THE CONTENT MARKETING PLAYBOOK

Introduction

A Playbook to Win
with Content

Hiten Shah,
Co-Founder, Quick Sprout

T oday, more content is produced than ever before. Everyone seems to have a blog, and for
people just getting out of the starting gate, it seems more daunting and intimidating than ever
to succeed with content. Maybe that’s why so many people are trying to proclaim “the death of
content marketing.”

But there’s a reason why there’s so much content out there: it works.

I’ve run 7 different companies over the last 12 years. I got two of my startups, Crazy Egg and
Kissmetrics, to a million dollars per year in revenue—and I got there by producing valuable
content.

Content marketing isn’t scary. When you strip away all the misinformation and hype, it’s really just
about helping people solve problems. But to turn it into an engine of growth and revenue, you
have to make it a process.

Stick with me, and I’ll take you through my tried and true system for writing great content,
producing it at scale, and turning it into results.

Hiten Shah

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Chapter 1

Build

To impress your offer on the mind of the reader or

listener, it is necessary to put it into brief, simple
language...No farfetched or obscure statement will
stop them. You have got to hit them where they live:
in the heart or in the head. You have got to catch their
eyes or ears with something simple, something direct,
something they want.
 — John Caples, Tested Advertising Methods

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In a hyper-competitive space saturated with content, there’s one thing that will make or break
your efforts: quality. We’ve come to a point in SaaS and B2B where there’s little technical
differentiation between various tools. How do customers decide which to pick? Brand.

In the short term, you can drive traffic and get conversions with quantity and mediocre-to-poor
content, but you’ll never be able to build a brand. That’s what makes quality the first thing you
should focus on from the beginning before you try to up the quantity.

In fact, the most common mistake that people make with content is scaling prematurely. As with
everything in business, you need to nail it before you scale it.

When you build a brand, you get direct, unattributed visitors—people coming to your site for no
clear reason. That means that your content is memorable, and it’s getting people to return to
your site organically. It also means that your content is spreading the message about your brand
through word-of-mouth.

That’s a critical, early indicator of how you’ll perform over the long term with direct traffic and
organic search, the two most important channels for sustainable growth. If your quality isn’t up
to par over the long haul, you’ll see your brand and your search traffic suffer. Given that the vast
majority of long-term traffic comes from these channels, that means that if you don’t start with
quality, you have no content marketing endgame.

Our Simple Rule of Content Marketing is Quality + Quantity = Eyeballs. And in that order.

SIMPLE RULE OF CONTENT

Easy to understand. Difficult to execute.

Quality + Quantity = Eyeballs

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Quality is one of those things that sounds ephemeral and out of reach. What people don’t realize
is that you can get there by following a series of steps and by turning quality into a process.

The Kissmetrics Content Marketing Secret

Quality comes from loving your people.

As a startup, you’re low on budget and resources, but you’re high on enthusiasm. You started your
company because you experienced the pain point first hand, and you want to help people like you
succeed. Content marketing is how you operationalize your passion and turn it from a characteris-
tic of your personality into marketing.

When you love your people and that love comes through in the content, they recognize that as
quality and they tell their friends about you. Your direct and search traffic grows, and you have the
makings of a content marketing engine.

Once you know who your customers are, talk to three of them.
Figuring out where they hang out can be as simple as asking That’s why high-quality content
marketing all begins with these
them, “What blogs are you reading?” three questions:

To learn how you should engage with them, ask them, “What’s Question 1.
Who are your customers?
the most frustrating part of your day?”
Question 2.
Where do they hang out?
What your people tell you gives you the context you need to
define what quality means to your customers, and points you Question 3.
How should you engage them?
in the right direction for getting your content in front of your
people. It allows you to get feedback and improve.

Case Study: Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics began with this framework, and applying it led us in an unexpected direction.

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Around 2009, we were still building our product—an analytics platform for marketers. We were
looking for a low-cost way to reach our audience before our product was ready, with a low
budget and limited resources.

Doing some basic research, we found out that analytics folks in the Omniture and Google
Analytics ecosystems, as well as a broader audience of marketers, hung out on Twitter using the
#measure hashtag. These were the exact people that we wanted to engage.

They weren’t just talking about online marketing but were actively looking for fresh information.
They had real problems that needed solving, and we knew we could help. But first, we had to
show people that we knew what we were talking about.

