning was that almost everyone goes through the self doubt portion at some point in their business. To overcome it, focus on getting small wins to build back your self confidence and talk to other people who’ve been there before. I found this startup curve from Paul Graham to be helpful.

About a month ago reality set in and I was in the trough of sorrow, however after experimenting and pivoting we found that things started working they way we had originally predicted. That built back my self confidence and now I’m more excited than ever to put all of my effort into this business.

Devesh:

Honestly, I feel great about Grow and Convert right now: we continue to get great emails from people, initial validation of our content marketing system via coaching and the training program has been great, and SEO metrics and backlinks are looking up.

What’s there to be sad about?

Two other outside factors have contributed as well. First, my CRO agency is doing well, and I’ve found that when one project or business is doing well that eases pressure off of others. Second, as Benji mentioned, I’ve had some traumatic family issues happen suddenly in April, so that frankly puts things like traffic, business, money, and life in perspective. Business having ups and downs? Not to worry, if I can spend time with people I love, I’m happy.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

The point of the growth model was to turn traffic estimations from a hopes and dreams model, to a predictable calculation.

To do this, we built a bottoms up growth model.

That means, instead of a top-down model that says “we got 10,000 uniques last month, and we want to grow by 25% every month, so this month we’re estimating we’ll get 12,500 uniques.”

We said, let’s list all actions we can control, like:

• How many posts we write
• How many guest posts we accept
• How many other traffic generating campaigns we run

…and multiply those numbers by the amount of traffic each action has produced in the past.

That made it bottoms up (relying on actions we can control), and data driven (using previous data).

Here’s what this model looked like for March:

Not too complicated.

For a full breakdown of this model, see Part 1 of this series, where I walk through it step by step. Or get the spreadsheet for yourself for free here.

In short, our actions-we-can-control were:

1.  Posts written on our site
2. A contest

We multiplied those actions by estimates of how much traffic each would produce and figured out how many posts we’d need to get to 20,000 users in March (3 posts a week).

In this post we’re going to go over what actually happened in March, compare each step with what we modeled and discuss how well the model worked and what this means for the future of Grow and Convert.

Let’s jump in.

Model vs. Actual: Posts On Our Site

Existing readers know that the majority of our traffic so far has come from community-based promotion of posts on our site — not guest posts on other sites, not SEO, not social shares, just posts on our site heavily promoted in marketing communities and groups.

In our March model, we planned on doubling down on this, and forecasted 52% of March’s traffic coming from new posts we planned to publish in the month (with the remaining coming from baseline traffic from old posts and a social contest).

That “new post traffic” was forecasted to hit 18,750 unique pageviews coming from 12 posts averaging 1,563 unique pageviews each.

How did we actually do in March?

We only published 7 posts, slightly over half of what we had planned. But, instead of the posts giving us 1500 unique pageviews each, they averaged 2,400 unique pageviews each.

Hooray.

How many posts per week was reasonable for us? Hint: Not 3.

Not producing as many posts as we planned was predictable — 3 a week is aggressive considering what we define as a post (2,500+ word case studies or how tos). So we learned that “pushing hard” for us meant 2 posts each for Benji and me in a month, and 3 guest posts.

We’re not too worried about not hitting 12 posts a month.

We both agreed early in March that it was better to not hit that number and talk about why in this post than produce lower quality posts just to hit it, which has obvious negative long term consequences.

How much traffic did each post produce?

This was the most incredible thing about March.

We had predicted 1500 unique pageviews per post. With posts published at the beginning of the month producing 2500 unique pageviews in 4 weeks and posts published later in the month producing a proportionally reduced amount in March:

That makes sense right? You’d expect a post published in the last week of the month to not bring in the same traffic within that month as a post published at the beginning.

This is what actually happened:

Clearly, there’s not a lot of correlation to the linear reduction in the model.

The three posts in Week 1 averaged 2880 unique pageviews. That’s spot on (actually slightly higher) than the modeled traffic for posts published in the first week.

Week 2 was also very close to predicted.

But two posts in the second half of March got way more traffic than we predicted a post published that late in the month could accumulate by month’s end.

Let’s look into both of those surprising posts in detail to understand why.

Surprising Post #1: Free Facebook Ads

In Week 3, I published a case study of a relatively young business that discovered a method of getting steady leads from Facebook ads that were “self-funded” via a mini-product that more than covered the cost of the ads.

It was published on March 22 but still managed to get 2,444 unique pageviews in the 9 days left in March. This is incredible. Our data suggested an average post on our site will get 2500 unique pageviews in its first 4 weeks.

Clearly, this post was not average.

Here’s where traffic came from:

The majority came from Growth Hackers where it did really well and made it into their weekly email:

Lesson: If you can tap into a community with an existing large audience, you can get loads of traffic quickly (in particular if you make it onto a popular email list).

Surprising Post #2: Marketing is the Hardest Position to Hire For

Then, on March 28, instead of just letting me have my glory with the over-achieving post, Benji — that punk — decided to one up me with his opinion piece on Why Marketing Has Become The Hardest Position to Hire For.

This post brought in a whopping 2,542 unique pageviews in three days. GTFO Benji.

Unlike the Facebook ads post, this one had traffic from a variety of sources, with the leader being Inbound.org, because it sparked a lot of discussion there:

From Benji: What I did to promote this post

Initial traction with this post kicked off when I posted it on Inbound. Within a few days time, It garnered 40 comments and 151 votes.

The next thing I did was post it to the Digital Marketers group on LinkedIn

It definitely stirred some debate with 10 comments, which in turn caused it to get pushed through peoples LinkedIn feed.

Then I also shared to some marketing related FB groups and after that, the post pretty much took on a life of it’s own and was shared by many business owners and marketers by e-mail and social.

Back to Devesh…

Finally, if you’re curious how much traffic these two over-achievers produced since the end of March, don’t worry, I was curious too. Free Facebook Ads has tallied 3,362 in 30 days and Hiring Marketers has hauled in a whopping 6,338 unique pageviews in 30 days.

Considering our model assumed 2500 unique pageviews in 4 weeks, those are stellar numbers.

Opinion: What’s Special About These Two Over-achieving Posts?

I’d like to temporarily break from my mathematical breakdown of March to wax poetic about these two posts.

First, their differences.

What I actually like most about these two overachieving posts is how very different they are: One is a case study and the other is a semi-controversial opinion piece.

Now, you can write off the case study as just that, a case study that happened to do well. It’s a content framework that has been around longer than the internet and we think it’s still one of the most powerful content frameworks your business can use in its content marketing. It inherently carries detail and social proof which builds both trust and desire in prospective customers. That’s why our entire site to date has been case study based.

But, what about Benji’s piece on hiring marketers?

It goes against the common marketing blog post trend of “how to” or “case study”. It’s an opinion piece…that can’t be that valuable right?

Wrong.

I noticed two subtleties about the hiring marketers post that I think helped it do incredibly well.

