This will be piece inspired by a recent BuzzFeed article that outed contributors at “trustworthy” publications like Forbes, HuffPo, and Inc.

To recap the piece: Forbes and others operate using a free contributor model. In addition, their editorial stringency is nonexistent, so authors are incentivized to make their money by other means – mostly by dropping backlinks and references to their SEO clients in the article. This practice is widely known in the marketing world. However, most readers don’t know about this arrangement.

This paragraph from the piece, in particular, is what I’ll talk about in my article:

“DeMers and his present and former colleagues are among the many unpaid or low-paid outside contributors who’ve been recruited by sites like Forbes and Entrepreneur for years. The appeal for Forbes and Entrepreneur is a constant stream of content for which they pay little or nothing. Contributors, meanwhile, are attracted by the opportunity to build their profile or promote their views on popular sites with recognizable brands.”

Bolding is mine.

I’m going to talk about incentives, free lunch, and why the reader is almost always paying an externalized cost for cheap/free content that publications pump out.

DeMers and his clients (called out in the piece) aren’t really the ones to blame here, as the incentive structure set up by these publications obviously leads to this behavior.

This post is mostly written for the non-marketing audience, as this is largely known about in the marketing space. However, I think there are still important points to come even if you know all about this payola business in content marketing.

The Economic Concept of “Free Lunch” and What it Has to Do with Content

Free lunch essentially means that “an individual or group can be provided a good or service at no cost to the individual receiving the bene­fit or to anyone else.”

Obviously, as the saying goes, “there ain’t no such thing as free lunch.” Someone always has to pay, it’s just that the cost can be externalized, indirect, or in the form of an opportunity cost.

The phrase was popularized by saloons in the early 19th and 20th centuries:

“During the nineteenth and early twentieth century many saloons in the United States offered a midday buffet selection of gratis food to customers who purchased at least one drink. The saloon keepers hoped to increase the number of clients and the amount of alcohol purchased. The “free lunch” food functioned as a loss leader.”

This, of course, didn’t work out for saloons. The cost of the drinks didn’t keep up with the unrelenting pace of freeloaders ruining the economics of the restaurant.

A more interesting angle on this saying, though, comes from a 1898 newspaper:

“A free lunch is not very cheap thing after all, when one consider how many feller get poor eatin’ ’em.”

As Quote Investigator put it, “this adage suggested that partaking of free food did have a price. One may become a saloon habitué facing the dangers of dissipation, indolence, and alcoholism.”

I like this quote because it focuses on the consumer, the one who is eating the free lunch. Turns out, there are downsides to “free” content as well.

Today, there are dozens of examples of “free lunch” that are mostly just subsidized by advertisers or lots of venture capital. Content publishing is one of the areas I think has truly been underexplored, with the exception of the reliance on the advertising model (which itself is problematic, but we know that).

What I want to talk about is the transaction between the publisher (the consumer) and the author (the producer). Normally, an exchange of equal value must occur for all parties to be satisfied. The direct, transparent route would be an amount of money sufficient to cover the effort and value of the content.

Let’s say, for the sake of this article, the value of a given Forbes article is $750.

In the absence of this direct, monetary transaction, an author must make up the equivalent value by other means. One of those ways, supposedly, is through fame, or by the inherent value of having a byline on Forbes.

Of course, this is bullshit.

This is the “exposure” excuse that has exploited artists with poor business sense forever. Granted, sometimes this is enough value. Sometimes, an honest, high-quality author will publish something of value for free truly because the publication gives them a large platform with which they can spread ideas.

This is only my opinion, but I’d wager that’s the case less than 0.1% of the time (and probably far less often than that).

This, however, is the premise of publications like Forbes. People are writing to lift their own name, credibility, and status, and to spread their ideas to a wide and important audience.

The true case, however, is that the barrier to entry to publish on a site like Forbes is so low that the floodgates have opened (according to marketer/writers I know who write for these sites, the barrier used to be even lower a few years ago. They seem to have clamped up a bit since some of this bad press has come out).