We started sharing links under #measure on Twitter. We would share anyone and everyone’s
content, as long as it was quality and genuinely useful. We became the go-to Twitter account to
follow for marketers to learn more about analytics. Over time, we grew our Twitter following to
200,000+ people, all 100% organic, without spending a dime on acquisition.

Twitter was exploding in popularity at the time, and allowed us to grow an audience much faster
than we ever could on our own. By the time we were ready to launch, Twitter also gave us a huge
base of people to kickstart it with—and a concrete, tested idea of what they wanted to read.

Answering the 3-question framework allowed us to find our market and get a sense of what
quality looked like for it. The next step was to drill down on quality.

Quality Bubbles to the Top

We have to be clear about what we want people to

remember us for.
— Steve Jobs

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The signal-noise ratio compares the power of the desired signal to the background noise that it
operates in. The more noise there is, the stronger the signal needs to be to cut through.

Content operates in much the same way, where the fidelity of your signal is directly correlated
to quality. Think about it this way. There is a lot of noise out there. In such a competitive
environment, if an article stands out against all that noise, it’s likely that the piece is high quality.

People get hung up on the idea of quality because it’s hard to pin down quality qualitatively—but
this is why it’s actually pretty easy to measure quality quantitatively.

If articles for individual, trusted blogs within your market are shared a lot, for example, it’s a
pretty simple way to benchmark what’s good and what’s not. Shares are more than just traffic or
clickbait. They show that people care enough about what you’re saying to help spread it along.

Creating high-quality content is a data-informed process, which makes it deducible and

reproducible.

Reverse Engineer Content

Figure out what’s working. Do more of it. It’s a fundamental principle that I run all of my
businesses by.

This rule applies to content, with a twist. Figure out what’s working for others. Imitate it, but
don’t rip it.

Everything to do with content is publicly available and out there, so it can be measured. If you
can measure it, you can reverse engineer it.

Beware this caveat, as it’ll save you a major headache. Because content is such a powerful way
to build a brand, if you rip off content from another company, their customers will know and
they’ll rain hell down on you. The upside is that when someone rips you off, your audience will
return the favor.

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The key to imitating great content is in first determining what content to imitate, since quality is
specific to a market or customer.

Fortunately, if you’ve gone through the 3-question framework of The Kissmetrics Content
Marketing Secret, you already have your answer. The content you want to imitate is the highest
performing content in the places on the web where your customers hang out.

With the following tools, you can dig into the data for a given site that will show you what
content performs the best. From there, it’s easy to study the piece, break down why it was
successful, and imitate it.

Buzzsumo : Easily find the most-shared articles on a particular topic or a specific website.

Start by topic. Suppose you want to find the top performing articles on content marketing. Just
search “content marketing” and Buzzsumo automatically gives you a breakdown of the most
shared articles over the past month.

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Then, take the top 4-5 blogs in the data, and break them down further.

Take their domain names, and copy and paste the URLs into Buzzsumo. This allows you to take
the top 10-20% of content within your market by shares over a period of time, and get even more
granular with your analysis.

Export this data into a spreadsheet to have a master document on the best performing content
across all of the sites that you care about.

Open Site Explorer by Moz: Measuring shares is an invaluable way to track what content
struck a chord and became hugely popular, if only for a short period of time. Looking at
backlinks via Open Site Explorer, however, is like going through an album of greatest hits—
it’s a good gauge of how quality lasts over time, and what kind of content is evergreen.

That’s because while social shares are ephemeral, backlinks are forever.

The screenshot below shows Quick Sprout’s top 3 pages by link quality: “The Definitive Guide to
Growth Hacking,” “How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions,” and “The Advanced
Guide to Content Marketing.”

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Two out of three of these are long-form guides. It should come as no surprise that big bundles
of content value wind up getting linked long after they’re posted, but what you may not realize is
that those “advanced guides” are often just several blog posts merged into one expansive piece of
content.

Creating evergreen content doesn’t have to mean spending weeks penning a brilliant post from
scratch—sometimes all it takes is a couple of super valuable articles on similar topics, tied
together into a coherent whole.

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Google: Because you want to rank on Google, you should run searches on it to find
out what’s currently ranking. Run the queries you expect your customers are running
to get a feel for how the existing content out there solves those problems.