First, yes, it is an opinion piece, and thus it stood out from the crowd for our audience.

I’m arguing that a well thought out opinion piece can add more value than the same old “how to” your audience has seen 100 times.

The title was intentionally provocative, without over promising (we didn’t bait-and-switch, we honestly spend the entire post defending the assertion in the title).

Second, it actually has a how-to section baked into the opinion.

Unlike a typical ranty opinion piece that’s mostly entertainment and witty sarcasm that you’d find on, say, Medium, the hiring marketers post had serious doses of practical, usable strategies. For example, Benji presented the “5 Hows” technique for filtering marketer candidates that a hiring manager or CEO could use immediately on their next interview.

Multiple people commented on this (42 comments in total):

Third, it agreed with an opinion that our target audience already had.

This is a subtle technique I learned from working with Brian Dean. People love sharing things that reinforce their existing opinions.

Or said in another way, a controversy has two sides, people who disagree and people who agree. You only need one for a piece to take off.

We were actually hoping this post would piss off developers and thus get a bunch of attention in that community but it didn’t. Perhaps because they just didn’t care, or because we don’t know how to promote in developer communities.

But it didn’t matter. Marketers far and wide loved it.

Are we (and they) right? Is marketing actually the hardest position to hire for? The truth is, it doesn’t matter. All that matter is our target audience (marketers, CMOs, founders of startups) agrees with it — not in a “I’ll nod my head” way, but in a “OMG, yes I’ve felt this pain of hiring, let me rant about my story!” kind of way. You can look at all of the comments to see.

Takeaways from New Posts in March

We learned a few things from comparing actual vs. modeled traffic for new posts in March.

First, it’s okay to compromise post quantity for quality. The two overachieving posts at the end of the month did a good job making up for the large hole left by publishing only 7 of the 12 posts we had planned on for the month.

Second, explore different content frameworks instead of just sticking to the same thing. Opinions are good to sprinkle in to your usual diet of “utility” posts — and it’s even better if you they have substance and controversy.

Even if your company is in a “boring” space, think carefully about opinion pieces that can get your company some attention. Here are some examples.

The employee scheduling app company When I Work has a thriving blog that discusses issues that small businesses have. Now, they make an app to help small business owners schedule hourly employees: not the most controversial or click-inducing topic, right?

But look at who ranks #1 on Google for “pros and cons of minimum wage”:

It’s a topic that their audience thinks about and it’s controversial: you’re damn right people have strong opinions on both sides.

Here are more examples to get your gears churning:

• Company: Web development agency. Opinion Piece: Why Flat Design is Not a Good Idea
• Company: Women’s apparel ecommerce. Opinion Piece: Stop wearing black because you think it’s slimming.
• Company: Real estate firm. Opinion Piece: Why the housing price drop is actually good for you.

I’m just making these up, but you get the picture. Think creatively. Come up with 10 ideas, discuss them at the office, and write about the one that gets the most heated discussion going.

Other Traffic: Baseline and (a non-existent) Contest

Besides new posts, we modeled two other sources of traffic.

1. Baseline traffic – a combination of referral, SEO, and other sources of traffic to posts published before March. We used February’s baseline traffic as a data-backed benchmark for March.
2. A social contest – traffic from a giveaway that we planned to do in March where users would get more entries in the contest by sharing with friends or on social media. We hadn’t done this before so we guestimated based on other people’s reported results.

Baseline Traffic: Spot On

Our actual baseline traffic was spot on. We modeled 12.3k of and got 12.6k. Our modeled number was identical to baseline traffic in February, which in this case was a decent assumption because we didn’t publish much in February.

Be careful when you do this yourself, if you have steadily growing SEO traffic or have a good month like we did in March, your baseline traffic will expectedly increase (because you’ll have more posts providing more traffic). You should be able to use a trend of how much this has increased over the past few months to predict next month, however.

Social Contest: Nope. How about an app instead?

We didn’t do a social contest. I know, I know, how lazy of us. If it helps, we instead stumbled into a great idea for a content publishing app we’re calling Postable.

So, we were busy working on it behind the scenes in March. We’d love it if you’d go check it out and save yourself hours of time wasted in WordPress formatting.

We figure this was a decent compromise as Postable has some great long term potential both in terms of revenue and overall brand building.

Overall: How Useful Was the Model?

We loved having the model in March, and here’s why.

Instead of just setting out an aggressive goal like “we want 20,000 users this month” and hoping and praying, we were able to see exactly what we did that helped and why we didn’t hit our goal.

Here’s a summary of how we performed on all the key metrics.

From this summary plot, it’s pretty clear why we didn’t hit our Total Users goal: Number of Posts.

We’re totally okay with this result. As we said earlier, we have no desire to sacrifice post quality for quantity.

The second thing we noticed is that we got way more unique pageviews per post than we predicted. That’s great. Is it predictable? Will it happen next month? We can’t answer that with certainty, but this is super useful for two reasons:

1. We know what’s possible. Averaging 2500 uniques per post in a month is high. And some of these posts got over 3000. We know these are high numbers, and they won’t happen for ever post, but we know it can happen, and we know what we did for the posts this month to make it happen. That knowledge is valuable.
2. We can further refine our estimate. Even if 2500 unique pageviews per post is not sustainable every month, in future months, we can start creeping our estimate up from 1500 and seeing how we perform. Over time, we’ll start to hone in on what’s sustainable long term.

So in the end we have a better sense of how much traffic each post brings in, and we know how many posts a month we can reasonably produce, and a model that tells us how much traffic we can expect from those efforts.

Now, instead of hoping and praying, we can predict how much traffic we’ll get each month.

We consider this quite the success.

March Stats Recap + Our Plan for Moving Forward

Traffic: 95% month over month growth

Here are our traffic stats for March, just like we’ve done for February, January, December, and November.

Total traffic:

Note the huge spike at the end from Benji’s massive promotional push on his hiring marketers piece.

I salute you for your effort:

Our traffic in March versus February:

Users (what Google used to call “unique visitors”, or what people casually refer to as “uniques”) has been our key metric from the beginning, and a 95% increase from one month to another is satisfying.

Here’s where we are on our 6 month graph:

Still spot on! (But that will change in April, as we discuss below.)

SEO “indicators” like impressions continue to increase:

But we haven’t yet broken through to the first page on critical keywords, so actual organic traffic is increasing, but is still at the early part of the “exponential” graph, so we’re only starting to touch 1,000 sessions a month from SEO:

In order to get significant, sustainable traffic, we’ll need SEO traffic, as we discuss below. To date, we haven’t done any real “link building” outreach. All links have been built organically by people finding our material and linking to it on their own.

List Building: 60% growth

We reached 1580 email subscribers in March which is 60% growth from the previous month.

Our list growth hasn’t been spectacular, and here’s why:

Many posts aren’t converting well because we’re being lazy and not including content upgrades.