People with no important ideas to spread (or desire to spread ideas) are publishing on them, and they’re doing so for some reason.

It’s not a direct financial reward. It’s not for fame/the facilitated spread of ideas.

It’s for an indirect financial reward – the money an author can make from placing clients in these publications. That’s the gist of what the BuzzFeed article covered. The fact that publicists are writing articles and dropping their clients’ links isn’t necessarily news, but I think there’s more to the story than what BuzzFeed covered.

You can understand the problem more deeply if you uncover the economic reasons behind it. You can also see that the problem goes much farther than Forbes, HuffPo, Inc, and the common culprits (that now are almost just the scapegoats).

Marketers Subsidize Much of Your “Free” Content

Marketing professionals seek to gain attention for their companies or clients. They do this through many means, two of which are important for this context: public relations and content marketing.

Both of these tactics piggyback off of media impressions to achieve business growth.

Someone searches for a keyword on Google. They land on a website, say Forbes or a software company blog (let’s name our software company Payola Inc.). The website gets paid somehow. With Forbes, or another publication, that’s through ads. With a software company, that’s through leads or customers who sign up for the product.

For either of these types of publications:

ROI = revenue generated with content – cost of content production.

A scrappy marketer can easily see the loophole here: promise free/cheap content to the publication with the expectation that they’ll give you space to promote your product or client. This is an obvious incentive structure that almost anyone in marketing knows.

This is why marketers guest post for other blogs. It lowers the cost of content production to almost zero (depending on the editing process) for the accepting blog publication. In this case, however, the transaction is normally obvious and transparent: you write for my blog, and you can drop a backlink to your product or service. It’s almost like a “sponsored content” model, in which the incentive structure is disclosed or obvious:

A marketer can cover their tracks and scale their link building efforts by hiring a third party service or a freelancer to write these guest posts for them. That way, neither the publisher nor Google knows any better, and they can scale their content production and link building for a lot cheaper than doing it themselves, in-house.

So, you have a structure that looks more like this:

The problem is, the reader has no fucking idea that the companies on the left are involved at all, so their worldview is essentially warped by opaque incentive structures facilitated by “top” “trustworthy” publications. In short, they’re paying for the content that Forbes gets for free. This is all the reader sees:

The problem is, for a marketer, this is a really effective tactic. If I could game The New York Times for a backlink, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But that’s hard to do, because The New York Times has high standards.

The publications allowing this to happen are making it far too easy for marketers to game. That’s the heart of the issue.

Pssst: This Is Common and Happens All Over the Place

I applaud BuzzFeed for doing this story. One cure for all of this is to shed sunlight on it. But their platform isn’t clean of this behavior.

I don’t want to throw people under the bus, but I’m in more than one Slack group that engages in “link trading” and “link placement,” and I’ve seen BuzzFeed offered for placement regularly. You can buy links there for like $100. They’re offered just as often as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and the lot.

Apart from the direct link buying the BuzzFeed piece covered, most marketers are, at the very least, trading links and dropping links to friends’ content.

This isn’t ever disclosed, which is surely somwhat ethically questionable, but as a marketer, you do what you can to help out friends, build reciprocity, and of course, mention good companies and sources too (not all of this is negative and poisonous).

To an even lower degree, roundup posts and HARO-based content is basically a press release for those people who are featured. Not a lot of people call this out, but if Forbes’ contributor/marketer written content is “free lunch,” then HARO & roundup posts are at the very least “cheap content.” The barrier to entry is low, it’s mostly crap (not all of it!), and it crowds up the supply side of the internet with fluffy BS.

This is a cheap press release filled with easy backlinks for marketers

And if a marketer is working with a freelancer network or agency to help place guest posts or brand links, they often do so only on other software company blogs or lower level publications in their industry.

Maybe I’m off here, but that seems (while of dubious ethics) to be less damaging. People simply don’t put the same faith in the truth of a random software blog that they do in Forbes or Fast Company.

In the same way that we don’t expect the same political objectivity from the Huffington Post that we do the New York Times, we don’t expect the same quality and objectivity from Random Company Blog that we do from Forbes.