Take the stand-out blogs and influencers in the arena and search their sites specifically. Type in
site: [domain name] followed by a query to hone in on your results.

Your problem becomes simplified because you know your competition and you know what end
product you’re trying to build. Now it’s just a matter of getting there.

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Headlines are Everything Here are the 7 basic rules for

constructing headlines:
Headlines are where you express the quality of your
signal. Too many people spend all their time on the con- Rule 1. Negative words and numbers
tent, and let it go to waste by slapping together a boring cause more clicks.

headline at the last minute. Rule 2. Keep under 65 characters to

ensure search visibility.

That’s one of the biggest mistakes that you can make Rule 3. Use specific headlines that
match your content.
with your content, because of one simple fact. Eight out
of ten people will read your headline, but only two out of Rule 4. Odd numbers perform better
than even ones.
ten will read the rest of your post.
Rule 5. Aim to have six words in your
headlines.
My co-founder, Neil Patel wrote a blog post for
Kissmetrics called “Five Shocking Facts That will Change Rule 6. Avoid words that have multiple
meanings.
your Entire Approach to Social Media.”
Rule 7. Include power verbs and
interesting adjectives.

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Five out of seven rules is the perfect amount to follow—we

Look closely, and you’ll see that Neil’s
tested it. post follows 5 out of 7 of the rules
outlined above:

Some people call this title (and ones like it) clickbait,
Rule 1. Negative word — “Shocking”
but the data shows that visitors spent a significant
amount of time on the page—around 4 minutes on Rule 3. Title is deadly specific about
what you’ll be reading
average. This shows that the post is delivering on the
Rule 4. Odd number — “Five”
promise of the headline and people are sticking around
to get value and learn. Rule 6. No ambiguous words

Rule 7. Power — they’ll “change your

Using a clickbait headline doesn’t mean that the content entire approach”

you write has to be trash. The greatest content on the

internet combines effective headlines that people want to
click on with content that they can’t stop reading. It’s the
best of both worlds.

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Chapter 2

Grow
I’m a vegetarian, so I eat tofu religiously, and I always encourage
everyone else to do the same. But tofu isn’t just good for your
health. Once you have your quality on lock, ToFu is also the secret
to building your content marketing and distribution engine.

ToFu stands for Top of Funnel, and filling it with leads should be
your top priority. Typically, people skimp on their ToFu. They put no effort into getting leads to their site,
write a bunch of conversion-focused content, and end up without seeing results.

That’s because you need good, steady traffic to convert people with content. Even if you see high
conversion rates, a low traffic volume means that actual conversions will be few and far between. Most
often, the way to get more conversions is more ToFu.

Focusing on ToFu can feel counterintuitive because your instinct is that great content should be getting
you results on its own. But that’s just magical thinking. People aren’t going to suddenly flock to your blog
because you made one great piece of content. Remember our first simple rule of content marketing:
Quality + Quantity = Eyeballs.

Once you reliably begin to put out quality, double This is critical, because:

down, and turn it into quantity. A HubSpot study shows

• Quality helps you build a brand, but
companies that blog 16 times a month receive 3.5x more quantity helps you learn what works.
traffic compared to companies that only put out 0-4. You need to get quantity to start A/B
testing.

• Quantity is the only way to build up

100,000 website visits a month is a good benchmark to hit.
larger channels of traffic, like organic
At a pretty standard conversion rate of .25%, this means search.

you start seeing 250 conversions a month, and you then • If you can create quality content at
have the ToFu you need to experiment and dramatically scale, you push yourself above 95% of
content that’s out there.
improve this number.

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The Content Marketing Assembly Line

from a Survey of 2,203 Companies

Producing a steady cadence of high-quality content is one of the most challenging aspects of
content marketing for companies, but that’s often because most people approach it with the
totally wrong mentality.

I ran a survey of 2,203 companies driving traffic through content marketing, and what quickly
became apparent is that most people approach content marketing like a black box.

Ideas go in one end. Hours and days are spent doing something creative and mysterious. And
content comes out the other end.

Only 35% of companies doing content marketing have a documented content marketing strategy,
and that means that the vast majority of companies don’t know what they’re doing. What’s
startling is that people measure and analyze all other aspects of marketing, but they don’t take
that mindset and apply it to the actual practice of content creation.