Note: In previous recaps, we had reported 7%+ conversion rates. That was a mistake. It turns out we were using “all goals” in GA, but one of the goals was already measuring visits to all thank you pages, so it was double counting. We humbly ask for your forgiveness.

It’s an ongoing battle between “focus on one goal” (traffic) and “always build the list”, which is critical for an information and education based site like ours.

This needs to change and will become part of our new strategy starting in April. Let’s talk about that next.

Our New Focus: SEO and List Building

Building the traffic model, executing the plan (as best as we could), and comparing results in March has taught us a lot about what is possible.

So has the entire last 5 months of this project.

We’ve grown traffic to over 20,000 sessions and 15,000 users in a month primarily through community based promotion:

• Find out where your target audience hangs out
• Make unique stand out content on topics of interest to them
• Promote in those communities
• Use one on one relationships you build in those communities to further promote

This has worked well, but, it won’t be enough to get us to 40,000 users/month.

We’re not leaving that goal behind, we’re going to hit it, but it won’t be in the 6 month timeframe that we originally hoped for. We’ll also continue to do monthly updates.

SEO: Intentional Link Building

We need SEO traffic to get us to the 40,000 unique visitor number. We don’t see the point in just publishing more and more just to hit that number.

Plus with community based promotion, you can easily wear out your welcome by over promoting your own material. Even Neil Patel on his $100,000 challenge isn’t hitting 40,000 users in 11 months without SEO.

It takes time to build domain authority (and thus rank more easily) on a brand new domain (ours is at 29 now, according to Moz), and we’re happy to wait until that happens.

So, we’re going to begin focusing on list building tactics. Things like broken link building and the Skyscraper Technique.

We’re not sure if it will work or if it’s better to just keep promoting in communities, but we’ll give it a shot and let you know how it goes.

Conversions: Building the Email List

We also think it’s time to start really focusing on converting more visitors into subscribers. Like I mentioned above, many posts aren’t converting well because we just don’t have calls to action on them.

Now we have enough traffic to change that — we’ll start creating content upgrades and perhaps even optimize our homepage to be more of a welcome gate.

We know that as we start to roll out more products and services, the email list will be essential for early customers, and at 15,000 uniques a month, the difference between 3% and 10% conversion rate adds up fast.

Questions about our change in strategy or what the future holds for us? Ask us in the comments.

Also if you have specific experience with manual or intentional link building, let us know in the comments.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story like this about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

Traffic

We got 7,614 users to the site in February. This is how that compares to the previous months (blue line is target exponential growth, orange dots are actual):

It’s funny, when I drew up that blue line at the beginning of this blog, I said multiple times to “take it with a grain of salt” because traffic doesn’t actually grow that mathematically.

But so far, our actual traffic data has come eerily close to that line. I have no explanation for that.

Now of course, we are entering the super steep part of the curve, so it will get (literally) exponentially harder.

You’ll remember from our January update that we were aiming for 10,000 users in February, we didn’t hit that. We only published 4 articles in February and underestimated the lack of time Benji would have due to moving from San Francisco to Bali (believe it or not).

We also just guessed when it came to wanting 10,000 users, and we had no plan. We didn’t even do basic math to figure out how many posts we’d have to publish to hit that or what else we should do.

That, of course, is changing in March, which you can read all about in this post.

Acquisition: Where Traffic is Coming From

This largely stayed the same as last month. Most of our traffic comes from marketing communities:

A few notable things. We got 1000 sessions from Medium, obviously due to Benji’s article on Medium.

We also experimented with trying to promote our posts on Reddit.

Benji: “I experimented with having some friends share our articles on Reddit and also tried paying someone on Fiverr to post one of our articles on Reddit. While, it was the 5th highest source of traffic, the traffic quality was very poor. I had experimented a lot while at ThinkApps paying people on Fiverr and while it used to work well (1 post got 9,000 views in a day and another got 11,000 – both with high time on site), it doesn’t seem like that strategy works anymore. Someone sent me a book on Reddit today (Thank you), I’m going to test some things out and we’ll report back next month.”

Finally, note the power of influencers, our 9th highest channel was Darren Rowse’s Facebook Page. He published one post about our post and we got 300 views from that alone.

I would file this in the list of things you don’t expect. When I look at this post, I see 46 likes (besides me), 1 comment, and 4 shares. And yet, GA is telling us we got 291 sessions just from Darren’s page. Great. What’s also interesting is that we didn’t reach out to Darren. We’re guessing he must have found it through GrowthHackers or Inbound. But despite us not having reached out, it still goes to show the importance of somehow, someway, getting on the radar of influencers.

What Happened to Quora?

Readers of the February post may remember we were heavily trying to get traffic from Quora last month. We stopped. We just didn’t see any traffic spikes at all from it and it was incredibly tedious trying to write an answer a day and somehow finding ways to link to one of our (few) articles in those answers. After a while it felt like we were forcing it, so we gave up and stuck to other things that were working.

SEO: A Burgeoning Romance

SEO traffic is like watermelon at a summertime barbecue: everyone wants some.

We, of course, started with a brand new domain, so no links, no domain authority, nothing. Honestly, if we’re going to hit 40,000 users in 6 months, we’ll need some SEO traffic pronto, but I talk more about that in the emotions section.

To be honest, though, we aren’t doing much to intentionally build links. When we can, we’ll try contributing to posts that friends are writing or grabbing link opportunities here or there. For example Benji got into HuffPo (DA 96) after his Medium piece, and we also wrote a guest post or two, including this one in SumoMe (DA 67).

We’ve also noticed links in Roundups and other bloggers’ articles are happening without any outreach in our part, which is fantastic, such as this one in ProBlogger (DA 80) (we owe Darren Rowse some lunch or something):

So our own domain authority has now reached 22 according to the Moz Toolbar, up from 18 a while back and 20 a month or two ago.

SEO traffic is also on a steady (but slow) increase:

We got 337 sessions from SEO according to GA.

But there are other signs of life here. For example, impressions in Google search results is increasing exponentially:

Which is a great sign. (For those that are curious, impression means you appeared in a Google search result. Clicks are obviously what you want.) But we are still on page 3 or higher for terms that could get a decent amount of traffic, so clicks are much lower (but increasing slightly nonetheless):

We definitely have a long way to go on this front. We need the y-axis on the clicks graph to be in the thousands.

Here are the terms that we are showing starting to get impressions for:

“Hire writers” (and related terms) seem like a great keywords to be ranking for, and we are getting very few clicks for those, because we are on pages 4 and 5. So building more links for those terms and moving to the first page would be a game changer.

Here are the pages on our site that are getting some organic impressions:

So as time allows I want to start doing some email outreach for building links. In particular, using techniques like the Skyscraper Technique and Roundup link building.

