Tips and Tricks -

What We’ve Learned – Lessons From Our Top 6 Posts

Whenever we write articles for our social channels, we test a number of different content marketing strategies and tactics to see what our readers respond to. As we head towards the second quarter of 2013 and start to plan our new editorial calendar, it’s a good time to look back at the last 12 months and see what Google Analytics can tell us about the topics and tactics that resonated most strongly with our audience.

Now, over the course of the last year our Twitter followers increased from 300 to almost 3000, so this exercise isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison. We have to take the numbers and add a pinch of salt before we start cooking with them.  But, we can make some reasonable conclusions about what made these six posts work, and how we can replicate these successes in the upcoming quarter.

Turning Culture Into Content - (aka The Eventbrite Explosion)

In August of 2012, we went up to Vancouver to attend the Grow Conference, an event attended by venture capitalists and start-ups on the West Coast and across Canada. One of the speakers was Julia Hartz, the COO of Eventbrite. While the rest of the room tweeted 140 characters about what Julia was saying, we went an extra step.  We wrote and published a quick blog post about the presentation, and tweeted that link. Eventbrite then retweeted that link to their 140,000 followers, and the result was an accidental test of how much our Web server could handle. Unfortunately, it was a test we failed.  It’s hard to know exactly how much traffic we would’ve gotten if the Web site had stayed conscious, but we learned an important formula. Don’t just tweet about influential people, write a blog post about them and tweet that link. You will get syndicated and see targeted traffic get to (or try to get to) your site.

Marketing Lessons the NFL Can Teach Your Company – (aka The Football Post)

We wrote a post in December, right around the time the NFL playoffs were starting.  We covered the topic of what a company’s marketing department could learn from the NFL. We also did a little test by placing the article in the Outbrain network, putting a maximum bid at $.04 per click.

Because we put the term “NFL” in our title and because the NFL was such a popular topic that week, there were enough impressions being delivered through the Outbrain network that our ridiculously low bid of $.04 per click actually made it into a lot of published content.  As a result, our daily visits increased by hundreds of percent.  The traffic was pretty unqualified and we didn’t see much of an uptick in trials, but we learned a valuable lesson about how we *could* use Outbrain to drive traffic if we wanted.

You Don’t Know What You Know – (aka The Christmas Wish Post)

It was around Christmas 2012 when we put this short post on our site. It was basically a plea to our colleagues and connections to write more blog posts, because we were tired of reading Top 5 lists like this one (ironic, I know…) We plugged it through LinkedIn with some sort of intro tagline of, “This is all I want my smart friends to get me for Christmas this year.”  The result was a good rumble through our social networks, with a high number of retweets. Maybe people reasoned that we considered them among the “smart people” we know and wanted to turn it into a passive self-compliment. Regardless, it worked for us.

Recipe for Success: The Anatomy of a Great Blog Post

This 7-part “How-To” goes all the way back to June 2012.  It’s a post that the team spent a lot of time on, carefully selecting the seven most important aspects of writing a blog post.  They then spent an equal amount of time showing examples and creating great visuals.  The lesson learned here is that how a post looks, and what kind of references you provide, can be just as important as what you write.

How to Attain Incredible Growth, You Ask?

There’s a lot of controversy around the Relaborate offices about the reason this post from December was so successful, and continues to generate traffic to this day. On one hand it is an extremely well written article, packed with useful data, and visually appealing. And much of the data comes in bite-sized bullets which can easily be tweeted. So from A to Z, it’s a perfectly executed piece.

Now on the other side of the room…you hear an argument that the title of this post, coupled with our usage of Outbrain on pop culture sites, drove a different type of traffic to our site – the kind of traffic that was not looking for help with their content marketing…

Is Content Marketing Replacing Online Advertising?

The power of this February 2013 post was that we took two very important topics to our target audience, and developed an argument that people had to take a stance on.  The title also includes popular terms that our audience monitors in their Twitter tools.  This combination of a provocative title with a broad reach delivered a post with a long shelf life. Unlike most posts that have a huge spike on day one and fade out, this post has had 3 different days in which traffic spiked – what we like to call “rolling thunder.” This means the article continues to be forwarded, and each time it reaches someone with influence, we see another influx of traffic.  It is also packed with statistics that readers are able to use for smaller versions of their own posts.

Conclusion:

So those are some of the key things we’ll try to replicate next quarter:

• Write about influential people who have a strong social presence.
• Spot the trending topics our audience cares about.
• Make people pick a side to an argument.
• Use some smart ways to syndicate articles cheaply.
• Make sure the posts look visually appealing.
• Spend time doing research. Any primary data you can share is even better.

Let us know if you have any tips of your own to share.