When I interviewed companies that do content marketing with and without a documented
strategy, one basic 7-step “recipe” for content production emerged across the board:

Identify Pick a Track

Research Create Review & Promote &
Topics Single Performance
Topic Content Publish Distribute
Topic

Step 1. Identify topics: This mostly consists of brainstorming based on hunches.

Step 2. Pick a single topic: One person has an editorial role and they pick a topic to start on.

Step 3. Research topic: Whoever picked the topic is the expert, and they do research to set up the parameters of the content.

Step 4. Create content: This step is often handed off to a specialist—writer, designer, etc.

Step 5. Review and publish: Copyediting, revising and hitting the publish button.

Step 6. Promote and distribute: Post to social channels, and sites like Hacker News and Growth Hackers.

Step 7. Track performance : Keep track of views, time spent reading, traffic sources, and shares.

You need to look at content production as a series of steps because then you can begin to identify
bottlenecks and test ways to push through them.

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If you’ve found, for example, that “How-To” posts and “List”

To improve the efficiency of your
posts perform best within your space, create templates for process, ask yourself the following
them. Consult an index of trending subjects, and the sites and at each step:

blogs you frequent most often for research. Fill the template
• How long does it take me to get to the
out, and outsource it to an established freelance writer. next step?

• How can I use data to make more

If you’ve found that your visitors prefer reading longer accurate decisions?

blog posts, but that it takes you too long to write them, • Are there parts of this that I can
try combining a few shorter ones into one value-laden outsource?

megapost.

You shouldn’t do the same things over and over and expect different results. Instead, use every
iteration as an opportunity to try something new, and over time you’ll build a hyper-efficient content
machine.

Building an audience that comes back to your blog or site is like television programming. If you’re able
to deliver quality, consistent experiences like clockwork, audiences will tune in every week for more.

Case Study: Kissmetrics

My co-founder Neil Patel and I love to accomplish a lot with very little. One of the best examples
of this is how we grew the Kissmetrics blog.

For most of Kissmetrics, we only had two people in marketing, and we were still able to fill our
content pipeline with multiple posts a week and reach millions of marketers. This was only
possible because we had a relentless focus on breaking down the content creation process and
removing bottlenecks.

The editor of the blog was Sean Work, a colleague of ours from ACS, our consulting business.
Sean used to be a rocket scientist, and he applied that precision to the content on the
Kissmetrics blog. He cared deeply about the audience, and in doing so, set the bar for quality.
Even if Neil or I wanted to post on the blog, we needed to get Sean’s stamp of approval.

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That kept the quality of the blog super high, but it also created a bottleneck at the Review &
Publish stage. If posts weren’t up to snuff, they had to be sent back for multiple revisions, and
if we didn’t have other posts lined up, then nothing ended up getting out. We wouldn’t have
anything to Promote & Distribute and we couldn’t Track Performance either, so the middle
stages of our pipeline were backed up while the ends were sitting idly.

We realized that posts didn’t have to be written by Neil or me, and that if we could break down the
types of content we wanted to produce, we could maintain a high-quality standard and increase
the rate of production by outsourcing the actual writing to others. We found specific authors with
proven track records, paid them for the posts, and empowered them to create great stuff.

If a freelancer’s work didn’t meet Sean’s bar, we could drop it from the queue as a defective
piece without disrupting the rest of the assembly line. What mattered was having the assembly
line in gear and cranking.

Over time, the quality increased, because something cool happened. As our blog grew and
grew in traffic, it offered writers a bigger and bigger stage for their writing. The dynamic totally
reversed, and instead of paying writers to post on our blog, high-quality writers would pitch
us to write on our blog for free. Writers sought us out to write on the Kissmetrics blog to earn
recognition instead of money.

Traffic Source Teardown

It’s easy to spread yourself thin trying to optimize for every traffic source. You hear that you have
to start publishing on LinkedIn, that Twitter is blowing it up for your market, or that a community
forum like GrowthHackers brings in crazy viral traffic.

These things might be true—but you can’t blindly chase down trends just because they work for
someone else. More often than not, hunting them down will spread you thin, with only mediocre
gains to show for it.