Pages: What is Most Popular

Benji’s suggested search hack post did incredibly well last month, bringing in 3,375 unique pageviews alone:

Email List

We got to 990 email subscribers at the end of February, which is slightly ahead of schedule according to my totally made up exponential roadmap (blue line):

But more importantly, we finally set up thank you pages after people opt-in so we can measure them as goals in Google Analytics and see our conversion rate (hooray!):

So we’re converting 4.22% of visitors onto our email list. I was hoping for a lot better (6%+), but we are just starting to implement good content upgrades, so no shocker there. For example, Benji’s Medium virality post with a great content upgrade are converting over 6% so far:

And my recent growth model post with the spreadsheet based model I talk about as the content upgrade is converting almost 8% of sessions to subscribers so far:

Lastly, our homepage, which gets a decent amount of traffic is a simple list of posts with one small call to action at the top and a timed popups, and is converting at 4.5%. If we turned it into a proper homepage gate it should reach 12 – 20% conversion rates. We’re debating whether we should do that now, since getting people to read more, like us, and link to us, is more of a focus than growing the list at this time. But, to be honest, I go back and forth on that — I don’t know the correct answer.

Promotion

Benji:

This month we didn’t do a lot of new testing outside of Reddit. This is mainly due to me moving away from San Francisco and getting settled abroad.

We stuck to GrowthHackers and Inbound as the main sources of distribution and in turn those led to being picked up by the GrowthHackers Newsletter, Darren Rowse sharing our post on Facebook, and getting in the IMScalable newsletter.

We also tested out sharing in some LinkedIn groups – primarily Digital Marketing and eMarketing Association Network . It wasn’t a ton of traffic but it drove 285 new users to our site.

February’s first big jump in traffic came from my Medium post. Most of the promotion for my Medium post was done through my personal Facebook page (since it was a story about a life event), getting friends to share my post, e-mail my personal e-mail list and our Grow and Convert e-mail list, and then trending on Medium. For more about promotion on Medium, for a step-by-step process of what I did, read this post.

The highest source of traffic came from my article Growing from 0-12k Organic Visitors by Mapping Content to the Sales Funnel trending at the top of GrowthHackers, getting the must read label, and getting included in their newsletter.

Going forward, we’ll be doing a lot more manual outreach to influencers we mention in posts (or with a tool such as contentmarketer.io), we’re testing if there is a way that we can be included in more newsletters, we’re going to be testing out Reddit in new ways, we’re testing out guest posting, and we’re going to be searching for more marketing communities that we can become a part of.

We’ll update you on progress in next month’s post.

Emotions

I added this section last time to talk about the emotions we were going through during this challenge, since I felt like you don’t really see that much in the marketing world, you just see people bragging about the end result. I wasn’t sure whether people would care, but multiple people noted it:

So here it is again.

Devesh

Making the March plan made me feel a lot better. In fact when I got the idea for it, Benji laughed and said only I would build out a post by post model for traffic. Maybe, but our goal for March is 20,000 uniques. And we are getting awfully close to needing to hit 40,000 in a 30 day span, so I think it’s important to have some sense of whether it’s possible and what we need to do to get there.

My feeling right now is largely positive, and that’s unrelated to whether we’re going to “hit” the goal or not. I’m just happy with what we’ve done already.

To be honest, I find myself caring less and less about the 40,000 number. I think 20,000 in a 30 day span is imminently possible, and I’d like to hit it. If we can, I think that’d be a solid achievement. Frankly I think to get 40,000 users in a month with no SEO traffic is difficult to impossible without having a piece or two go viral. Maybe that’ll happen or maybe we will break into page 1 at soon and things will change. Until then the focus has to be on keeping our content quality really high.

So overall I feel better than I did last month.

Benji

I’m trying to take things day by day and not trying to worry too much about the 40,000 number. Like Devesh said, I’m not really a planner, I’m a doer. I just try to keep grinding day in and day out knowing that if we just keep giving this our all, we should be able to hit the numbers we set out to hit. And if not, we should come pretty damn close.

That’s the thing about setting high goals for yourself, even if you miss them, you should end up in a good spot.

Like Devesh said above, I’m really happy about how far we’ve come over the last four months. I think the best part for me has been connecting with so many great people. Getting e-mails from people sharing how much they love what we’re doing and how much some of our articles have helped them is really rewarding.

I definitely understand where Devesh’s skepticism comes from. Where I miscalculated our 40,000 goal for six months was definitely underestimating the value of SEO traffic. When we hit 35k unique visitors in 6 months at ThinkApps, I had forgotten that even though we didn’t have many links when I started, the domain was over 2 years old (which helped us rank faster). We also got 80 something links when one of our articles got picked up by 9 to 5 mac and syndicated across 80+ sites. That drastically helped us build our link profile quickly. I’m not saying the same thing can’t happen, but we’ve definitely got our work cut out for us going forward.

To make up for the pretty much non-existent SEO traffic, we’ll definitely have to pull out all of the tricks in the book. We’ll need to leverage our network to connect us to some high-influence blogs that can hopefully help us gain more exposure, we need to increase the amount of content that we publish on our site on a monthly basis (we’ve only published 15 posts), and we’ll need a couple of posts to go viral within the same month. If all of those things come together at the same time, we should be able to hit our goal of 40k unique visitors in one month.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

We’re now 2.5 months into our 6 month project (nearly halfway!), so things are starting to ramp up. We made some good progress this month, but the real challenge is about to arrive.

If you’re new and want to follow along as we try to hit 40,000 unique visitors in 6 months, click here.

On to January’s update.

Traffic

We had an internal goal to get to 5,000 unique visitors (users) in January, and we got close, coming in at 4,382.

As we talk about in the emotions section below, it’s easy to get dejected or overwhelmed with our 40k goal, but it’s important to remember that just a month ago we had 1,276 users, so we more than tripled traffic in a month (with holidays in between).

Satisfaction level on overall traffic: 90%

Acquisition: Where Traffic is Coming From

No surprise here when you read our promotion section, but our traffic sources were dominated by Growth Hackers and Inbound.org:

We made a push this month to answer a ton of questions on Quora, and although we suspect links out of Quora may be showing up as Direct (see below), a week or two into January, we started putting UTM parameters on those links to indicate it’s from Quora.

Traffic from those UTM tagged links didn’t make it close to the top 10…coming in at 17 sessions and ranking 25 on our acquisition list. Argh. We’ll keep at Quora for another month and see if we can get something substantive.

Pages: What Is Most Popular

We only have 9 posts on the blog so far, and the homepage makes 10, so don’t hold your breath for the top 10 most popular pages on this site:

We do have an internal competition of whose posts are the most popular, and I couldn’t be happier to see my blog conversion post coming in at a strong #1, even ahead of our homepage.

That said, Benji’s suggested search hack post was only published in late January, so it’s a legit threat.

Competitions aside, we are proud of our time on-site stats so far. People are reading the posts! Like reading reading. The suggested search hack post has a 6 minute and 11 second time average time on page right now. This is solid. The only blogs I’ve seen with higher time on site are super high quality and publish really long articles, so that’s a good sign for us.