So we have a varying degree of transparency and harm in marketing-driven content:

• Marketer writes guest post with their own name (transparent)
• Marketers are mentioned on roundup posts and HARO content (cheap, but whatever)
• Marketer engages in link trading (questionable, but whatever)
• Marketer pays “author” to drop links in low level blogs (unethical, but low damage amount for public perception)
• Marketer pays “author” to drop links in “reputable” blogs (damaging to publication credibility and public perception of truth)

Companies like Forbes and Fast Company have massive reaches, lots of money to spread their content, and are generally looked upon as being purveyors of real news. They’re not, for the most part, purveyors of real news.

They’ve been pumping out cheap, marketer-created fake news for years before you heard the term in relation to the 2016 election. Read the book Trust Me I’m Lying. This has been going on for a long time.

Forbes’ thinks, “we can drastically reduce our operating costs by securing free contributors who are looking to build their influence.” A marketer thinks, “no way in hell am I writing for free, with no benefit. I’m going to use this platform to sell influence.”

Forbes gets something. Marketer gets something. You get shitty, marketing-driven news.

That’s a Bummer. Is There Anything I Can Do?

“The small businessman is smart; he realizes there’s no free lunch. On the other hand, he knows where to go to get a good inexpensive sandwich.” – Adam Osborne

As a marketer, I realize I may be biased, but where the blame lies is obvious: on the publications.

Those who try to reduce the creation cost of content will externalize that cost on somebody. Even if you’re not paying people nothing for the privilege of writing for you, how much does it cost to get a good, ethical editor?

I’ve been called out tons of times on content I’ve written that contained too many questionable links and references. I was annoyed, but they were right. If this happens on Random Company Blog, it sure as hell should happen at Forbes.

But ignoring the problem helps Forbes continue to acquire free content and increase their content ROI. You know, as Upton Sinclair so beautifully put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I don’t think we can completely solve the problem, but we can start at home and do things as readers to start to chip away at it.

What Readers Can Do

I don’t have all the answers, but I do these things:

Question everything I read. I’m a cynical skeptic, but I think it’s warranted. It’s especially important to be critical with free-contributor models like Forbes, HuffPo, etc., if the author is a “guest contributor.”

• Share and evangelize truly good content. I praise to high heavens FiveThirtyEight, The Atlantic, and WaitButWhy.
• Pay for good content, through Patreon or subscription. We need a new incentive structure, and you can help provide if by voting with your dollars.
• Call out bullshit content, plagiarism, and egregious behavior. In any system, there will be a few idiots flaunting the rules that ruin it for everyone else. Most people ride Bird Scooters without a helmet, but we should call out the asshole without a helmet who is running red lights and carrying two people on the scooter.

In general, if content is cheap or free to produce, there’s a higher chance the content will be garbage (though not a certainty). That’s a simple lesson in content economics.

It sucks that the externality is on the audience. It’s a bummer you have to be skeptical every time you come across a piece of content. But when in doubt, I’d lean towards skepticism, especially online.

Instead, as a reader, ask: where’s the money? If a person isn’t being paid, and being paid sufficiently, for a piece of work, you have to wonder where the incentive is coming from. Why are they writing this? For fame, glory, and a Forbes’ byline? Don’t be naive.

And in the meantime, don’t believe any content written by marketers that is not transparent about their affiliation. You can initialize your parameters to “don’t believe anything Neil Patel writes,” and your model will be 99% accurate.

As consumers of content, I like this quote:

“So, unless you want to be a sheep, some questions you should always be asking yourself are- why is this being provided at no cost to me? How will I act or feel differently after I accept this? Is there an expectation that I or someone else has if I accept it? What is the long-term benefit for me and for the person or group providing this to me?”

For instance, I write content on my blog to a) show people I’m smart and b) in order to bring to people to my site for personal brand awareness. These lead to opportunities for a) CRO/growth client work b) speaking gigs or podcast requests or c) just interesting conversations. The incentives are somewhat obvious with personal blog brand building, in most cases at least.