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Instead, ask yourself: “What are we doing today that’s already
working? Can we start there?” It goes back to the simple rule
of marketing: figure out what works, and do more of it.
Different companies have different makeups of traffic that are
highly specific to the stage of growth they’re in. A software
blog that receives under 150k visits in a year operates under a
completely different rubric than one that receives millions.
I did a breakdown of 15 different blogs, from software to
community to personal, and sorted them into buckets
based on traffic volume.
At each stage, you see different results—but patterns begin
to emerge. Let’s walk through them.
1. Traffic Sources for Blogs
with Less than 150k Visits in 2015
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Caveats on traffic sources:
• Direct traffic is basically unattributable.
It could be from social networks, email
links, mobile devices or any number
of other sources. Direct traffic lessens
with more visits, probably because
blogs with more visits start to use more
sophisticated tools to measure traffic.
• Social traffic looks low and is difficult
to pin down because it often gets
labeled as direct traffic. A lot of mobile
phone apps, for example, don’t track
the referral website.
• Referral traffic isn’t nearly as big as
it used to be. This is in part due to
changes in Google’s search algorithm,
as well as an increasing number of
people who actively block tracking.
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• In the early days of your blog, think about SEO, but focus on producing high-quality content. Organic search was only a massive
source of traffic for the software blog. There’s a tension between search and quality, and when people focus on SEO early on,
quality tends to drop.

• A high percentage of direct traffic at this stage is a signal of quality. Though direct traffic could mean a number of different
things, a high percentage this early signals that you’re doing a good job of spreading brand awareness. Visitors care enough
about your content to bookmark your site and go directly to it.

• This bucket of traffic has the highest percentage of social traffic compared to blogs with higher volume. Before your content
is fully indexed by search engines, social is a key channel for distribution. It allows you to leverage networks, just as we did at
Kissmetrics with #measure and also helps with link-building for SEO.

2. Traffic Sources for Blogs

with 150k-600k Visits in 2015

• By this stage, organic search is already the largest traffic source for both software blogs. Visitors use organic search to either
search for branded keywords, like a company name, or for a solution to a problem. In comparison, the two others A and C both
have relatively small SEO traffic, but it’s huge for both software blogs in this bucket.

• Consumers (and everyone else) love and rely on email . C has a massively high percentage of traffic through email, larger than
any of the other blogs. It makes sense. Traditional consumer brands were the masters of mail-in advertising campaigns, and they
apply the same strategies to email—offering massive discount markdowns in the subject lines.

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3. Traffic Sources for Blogs

with 1.5m-3m Visits in 2015

• In this bucket, organic search begins to take over as the top traffic source for all of the blogs, across types. The one outlier to this
is B, the community blog. This makes perfect sense because the majority of content comes from visitors so there’s no organized
keyword or content direction.

• Once you’ve built brand awareness and ToFu, direct traffic and social tend to diminish proportionally. B is again the outlier, but
given that it’s direct and other traffic sources are so high, it’s also possible that they don’t properly sort through their traffic.

4. Traffic Sources for Blogs

with 8m-15m Visits in 2015

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• At high volume, organic search dwarfs all other traffic sources. It strengthens ToFu and acquires new visitors like nothing else.

• As a channel, email needs to be actively nurtured and invested in at large scale. Email is a good channel because it nurtures
high-quality, repeat visits—if you can get someone to roll in through search, and then have them return repeatedly, you nudge
them further along your funnel.

• The personal blog gets a high percentage of email traffic. Other companies in this bucket don’t come anywhere close to this.
What’s especially interesting here is that it shows you that you can carve out a niche on channels like email and social, if you
make it a core part of your strategy.

Blended Breakdown
of Traffic Sources

• Organic search is massive, and the top traffic source for content marketing. At higher levels of traffic, it grows like crazy, and
turns into the gift that keeps on giving. This is the biggest lesson to take away from all of the charts above.

• Direct traffic is the second highest traffic source. This is true for almost every blog regardless of traffic volume.

• Email isn’t as high in terms of sheer traffic volume generated. It’s important to keep in mind that quality of traffic matters too.
Email is king because it nurtures high-quality repeat visitors—the best kind, that can be nudged through your funnel.

• Social is on the rise. In order to tap into social, however, you need to break it down further and look at how your brand can
leverage specific networks.