We’d love to know what readers’ time on site is. If you can share, tell us your blog url and typical time on site in the comments.

Traffic Relative to Goals

Remember, in our first post about goals, we set up example exponential graphs to help us see where we are relative to a path that would lead us to our goal.

January has us on track again after a slight dip at the end of December.

If you’re curious, the blue line has February 28 at 7,000 users.

Email List

We started January at 238 email subscribers and we ended at 563. So our list grew by 136% — more than double, not bad.

Our conversion rate on the 4,382 users in January was 7.4%. Most blogs I’ve seen don’t convert that well, so that’s pretty good.

I still don’t think we’re maximizing our conversion rate, though, mostly (like everything with Grow and Convert right now) due to lack of time. For example, we don’t have a homepage gate, which should help with conversions considerably, and most posts don’t have real content upgrades in them. Instead we’re just asking people to “Join the journey”, which is working well so far but eventually we’ll need to provide more substance for optins. But I did project in our first post that this blog would likely convert between 5 – 8% of visitors, and we’re on the high side of that.

In terms of specific optins, our sitewide, scroll based popup is still converting at an insane 6.6%. I’ve never seen a simple popup convert that well.

Look at how simple it is:

In fact it breaks a lot of “rules”:

• No image
• The logo is bigger than the headline
• It interrupts reading because it’s scroll based

So why does it convert so well? My guess is:

• Our traffic is still not that high (<10,000 users), so it’s a super targeted user base
• Our content is appealing, if it wasn’t, no one would opt in
• Even though the popup isn’t the prettiest, the value proposition is compelling (people love the idea of following our journey).

Goal Analytics

We still haven’t created a thank you page and thus don’t have a Google Analytics goal for optins so we can’t easily see optin rate by post or page. As I mentioned above, working part time on this, our to do list is long and producing good content always wins. It’s bothering me to not have these basic analytics set up, though, so I’ll plan to fix this in February.

Finally, here’s where we are relative to our list building roadmap:

A tad ahead of schedule.

So, overall, we are on track, but note that the grain-of-salt exponential graphs are still in their early stage almost-linear growth regimes. The steep curve of the exponential is just getting started and is about to hit us full blast.

Fortunately there is still a lot we have yet to do…

Promotion

Before I list what we did in January, let me first list out what we have yet to do (as of 1/31/16):

• Haven’t published a guest post
• Haven’t been a guest on a podcast (The first one was published a few days ago in February.)
• Haven’t done any serious email outreach for link building or shares
• Haven’t run a contest
• Haven’t accepted guest posters

Now, here are the things we tried in January:

Communities, Communities, Communities

This was number 1 through number 100 in terms of promotion tactics employed in January (and so far). Obviously you can see that in our acquisition channels screenshot. Growth Hackers and Inbound.org were massive.

It’s hard to say exactly what makes an article do well in those communities, but we think a key part is that our content is really in line with the audience there. Marketers want to learn about marketing, and it seems we are giving enough depth in our articles to stand out. And as we’ve mentioned before, the 40,000 in 6 months goal is absolutely resonating with people.

In addition, we told people in private communities we are a part of about our posts. We both joined Facebook groups in January and have found that these groups are much more engaged than other communities. We’ve been sharing some of our articles there and have been getting a lot of great feedback and have been forming some great relationships with people that have helped us promote our content via communities.

Quora

As I mentioned earlier, we tried to answer 1 question a day each on Quora in January. Unfortunately only a week or two into the month we started to suspect that Google Analytics may not be properly recording Quora traffic as coming from Quora:

So we then started to include UTM parameters in our links back to Grow and Convert that identified the traffic as coming from Quora. We haven’t done a good job of going back to old posts and adding those parameters, though.

Above is all Quora traffic from our GA in January.

Either:

1. Quora isn’t driving a lot of traffic
2. The posts that are getting a lot of traffic are the old ones and don’t have the UTM parameters in them.

Let’s do some detective work to see which it may be…

Here are screenshots of our view stats from within Quora:

Devesh’s:

Benji’s:

Frustratingly, Quora doesn’t let you put a date range for viewing stats. But when we select “last 30 days” when writing this post (first week of February), it says my answers had 4.7k views and Benji’s had 6.6k views. So a total of 11,300 views.

Not every answer has a link to a GC post. But, many do. So let’s guess reasonable clickthrough rates to posts on our site…

A range of click through rates on links to our site of 1% – 10% would yield 113 and 1,130 sessions on Grow and Convert. Google Analytics is showing us 18 sessions from Quora, which would correspond to a clickthrough rate (on Quora views) of 0.16%.

I have no idea what clickthrough rates on links inside Quora answers are (if you know, please tell us or provide a link in the comments), but 0.16% seems pretty damn low. I measure conversion rates for a living and the kind of links that get clicked that few times are random stuff in the sidebar or end of blog posts that add little value.

Hence, we’re going to keep doing Quora in February and we’ll be sure to use UTM parameters in all links there.

Facebook Groups

2016 is the rise of the Facebook group. We joined a number of groups and have started interacting with members in the community.

Note: We aren’t just throwing links in these groups but we’re answering questions and helping other people with challenges that they might have. In turn that’s giving us visibility and helping us build relationships with other marketers.

The advantage of Facebook groups is that people are online almost all the time meaning that there is a super high level of engagement when posts do get shared compared to lets say Google+ groups or LinkedIn groups.

Being that it was our first month experimenting with FB groups, we’ll save some traffic stats for next month and will hopefully use UTM parameters to quantify the impact (although we don’t want to overstep our boundaries).

Groups that we’re a part of:

CopyMonk

Groove Learning

Blog + Biz BFFs

Internet Marketing Super Friends

Cult of Copy

Digital Marketing Questions

Again, I want to reiterate that we’re not just in these communities to share our content. We’re forming relationships with people who are active members of these communities. If you are just using these groups to distribute content you’ll get banned in 2 seconds (especially with Cult of Copy or Internet Marketing Super Friends). I’ve been a passive member for about a year studying how they operate and have only recently started contributing to the conversation.

Emotions

I want to start including this section on the monthly posts from now on. Here’s why: There’s a lot of bravado in the marketing space (especially marketers talking about marketing to other marketers, which is a category we fall into here). Most posts you see are like this:

How I accomplished this unbelievable feat in this unbelievable amount of time.

But what about the struggle? The doubts and fears, and imposter syndrome that everyone feels but tries to cover up. This isn’t a family reunion, we don’t need to pretend our lives are perfect.

So every month I want to talk about the emotions of the month.

So… January.

Devesh’s Emotions:

There were definitely times this month where I felt like “There is no way in hell we are hitting this goal.” Then, we’d get on a Growth Hackers email and it would switch to “Ok, maybe we’ll hit it.” then at the end of the month when we started knocking on the door of 5000 unique visitors (users), I felt pretty optimistic. But I’m not gonna lie, going from 5000 to 40,000 in 3 months isn’t going to be easy.