Also, another option for readers: read less online content. Read more books (they’re expensive to produce, less likely to be bullshit). Put in extra effort to follow and support specific authors you believe are doing excellent work.

Or just read less online content. The diminishing returns of doing so come on fast, so you shouldn’t feel bad about missing out on whatever is trending on Twitter tomorrow.

For Publications Who Don’t Want to Suck

If you’re a publication, and people think you suck, there can be long term reputational damage that is hard to recover. I think that’s the case for Forbes. Most people I know think they suck.

If you don’t want that to happen to you:

• Hire a good editor.
• Raise your barrier to entry and standard of quality
• Prioritize long-term success over cheap tactics and production
• Think about a different monetization model. Quillete seems to be doing cool stuff a donation/Patreon model. Maybe launch some small experiments in this direction?

Most of the reason this happens is because publications make it easy to do so. While I’m sure this has happened before at the New York Times, I guarantee it’s not very common. Why? It’s really hard to get a New York Times byline. The editorial standards are much higher.

Do you know how easy it is to get a byline or a backlink in Forbes, Inc., or the Huffington Post? Wildly easy. I’ve done it in all of them, several times over, and before they starting using only nofollow links.

Oh, that’s something: some of these publications are starting to give only give nofollow links. This is a start in the right direction, but it’s a lazy way out. Natural links deserve to be given SEO value, so you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater out of sheer laziness by changing all links to nofollow.

Just hire a better editor.

What Should Marketers Do?

Keep doing what you’re doing. If people are going to open up loopholes to build links for your brands, why not take advantage of them? You gotta pay the bills, too.

Conclusion

The following was printed in a 1938 edition of the “El Paso Herald-Post”:

“Speak on,” cried the king, and the palace guards leveled their crossbows. But the old economist rose fearlessly to his feet, stood face to face with the king, and said:

“Sire, in eight words I will reveal to you all the wisdom that I have distilled through all these years from all the writings of all the economists who once practiced their science in your kingdom. Here is my text:

“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.”

Remember that when you read a piece of content. Follow the money and ask yourself, “who is paying for this and with what money?”

The post There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Lunch in Content Marketing appeared first on Alex Birkett.

Content creation, content promotion, and content optimization.

Who’s they? Bloggers, speakers, thought leaders – you know the lot

Because of my background in conversion optimization, and just a general desire to improve and optimize things, content optimization is exciting to me.

Optimization implies an improved ROI, efficiency, scale, and a continuous and compound ROI over time (and at scale).

Content optimization means (presumably) that we can spend less time creating and distributing our work, and get more value from what we’re putting out there.

That’s the theory, anyway.

What doesn’t get talked about as much is how the hell one optimizes old content in the first place.

Well, it’s something I’ve thought a lot about and done even more of.

So that’s what this article will cover: how to look back at content you’ve already launched into the world and improve it to rank higher in the search engine or go further on social media or improve conversions, systematically and at scale.

My case is that content optimization strategy should be a core part of your marketing strategy, especially if you’ve published at scale already.

Content Optimization: Two Different Approaches

When looking back at old content, you can look at things two different ways (both valid and valuable):

1. Find high traffic but low converting posts and increase the conversion rate.
2. Find low traffic but high search volume/potential posts and increase search engine rankings or distribution.

The first method, in my opinion, is easier, at least from a prioritization standpoint.

You can very easily build out a model using your total traffic and your historical conversion rate metrics to calculate, with some degree of accuracy, how much value you can expect. This is basically a “what if?” analysis and I’ll walk you through how to build one out in a minute.

It’s also easier because we usually “set it and forget it” when it comes to conversion offers with content. With a little care and thought it’s usually pretty easy to optimize this part.

The second method (search engine rankings) usually has a higher ceiling in terms of how much value you can squeeze out of it. Terms like “great content” and “high-quality content” and even user experience are all somewhat subjective in search engine optimization, so it’s harder to know exactly how to update a piece and how much extra value you can get from it.