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Organic Search is King
Organic search remains the top source of traffic when it
comes to content marketing—blogs are perfectly designed
SEO fodder. The more content you have, the more organic
search you’ll pull. On a base level, higher quantity just
means there’s more stuff that gets indexed by Google.
The mistake people make is trying to optimize around
SEO too early on. If you start developing content from a
perspective of quality in the early stages, it’ll organically
build up backlinks and shares and you’ll start rising in the
search rankings. If you start putting out 3-4 posts a week,
the organic search will come.
It’s hard to get SEO going, but once you spark the flames,
you can coax it into a forest fire. While there are more
channels of distribution today than ever before, organic
search still blows everything else out of the water.
It’s not enough just to have the numbers though—you have
to get behind the patterns and behaviors that lead to them.
Decipher the intent behind the keywords that get searched,
and get a directional sense of what you’re ranking for.
For example, “how-to” articles are some of the most
commonly searched for content on the web. People want to figure out how to do things—if you
want to cast a wide net and capture warm leads, write some “how-tos” and help them solve
their problems.
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Organic search occurs (for the most part)
organically:
• Research with Google. We’ve already
discussed this, but it’s something so
basic that people still forget to do it
so it’s worth reiterating. Type in the
keywords you’re targeting, and let that
inform your content strategy. If you
search for a list post, for example, and
the top result is “25 ways to…”, write one
with 35.
• SEO is still all about backlinks. Not as
much as it used to be, but links are still
important for juicing organic search.
High-quality links are important.
• Think carefully about keywords. Highly
competitive keywords and terms are
much harder to rank for in SEO, whereas
less-common “long-tail” keywords can
get you more bang for your buck.
• Don’t be shady —hiring a “black-hat”
SEO firm that fills your site with spammy
backlinks, or stuffing your tags full
with keywords is a good way to get
penalized by Google and wreck your
traffic. People like to get fancy trying to
mess with Google’s search algorithm,
and it’s typically a waste of time. The
lgorithm itself is constantly updated
and tweaked.
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Email Capture Pop-Up

If you’ve ever poked through the Quick Sprout blog, you’ve probably noticed a pop-up that asks
for your email. No one likes it. It’s annoying and interrupts the experience of the content.

There’s one reason why we’ve kept it around. It works.

Email accounts for around 16% of Quick Sprout’s total traffic, and that’s a loyal audience of
engaged, repeat visitors. A lot of times, people shy away from these more aggressive strategies
because they’re worried they’ll alienate their visitors. But my co-founder, Neil Patel, sends out
an email for each and every blog post that he writes—nothing long, people can ignore it if they
want—and it’s effective.

Some people will unsubscribe. A few will even get mad and email you back to express their
anger. At the end of the day, if you’re providing rich, valuable content to your audience, it’s going
to be worth it.

Shift the framing, and ask yourself, “Can I try a nicer way to do this? Can I write copy that’s
compelling even when it’s interruptive?” It’s something that Brian Balfour does well on his blog,
Coelevate:

The pop-up acknowledges that it’s inconvenient, but owns it. When the copy is compelling, and the
content is quality, people are more open to the actual tactic. Bottom line: it may seem aggressive
or annoying, but you’ll never know how huge it could be for you if you never try.

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The Most Successful Piece of Kissmetrics Content

Ever was an Infographic

At Kissmetrics, we made our first infographic in 2010 as a kind of experiment. We knew that
infographics were good for SEO, and we wanted to test it out. Then it blew up. That little infographic
about color psychology and marketing landed me on a Canadian radio show talking about
something I didn’t know anything about. For the entire interview, I just read off the infographic.

There are two main reasons to use infographics:

1. I nfographics generate backlinks like nothing else. Even if you cite and utilize outside research in your infographic, others who
see your infographic are likely to attribute you as the source. They’re also inherently shareable.

2. Having your logo on an infographic is good for brand awareness.

In 2010, it was easier to make these kinds of SEO plays. Backlinks aren’t as important to SEO as
they used to be, and infographics aren’t as effective as they used to be—but they’re still incredibly
effective. When it first came out, it accounted for 1/6th of our total backlinks.

To date, that infographic has still been our most successful piece of content. As you can see
through Moz’s Open site explorer, this single infographic accounts for around 38% of total root
domains linking to the blog and around 15-16% of total backlinks the Kissmetrics blog, even six
years down the line. At around 39k shares, it’s also our best-performing piece of content overall.