One note on me though: In my previous job at a startup, my coworkers actually called me “Johnny Raincloud” because I had a way of raining on every parade (in my defense, that startup crashed and burned, so I had reason to be skeptical). I like to think of myself as “Johnny Data”, I’ll look at the data and see where it’s pointing. That has it’s pluses and minuses. Plus: I can be really realistic and not delude myself. Minus: I can be totally pessimistic in the early stages, when numbers usually show you that no one knows you exist.

The good thing is, this is a partnership and Benji is basically the opposite of me. He appears to be 100% confident at all times that we’ll hit this goal.

I’m going to let him comment here…

Benji’s Emotions:

As Devesh said earlier, I think the biggest challenge for us has just been the time we’ve been able to allot to this project. We’ve both only been working on this between 5-15 hours a week. That’s what worries me; because initially I thought we were going to be able to pump out 8 posts per month and 3 months in we barely have 8 posts total.

That’s was what led me to the decision of working on this full-time. I know that if I can dedicate 40+ hours a week to the site that I can make the site grow much faster. I was only doing the bare minimum when it came to promotion before and I only had time to write between 1-3 articles per month. We really need to increase the volume of posts on our site to hit a number like 40,000 readers a month. Also, I’m going to double down on promotion tactics that have been driving traffic for us.

I’ve stayed positive because it really only takes one or two posts going viral to help us hit a number like that and I have a few tricks up my sleeve to help us get closer to that goal. It’s going to be a close one but I will go down fighting if I have to.

I don’t want to spoil next month’s post but on the positive end as of writing this post (Feb 4) we’re already at over 2,000 unique visitors for the month so even though it’s a short month, we’re starting it off strong.

Next Month

February is going to be fun. As Benji mentioned, he quit is job and is working on Grow and Convert full time. But, he’s also moving to Southeast Asia, so that’ll take a decent chunk of his time. Nonetheless we should be able to really start ramping up elbow grease hours here.

The blue line in the traffic graph above says 7,000 uniques in February, but we want to get ahead of schedule, so we’re aiming for 10,000. That will set us up with a solid base of traffic for March and April.

Concrete Traffic and Promotion Plans

For February, we’re going to start doing

• Email outreach to promote posts (like this)
• Reddit
• Guest posts
• More podcasts
• Possibly an email based contest to grow the list faster.

Stay tuned and let us know if there are any particular topics you want us to cover!

If you’re new to Grow and Convert, you can follow us here.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

It’s been a really fun month and a half since we launched Grow and Convert.

We’ve had the chance to connect with tons of really interesting people from all over the world, and help them with their content marketing strategy.

Every month we share our stats and some learnings to go along with it.

This month we’ll look back 2015 and share what we did, what we learned, and how we plan to ramp up moving forward.

We have just under 4.5 months to hit our goal of 40,000 monthly unique visitors.

Can we do it?

Follow along our journey.

2015 by the Numbers

Since launching our site (Nov.17), we’ve had just shy of 3,000 unique visitors. 2,943 unique visitors to be exact.

The arrows above show when we published posts, and typically you’ll see correlation between when we published the post and spikes in traffic.

The high bounce rate 82.40% is due to there being only 5 pieces of content on our site.

We’re getting 1.41 pages per session which should increase as we add more content to our site and link pieces of our content together.

You’ll notice towards December, there were much smaller spikes in traffic — this is because we did less promotion of our content in December due to:

1. Being busy with our full-time jobs
2. Not wanting to do heavy promotion around the holidays

Breakdown by Acquisition Channel

Referrals drove the highest amount of traffic at 1,081 new users — almost all of the referral traffic was driven by Inbound.org. So far, three of our posts have made it to trending on Inbound — but all of them hit trending during the holidays which lead to lower traffic.

You can view the Inbound.org stats for the three articles here:

Our Content Strategy Unveiled: How We Plan to Grow to 40,000 Unique Visitors in 6 Months (67 Votes, 9 Comments)

Building a content team: Hiring Freelancers vs. Inhouse vs. Outsourcing (99 votes, 41 comments)

How to Find, Evaluate, and Hire Writers (80 votes, 9 comments)

(Other) was from the one GrowthHackers post that trended “Our Content Strategy Unveiled: Our Plan to Grow to 40,000 monthly unique visitors.” On this post we received 37 votes and 7 comments, and that led to 406 new users and a higher pages/session

Here’s a more detailed view of our social traffic. Facebook came in at number one driving 566 new users. Most of the traffic came in via our network from the launch of our first post.

Twitter was the second highest driver at 195 new users but accounted for the highest session duration.

LinkedIn surprisingly came in third with significantly less traffic — however the only promotion that we did was via sharing updates on our newsfeed infrequently. The rest of the numbers are too small to report on and have anything significant to say.

Breakdown by Content

Here’s a snapshot of our stats for each of our posts.

I won’t go too much into the details on this one — I’ll explain why numbers are so low for most of the posts in the art of promotion.

One thing I do want to point out is how high average time on site is. This is our indicator that we’re producing quality content. However, one thing to note is that time on site can fluctuate depending on how your promote your content. Being that these numbers were generated mainly from communities and social, I’d say these are pretty solid time on site numbers for each of the articles.

Where we are relative to our goals

If you remember from our first monthly stats update, we created some exponential growth curves to see how we are tracking every month (we also pointed out that you should take them with a grain of salt).

Here is where we are on the traffic curve.

The dip is because November’s number was from only 2 weeks of data, and we had a bunch of initial traffic from our network sharing our opening post. Overall, nothing to be too excited about either way — promotion hasn’t really begun yet.

List building is also on track:

Our list has been built exclusively by converting visitors on our site (no guest posts, contests, or any off-site tactics yet). We’re using Optinmonster (not an affiliate link) and here’s how our different popups are converting:

Keep in mind the conversion rates in this image are opt-ins per views-of-the-form, not opt-ins per pageview. So, for example, 65% in the first row means 65% of the people who clicked the link offering our hiring writers guide filled it in.

Also keep in mind that for forms that are giving away a content upgrade, not 100% of the opt-ins are new emails, because existing subscribers will often opt-in to receive a guide, or PDF, or whatever. The reason we (and you) should make existing subscribers opt-in to bonuses on your site is that you always want to maintain a list of who downloaded what, so if you’re thinking of releasing a product related to a certain subject you have a sub-list of people who already showed interest in that topic.

What we like about these conversion rates is that the site-wide scroll-based popup is converting at 3.7%, which is in general a pretty good number. A decent number are clicking on the “JOIN US” button on the homepage (also a good sign). And finally, the content upgrades to our recent hiring writers posts are showing interest as well.

Now, let’s talk about promotion.

The Art of Content Promotion

Content promotion is an art, not a science.

Every post you write requires a different strategy — there are different communities to post to, different audiences that will find the content valuable, and different channels to use to drive traffic.