The difference between clicks on the first, second, third, and all the other SERP results is astounding, and if you can lift your rankings you can gain a lot of traffic. Similarly, even the top SEO company have tons of pages ranking from 5-20, and with a bit of effort, it’s always possible to lift those.

The first method is mostly going to involve strategic work.

You’ll run an analysis of top opportunities, calculate the upside, and then go through the process of optimizing the acquisition pathways on each page you deem worth it. That last step, the optimizing of the acquisition pathways, is a ton of hard work and takes a talented hand to do so. It takes creativity, empathy, skill (i.e. good marketing).

The second method also takes a lot of analysis work, but it’s generally a bit easier to understand how you can improve a page if you’ve got a decent understanding of SEO. It’s usually some combination of content quality, internal linking or site architecture, external linking work, or some low hanging fruit like H1/H2/title tag optimization.

I’ll walk through each of these things in depth, to the point that it may get strenuous to read this guide if you’re only interested in one of the methods. Realistically, you probably should focus on one of these at a time as each step will require a ton of trial and error will rarely be easy or clean in practice.

This post is like a darn book. To that end, here’s a table of contents to help you jump around as you please.

• Option 1: CRO & Maximizing Conversions on High Traffic Content
  • How to Find High Traffic/Low Conversion Pages
  • How to Prioritize and Size Opportunities
  • How to Gauge Intent of Visitors and Align Your Offer
  • Running Content Experiments and Converting Visitors to Leads or Customers
• Option 2: Lifting Traffic Where There’s Potential
  • How to Find Articles That Are Losing Traffic
  • How to Find Articles That Are Almost Ranking Well
  • 6 Heuristics for Rankable and Linkable Content
  • Optimizing On-Page SEO
  • Relaunch: How to Get Back Off the Ground
• Conclusion

CRO & Maximizing Conversions on High Traffic Content

If you’re doing content marketing or digital marketing at all, it’s very likely your content follows a power law: most of your traffic comes from a few posts. That’s the way it was at CXL, and it’s that way at HubSpot, too. Most content powerhouses deal with this type of distribution.

The wrong way to look at this (as many “analysts” have) is that you should produce less content. That’s not a solution, that’s the table measuring the ruler.

You can’t guess what’s going to be a massive success ahead of time (though you can increase the probability with good strategy and execution).

No, the point of this is to say that you’re going to have some posts that have way more traffic than other posts. However — these posts will often have a much lower conversion rate than lower traffic pages.

This may or may not be true of your site, but I’ve seen this firsthand from every site I’ve worked with.

(There’s also a power law with the # of blog posts that deliver the highest percentage of leads/conversion usually as well. Sometimes there’s overlap between high traffic & high conversion blog posts, and that’s just magical).

The most common explanation is that the top post is so top-of-funnel that users aren’t converting as high on the same offers as on your bottom-of-funnel posts.

The second most common explanation is that you hit a high traffic topic that’s slightly outside your niche (if you sell commercial kitchen supplies to restaurants in Austin, an infographic on the top coffees in town may or may not be super relevant to conversion).

In both cases, the fix is to align your offers on-page with your visitors’ intent and customer journey stage. You have to match the incoming temperature of your visitor – don’t offer them an ebook if they want a demo, and don’t offer them a dress suit if they just want a first time visitor discount (and maybe a tie).

And if you have no conversion points on your page, well, add one. Easy fix, there.

How to Find High Traffic/Low Conversion Pages

There are many analytics platforms. The most ubiquitous of the analytics tools is Google Analytics, so even though you can probably grab insights from HubSpot or Sumo or whatever lead capture tool you use, we’ll use GA here.

We’ll pull a quick report that will give us an approximation of the conversion rates of different posts. This assumes that you have goals set up for your “conversion,” which could be an email collection form or otherwise. This report also relies on “landing pages” as the variable, so we may be missing out on some nuance with people who view lots of blog posts or navigate your site from somewhere else, but then convert on a specific blog post.

Anyway, we want useful, not perfect.