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If you search “color psychology” on Google today, our infographic doesn’t even show up on the
first page. It goes back to imitation: people saw that what we were doing was effective, and they
built on it. Help Scout wrote a post that was 2,000-3,000 words—and Google’s search algorithm
likes words more than it likes images.

The lesson here is that if you don’t pay attention to what’s really working and adjust your strategy,
someone else will fill the void. SEO, like all other good things, needs to be reinforced and nurtured
over time.

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Chapter 3

Convert

$3
COST PER TRIAL SIGNUP
Conversion is the goal, but it’s not to be rushed. Once you’ve brought a new person into your
ToFu, they’ll likely have multiple touch points with your content before they even think about
converting.

The good news is that repeat visitors convert at a much higher rate than first-time visitors, which
means that over time, your content marketing engine will start producing conversions on a
consistent basis.

Carried out strategically, content marketing is like retention before people even step inside of
your product. It allows you to build an audience that keeps coming back to you for more—and this
is before they actually use your product.

At Kissmetrics, we were able to reach a cost per acquisition through content of around $3 per trial
sign-up, compared to the several hundreds of dollars it would have cost on Google Adwords. Even
when our overall traffic dipped, we were able to continue growing by relentlessly increasing our
conversion rate. Over a year, we saw a 1,145% increase in trial signups.

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The Conversion Map

Take different types of content you produce—from blog • High traffic and high conversions are
posts to ebooks, webinars, and even landing pages—and the hot zone of content. Do a happy
dance, but keep your eyes peeled to
plug them into the 2x2 matrix above. That way you can make sure your legs don’t get cut
get a handle on what performs the best, and you can out beneath you. Google changes its
algorithm constantly, while there’s
eventually componentize them into templates. always fresh competition. Stay vigilant,
and use Moz’s search engine rankings
or Buzzsumo alerts to make sure the
There’s a ridiculous number of tools that people can use to competition doesn’t outpace you.

measure these things—what’s more important is to build

• When you’re in the bottom left and
a framework that allows you to zero in on opportunities to bottom right quadrants, you basically
have one option: get more traffic.
improve. If you’ve got enough data you can measure, you Go back to ToFu and build your top
can test, learn, and iterate. of funnel, which will increase your
conversions and give you more people
to learn from.
The top left quadrant is where you have a huge
opportunity. You’re getting great traffic, but you’re not
converting enough of those people. Knock up your conversion rate a bit via A/B testing, and you’ll
massively increase your number of total conversions.

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Brian Halligan, HubSpot Co-Founder and CEO does the happy dance.

Isolate Your Opportunities to Increase Conversions:

Find pages with high traffic and high bounce rate: Bounce rates are good signposts of
engagement with your content. They’re also something that Google Analytics will tell
you for free.

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Posts that get high amounts of shares and a large volume of traffic tend to have lower bounce
rates—the ToFu audience cares about the content to actually read it through. High bounce rates
are more frequent for conversion-oriented posts.

• Quality content, clickbait headlines: Headlines are everything, true. But headlines create the expectation of value—if you don’t
fulfill them, you turn your back on quality and violate the fundamental rule of content.

• Examine keyword strategy and marketing channels. Do you get a low quality of traffic from these? High bounce rates can be
indicative of reaching the wrong audience.

• Create more relevant content. If you’re missing the target on your bounce rate, check to make sure your content is easy to read,
with clear structure and section headings.

Find pages with high traffic and low conversions: If you have a high volume of traffic, you have
enough touch points to start working off of. Use a tool like Unbounce for low conversion rates on
high-traffic pages to create and test conversion opportunities.

A low conversion rate means you’re not being productive with that traffic—but that’s your
opportunity to make that higher converting. You can add more variations and test.

At Kissmetrics, for example, we blew content on social media out of the water in terms of traffic—
but it never converted very well.

• A/B test. Test headlines, images, word counts, colors, and call-to-actions (CTAs). Test everything—but test it in isolation.

• Re-purpose existing content and steer it toward conversion. You want to achieve the equivalent of product-market fit for content.
Take that infographic, webinar, or whatever, and turn it into something that can actually convert—for example, turn a general
interest brand post into a “how-to” that applies the same concept, but gears it toward solving a specific problem.

• Use as fodder for long-form content. Turn your high-performing blog posts into ebooks and guides.