Also, the strategy changes every year — what worked last year most likely won’t work this year due to changing rules and marketing practices.

This is why it’s important for me to network, read, and find out what other people are doing — that’s the best way to research new promotion strategies. Then it becomes equally important to test my research for myself and tweak the approach, because most of the time the way someone else approached promoting their posts will not work for me.

Once I find a tactic that works, I try to replicate that tactic for every post and scale up what’s working.

There are a lot of variables that come into play when talking about content promotion: the content itself (is it good? do people want to share it?), the timing of when you post it (posting during the holidays/weekends may lead to lower traffic), if you hit trending or not on the different communities you post to, the influencers that come across your content, etc.

This is why content promotion is an art, not a science.

So far, we’ve done very minimal promotion of our content. Pretty much just the basics (social sharing and interacting with communities).

Our first post we only shared via Facebook to our personal networks (875 unique visitors) — this is because it was announcing our blog and what we planned to do with it. It was an opinion piece and didn’t add a ton of value right off the bat. I plan to heavily promote this article in the coming months now that there are other valuable pieces of content on our site.

Our second post (1355 unique visitors) we shared via GrowthHackers and Inbound and got a natural lift of social traffic from those. However, there’s still a lot we can do to promote that piece — we can find other communities on social networks (Facebook, G+, Quora, etc.) that are made up of marketers that would be interested in what we’re doing to grow to 40,000 people. We can do outreach to people mentioned in the post that might want to share our content with their networks. We can reach out to content roundups that talk about content marketing posts and see if the author will include our post in their roundup, and a whole bunch of other things.

Our third post (223 unique visitors) we only sent to our e-mail list and posted to FB.

Our fourth post got a lift on inbound (616 unique visitors), was sent out to our e-mail list and our social accounts, but hasn’t been shared anywhere else.

Our last post also only got shared on inbound and via our lists(128 unique visitors), but hasn’t been shared anywhere else. Also, it was only posted two days before the end of the month, which is why traffic is so low.

January is going to be the month of promotion + new content that reaches a wider audience.

Here are some of the things we’ll be testing for content promotion in January:

• Creating a list of communities that we could publish our posts to — know some good ones? Add them in the comments.
• Creating a list of e-mail newsletters in the industry that we can reach out to — know some good ones? Add them in the comments
• Syndicating content on platforms that have built in distribution such as Medium and LinkedIn
• Finding more communities inside of social networks where marketers and entrepreneurs are active
• Find some slack groups that marketers and entrepreneurs are a part of

Any other ideas or things you’d like to see us try? Post ideas in the comments below.

Our Plan to Ramp Up Traffic Going Forward

In order to hit our goal, there’s a number of things we’ll have to do to get to 40,000 monthly uniques.

January: We’re going to focus on going broader in terms of our target audience to appeal to more marketers. We’ve been pretty narrowly focused on tactical stuff so far that only appeals to a small subset of people — but we’ll start going broader but still cover things in depth. We’ll focus more on promotion now that we have a base of content on our site, and we’ll also need to try to get more than 4 posts per month going forward. We have some surprises coming your way this month — but our goal is to hit 7,500 uniques for the month of January.

February: We’ll likely start introducing guests posts on our site and also start guest posting on other sites to increase our visibility. We’re going to target industry publications that have a large following of people in our target market. We’re also going to shoot for 8–12 posts per month. We should be in the 12,500–15,000 unique range in Feb.

March: Likely a combination of all of the above, and introducing webinars to get our name out there and to share more in depth content with our audience. We’re also going to shoot for press coverage in March to give us a nice lift going into our final month/goal. For March we should be in the 20,000–30,000 unique visitor range.

April: Final push — we’ll be doing everything we can to get us over the line -press, guest posts, contests, interviews, — you name it! We need to hit our goal by April 17th, 2016.

Follow along

As I mentioned at the top, the most exciting part about this project has been exchanging emails with readers and learning about their businesses, what they want to hear more of, what they like, and just getting to know our small but growing Grow and Convert community.

To follow our journey and join this community, just click here and tell us where to send updates.

Questions? Let us know in the comments.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

Let me be honest, when Benji first told me the goal should be 40,000 unique visitors a month in 6 months, I think I laughed out loud.

I might’ve even thrown in a snarky comment for good measure: “Good luck.”

Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that Benji has been more optimistic than me from the start.

Don’t get me wrong, we both fully expected this blog would resonate with marketers, and it has: we’ve received a bunch of emails and comments with people excited to follow our journey. But there’s a reason my ex-coworkers used to call me “Johnny Raincloud”…because I need to be convinced.

But here’s the thing, I can be convinced by numbers pretty easily (I’m an engineer by training), so really they should have called me “Johnny Data”, but they weren’t that nice.

In this post, we’ll look at data. Specifically, the traffic and email list data of this blog in November. And we’ll see why Johnny Raincloud is forecasting some sunshine for Grow and Convert.

But before we get into the numbers, though, I want to step back and point out what readers are saying about Grow and Convert. Because data is fine, but if you aren’t really resonating with people, traffic doesn’t mean much because you don’t have the trust or emotional connection to get people to act.

So let’s see what’s resonating.

What’s Exciting Readers: The Journey

We’ve noticed readers are specifically mentioning The Journey as something they like. The Journey has two aspects:

1. Our Goal: It’s unique and fun to follow a blog from 0 to 40,000 unique visitors. Will they hit it? Will they fail? Let’s see!

2. Our Transparency: It’s not interesting if we don’t tell you what we’re doing. That’s why a lot of people keep using the phrase “following along”. In fact, it’s kind of amazing how many people are signing off their emails with the same phrases:

Our Monthly Transparency Reports

Every month we’re going to update you on where we are relative to our goal: 40,000 monthly uniques and 5,000 email subscribers in 6 months. We’ll also list out what promotion strategies we used on that month’s posts, where traffic came from, and any other key insights.

Note: Our first post was in the middle of November, so this is actually a 2-week update, but we have some initial “startup” items to cover, and I wanted to get on a calendar month schedule.

Let’s get started.

BTW, if you want updates in between the monthly updates, we’ll post them on Twitter, so follow us there. and for more full updates of our journey along with other blog posts, join our email list here.

Forecasting How we Get to 40,000 Uniques and 5,000 Email Subscribers

Normally, we’ll get right into the updates, but since this is the first one, let me walk through how we think we’ll get to 40k monthly uniques and 5k email subscribers.

Blog Traffic Roadmap

Blog traffic growth is not linear, and it’s often not even monotonic, so laying out a roadmap of traffic growth is a bit dubious. But nonetheless, here’s a graph that shows our monthly traffic goals:

From my experience looking at analytics for many, many sites, our eventual traffic graph will look a lot more like a staircase, with big jumps followed by minimal growth:

We’re not exactly sure when these spikes of traffic will come. It really depends on the type of content that we put out, what resonates with our readers, and if we end up getting some of our content picked up by some larger publications, etc.