Go to Behavior > Site Pages > Landing Pages. Then use the “comparison” view instead of the table view. Change the metric that you’re comparing from “Sessions” to “Goal Conversion Rate.” It should look like this:

You can also use a filter like “/blog/” or whatever you use to distinguish your blog posts from non-blog posts (sometimes you’ll have a specific View for your blog, in which case just use the whole report).

From there, you can find which high traffic blog posts are converting much lower than the site average. I talk more about how to do this on my post in content marketing analytics, by the way.

You can also pull this data to Excel in raw format and do a similar analysis, but it usually suffices to just focus on the highest traffic, lowest converting posts, and you can see that starkly with this report.

If you’re doing it in Excel, pull your data over and use conditional formatting to highlight blog posts that convert less than the average. Then use a filter to only look at those:

Quick point: I love Google Analytics as much as the next guy, but it actually may be easier to use the analytics from your marketing tool in this case.

At least in the case of HubSpot, the CTAs tool has great reporting and you can compare side-by-side with all of your CTAs (or export the data and analyze it elsewhere). It shows which pages are converting best that are using the same CTAs and it also aggregates CTA conversion rates so you can compare apples to apples.

Now you have a good idea of which blog posts represent the biggest opportunities, at least from a bird’s eye view. Next you need to prioritize which ones you’ll focus on first and how much lift you can expect.

How to Prioritize and Size Opportunities

We’ll need to dump our data into Excel for this. We only need three basic variables: blog post title (or URL), page views (try to do an average monthly count from a spread of 3-6 months), and conversion rate (same thing with the average).

Where you get this doesn’t matter. You can pull it from Google Analytics, your marketing automation tool, or your analyst’s magic crystal ball (just not from your imagination).

Just make darn sure you have good quality data and that you trust it.

What you’re about to do is a common planning and projection analysis used to see what the upside of certain actions is (a watered down version of it, anyway). If the data isn’t right, your projections aren’t going to be worth much.

So, pull your data to Excel. On first strike, I like to only pull the top ten trafficked posts that are below the site average. You can find those using the above Google Analytics report, or by bringing your data to Excel and using conditional formatting to show those below average.

Then use a filter to only show those that are highlighted:

Once you have those, build out some additional columns for your projected values. You can get more precise with this, but to keep things simple, I like to use the site average to project out numbers. The assumption is that, if that’s the average, we can probably get any post there with some optimization effort (obviously that simplifies things, but it’s good for prioritization):

From there, it’s extremely to see which opportunities are the biggest. You can even project these numbers out over a longer time period (such as a year) to see what the potential upside could be.

This type of modeling helps especially when you have to make tradeoffs. For instance, if you have enough content resources to either invest in this type of conversion optimization, in net new content creation, or in SEO projects to lift current content to get more traffic, then you can see which one merits the prioritization.

Note: this is but one way to model things out.

Also, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The point here isn’t to project your exact amount of conversions you’ll get, but rather to choose between projects when you have a set amount of resources.

Even within this list, it helps you choose which articles you should focus the most attention on.

How to Gauge Intent of Visitors and Align Your Offer

In PPC advertising, there’s a popular notion that takes into account the “temperature” of a target audience. A display ad may be reaching completely cold traffic, so your offer shouldn’t be something bottom of the funnel like a demo. Maybe it should be an e-book, or something that pushes them down the funnel until they’re a warmer temperature.

People don’t talk about this as much with organic search traffic, but it’s the same case: people land on your site with widely varying levels of intent.

How do you determine the intent and user journey stage?

There are many ways to doing so, but they all start with understanding what channels people are coming from and what keywords they’re searching. To analyze your marketing channels is simple. Log into Google Analytics and go to your Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium report.

Start digging around and asking questions. What are your highest performing channels? Lowest performing? If you’re running campaigns, what ones are doing well and what ones are doing not so well?

Explore the data the bit.