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Find traffic sources with high traffic and low conversions: When looking to improving conversions,
considering each channel individually against conversions is crucial.

You can do this with most analytics platforms—the example above uses HubSpot’s. Conversion
rates differ wildly across channels. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so crucial to separate various
channels.

• A/B test the channel. For email, for example, test a variety of call-to-actions. Experiment with different lengths of the body text
and places to link to your blog. See which lead to the highest clickthrough rates.

• Decide which channels to optimize. Marketers often get tempted to explore entirely new channels where they don’t have any
experience. The problem is that there tends to be a learning curve. More often than not, you’ll see larger gains from building out
existing channels and making them more conversion efficient before dipping your toes into something completely new.

• Cut the channel. If you’re spending a lot on social, for example, and it’s not paying off, you have to know when to cut your losses.
If you can’t significantly increase conversions, it might not be worth it in the long-run.

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Content Creates Conversion Opportunities

If you’re able to reach a critical mass of quality content, you can use that to actively develop more
ways to connect with customers. These touch points can then be leveraged into opportunities for
conversion.

More points of conversion create more opportunities to nurture leads. Someone might not sign
up for your free-trial right away, but instead give you their email for a newsletter. At every step,
what’s important is that you nurse them further along the funnel.

At Kissmetrics, we had 60+ infographics, 70+ webinars, and 30+ marketing guides. The navigation
landing pages alone for each type of rich content saw the most overall traffic, and were extremely
high converting.

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Ebooks and Guides

Putting together guides is one of the easiest wins you
can add to your long-term content strategy. Use series of
posts that have performed well and already been tested,
and repurpose them into long-form ebooks and guides
(4,000 - 9,000 words).

From a conversion perspective, there are two main

possible outcomes for guides:

Outcome 1. Email capture

Outcome 2. SEO juice

You need to pick one based on your goals.

If you’re trying to build an email list, a tried and true

tactic is to put up a lead-gen gate before giving away the
PDF that asks at the very least for a name and the email.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to amplify SEO, you

should format ebooks and guides for the web, with
dedicated landing pages—and just give them away.

Because they’re so long, they’re perfect SEO fodder and Google’s search algorithm ranks them
higher. They also have a higher average time-on-page than other forms of content. On the Quick
Sprout blog, two out of three of the all-time best pieces of content for backlinks were both
guides.

The brand value of guides and ebooks is also enormous. They’re an opportunity for you to make
yourself the definitive voice on a topic or problem that plagues your readers.

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Webinars
As a marketer, your inbox is probably filled with webinar invitations. There’s so many out there
that you could probably spend all your time in webinars without even trying that hard—which is
why marketers can be prejudiced against them.

Your customers don’t see nearly as many.

Start doing one webinar a month, and then, like any other part of content, put more out there.
When someone signs-up for a webinar, create a lead-gen gate that at the very least captures
their name and their email. You can then enroll them in your newsletter or email list.

With webinars, audience’s intent to learn is higher than that of those just reading your blog—
feed them with more content.

At Kissmetrics, we host two webinars a week that get anywhere from a couple hundred to
several thousand attendees. Each webinar page leads to a separate landing page behind a lead-
gen gate that has a little opt-in option, where visitors can check a little box and get a free demo.

We’ve found that webinars can lead to a 20% conversion rate. The reason for this is pretty
simple. With a webinar—or an ebook or guide—the intent to learn is higher, and conversion is
also higher as a result.

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Calculators and Tools

Creating rich content, like calculators and tools that you can give away for free, is another good
strategy for conversion. Use them to analyze and diagnose problems that your customers might
have, and that your product can then help solve.

Moz ’s Open Site Explorer is a great example of this. It analyzes your site and shows you the
quantity and quality of backlinks on it. They also implement a pretty basic conversion tactic—
you can only do about five searches a day for free. Signing up for the plan gives you unlimited
search as a Pro feature.

Free tools help your customers, which helps you. They nurture repeat visitors to your site, who
bookmark it, and come back again and again just to use the tool.

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How can I help you?

Through all my different companies, the vast majority of conversions and business have come
through content. These are my key learnings and tactical tips that have guided me along the way—
and I hope they will help you too.

I’d love to offer you any advice and help that I can as you experiment with the strategies and tactics
in this eBook. Just fill out this Typeform survey to provide context on your challenges and goals, and
I will reply.

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