The goal of these monthly updates is to show you where we are relative to our monthly traffic goals and explain what has been working, what our shortcomings have been, and show you how we’ve been distributing our posts.

List Building Roadmap

One thing we haven’t talked about yet is the importance of email subscribers for the overall growth of the blog.

We think they are vital. Here’s why: they are far more engaged than social followers, and they help you build loyal repeat traffic.

If we can hit 40,000 uniques in 6 months, I think 5,000 subscribers is a reasonable goal. In the first 6 months of a blog, from my experience, I’ve typically seen sites converting around 5+% of their visitors to e-mail subscribers.

For example, here is the month-to-month conversion rate for my conversion optimization company blog in 2015, where traffic has hovered in the low 4-figures a month:

I’ve also had clients with over 100,000 unique visitors per month convert in the low single digit percent range, so 5% – 8% for 0 – 40,000 is reasonable. In a future post, I’ll detail the main opt-in strategies we’ll use to get there.

Assuming a 5% – 8% conversion rate of the traffic roadmap I showed above, here’s how many email subscribers we would get every month:

Before the data nerds start nitpicking me, I’ll be the first to say: Of course our conversion rate will not be constant from the beginning to the end, it will likely start off high and then dip as we get more traffic. But like I said, I think an overall conversion rate of 5% over 6 months is possible for this blog.

A lower conversion rate wouldn’t put us at 5000 (5% doesn’t quite get us there either), but there are other methods to make up the remaining subscribers such as: running a giveaway, going on podcasts, or doing free workshops for other blogs and communities. We should easily be able to tack on 1000 or more subscribers at the end with those methods.

Traffic Update: Ahead of Schedule

Ok, let’s see where we are in our first two weeks.

Overall Site Traffic

Our first post was published on November 17, and we’re at 1878 “Users” (Google changed the name to Users from Unique Visitors so this is the metric we will use going forward) as of December 1st.

1,878 unique visitors is pretty good for the first two posts and only two weeks of being live with the site.

Avgerage session duration is on the lower side (typically you’ll want to shoot for 2:00 and above) however this is due to there being only two pieces of content thus far and because of where the traffic came from (mostly social and referral).

Also, bounce rate is on the high side. Again, the high bounce rate is due to there only being two pieces of content and because of the traffic sources. Once we add more content, we should see the bounce rate drop. *Typically the bounce rate you’ll want to shoot for is 60% or below.

Note: Technically, the above data includes 80 or so visitors before the first post when we started announcing it to friends.

If you look at graph from Google Analytics of our traffic over the last two weeks, you’ll notice the spikes are correlated around the days that we launched our new posts. Also, you’ll see small spike pre-launch when we started telling friends via word of mouth about our site.

In the early stages of a blog, typically most of your traffic will come from social and referrals, and as the blog matures you should see traffic shift more towards Organic Search, Direct and Referral as your main acquisition sources.

Digging into the numbers for our two posts

Post 1: Content Marketing has become too trendy

Total unique pageviews in November: 736

Here’s where the traffic came from for the first post:

For the initial launch of our blog, we mainly leveraged our network to get the word out about our new site. Most of the traffic for our initial first post came from posting on our personal Facebook pages as well as some Facebook groups that were focused around marketing and entrepreneurship such as From Wantrapreneur to Entrepreneur (a private group for people who’ve taken the SumoMe Building $1,000 monthly business course). We also tweeted from our personal accounts to get the word out. Finally, Benji emailed an old list of his that had 164 people on it, and got a 13.5% click rate, so that also drove some traffic.

We did the bare minimum when it came to distributing our first post because it was mainly a launch announcement and we didn’t want to over promote our site prior to adding value to our readership.

Post 2: Our Content Strategy Unveiled

Total unique pageviews in November: 1043

Here’s where the traffic came from for the second post:

For our second post, communities became a big part of our promotion tactic. Friends in the marketing space shared our post on GrowthHackers and Inbound, and we ended up trending on both communities for between 1-3 days. As you can see from the numbers above, this drove most of the traffic to our site.

Below you’ll find the number of upvotes we received from each of the communities to attain that level of traffic. Comments also play a big part of the weighting system. For our post on Inbound we received a total of 9 comments. For our post on GrowthHackers we received a total of 7 comments.

Overall, here is our sitewide breakdown of acquisition sources — largely just a summary of what we have above for these 2 posts. In the future we expect email to make up a more significant share of traffic and of course, eventually, we hope organic search will start to build.

These numbers are very typical for an early stage blog. Typically most of your promotion starting out will come from social. Referral traffic was driven largely by the communities. Direct comes from people sharing your links with others. Other is traffic driven from GrowthHackers.

Digging deeper into the sources of social traffic site wide:

Here is where we are two weeks into month one compared to our month one goal:

So, although it can be dangerous to draw any sweeping conclusions after two weeks and two posts, we are ahead of schedule!

List Building Update: 10.4% Conversion Rate

Quite frankly, our email list growth has been excellent so far. We have 196 email subscribers already, which means 10.4% of the 1,878 users to date have joined our email list.

Considering our goal is to get 5% conversion overall, starting at 10% is great.

We aren’t implementing any fancy tactics yet. We just have a handful of ways to opt-in to our list:

1. Sitewide Popup – When someone makes it 50% down a page, this pops up:
   (We’re using OptinMonster for our popups, and we’re using their basic plan, (not an affiliate link) which costs $49/year, pretty affordable).
2. Join Us Button on the Homepage – This opens up a similar looking popup form when clicked.
   Taking up a huge chunk of your homepage is a great strategy for growing your email list. It’s been called a “featurebox” by some, and is used by huge blogs like Buffer (Buffer asks you to join their app, which is obviously their main CTA, instead of joining an email list):
3. Contextual In-Post CTAs – Both of our posts have calls to action to join us on our journey:
   
   We’re not shy about asking people to opt-in in the middle of a post, because we do it contextually. We’ll talk a lot more about content upgrades later, but for now, our posts are still high level, so it doesn’t quite make sense to make elaborate opt-in bonuses. Instead, since we’re outlining what our blog will be about, it makes sense to mention we have an email list where you can keep up on our journey.

Note: In the future we’ll report more detail on how various individual opt-in forms are converting. Unfortunately I made some installation mistakes so the individual opt-in form data wasn’t being properly recorded. Oops. 

Our Email List Building Secret Sauce

My suspicion is that our initial surge of subscribers has to do with what I mentioned at the top of this post: Our journey is compelling.  Plain and simple, people want to see if we can hit these numbers or not. (By the way, if you want to read our current articles — all which are very in depth articles with case studies and examples in each one about content marketing for real businesses, join our email list.)

So, here’s the question to ask yourself when it comes to list building:

What can you do in your niche to add a little piece of uniqueness to your content strategy that will get people to follow instead of ignore you?

Want us to write an in depth case study about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.