Specific to SEO traffic, you need to analyze what keywords are bringing users to your pages. To do that, enter the URL of a blog post in Ahrefs and click on “Organic Keywords” (you can also get this info from Search Console or many other SEO tools):

Then you need to classify these keywords into a temperature state: are they warm, ready to buy visitors, or are they cold, barely know your brand visitors? This helps define your offer and conversion pathway:

• If you’re a nerd like me, you might be interested in running clustering and classification algorithms to place keywords in user journey state buckets (read this on how to do that). (Disclosure: I’m still working on doing this in a way that I trust and that doesn’t take lots of tinkering and tweaking. Work in progress but promising)
• If you’re not, you may have just as much success using common sense to bucket keywords into user state (read this on how to do that).

Running Content Experiments and Converting Visitors to Leads or Customers

Content experiments are tricky because they are at an increased risk of being affected by things like seasonality and other validity threats. Google’s algorithm changes a ton, people search with different intent at different times of the year, and it’s hard to test on a truly representative sample.

However, you can still test, and you should still test – the same way you would with any other website element or experience.

I like to test at the bottom of the funnel. Don’t worry about things like time on page or bounce rate, use something like conversions as your metric to optimize against.

Most lead capture tools allow you to do this on their platform (if they don’t, get a new one). You still have to adhere to the same statistics principles you would with any other A/B test (and time period comparisons are still a bad methodology, as is always the case when trying to infer causality).

I’ve written a million articles on A/B testing at this point, but these three will cover everything to get you started:

• A/B Testing: The Ultimate Guide
• Ignorant No More: A/B Testing Statistics Crash Course
• The Wrong (and Right) Ways to Test Content Titles

Lifting Traffic Where There’s Potential

There’s another side of this content optimization coin: lifting up traffic. If you have lots of content already, it’s likely you rank for some stuff, don’t rank for other stuff, and rank on the second or third pages for the rest.

Content optimization is all about lifting those high value pages that aren’t ranking, and especially those that are almost ranking page one, to the front.

How to Find Articles That Are Losing Traffic

Here’s a sad fact marketers have to grapple with: even if you build a great piece of content and it ranks well, eventually it may start to lose traffic.

That could happen for a variety of reasons:

• Competitors start to create content that outranks you
• Google’s SERP changes (adding feature snippets, ads, etc.)
• Search volume for your keywords drops

There’s not much you can do about the third one, but knowing what the issue is (and that there is an issue) helps you move forward on a potential plan. Competitors outranking you? Beef up your content and build links. SERP changes? Optimize your content to get that feature snippet, carousel, or whatever else.

First step, though, is to find out if you’re losing traffic (and which posts are losing the most). Here’s how you do that.

Log into Google Analytics, pick a period of time (let’s say 3 months) from last year (let’s say from January 1 – March 1 2017).

Then, go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages and set your time range. Also, set your filter so that you’re only analyzing the property you care to analyze (e.g. /blog/).

You could get a high level view from here, but I prefer to narrow down to only organic traffic. To do that, set up a secondary dimension of “Default Channel Grouping.”

Then set up an advanced filter that only includes “organic search.”

Next, include all rows (scroll to the bottom and adjust the number where it says “show rows”) and export this data to CSV.

Open your spreadsheet and name the first tab whatever month and year it is (Jan – Mar 2017). Then delete all the data you don’t need (leave only the URL and the Sessions columns):

Go back to GA and change the date range to the current period. Make sure it’s the same time period and same start and stop dates, but for this year. This helps iron out traffic differences due to seasonality (always compare apples to apples). In this case, it means we need to set our date range from Jan 1 – March 1 2018.

Export to CSV, and bring it to tab 2 of your spreadsheet. Again, delete all data except for the URL and Sessions. Then rename the tab to something like Jan – Mar 2018.

Now add another column (Column C) to tab #1 and name it something like “Sessions 2018” (also rename Column B to something like “Sessions 2017”). Now do a Vlookup, like the following (in Column C) where ‘tab 2’ is the title of your tab:

=VLOOKUP(A2, ‘[tab 2]’!A:B, 2, FALSE)

Should look like this:

Now we’re going to see if there has been a significant drop. You can do whatever percentage you think is significant, but this example we’ll flag anything that has dropped by 20%.

Add column D and title it “20%+ decline?” then insert this formula in D7:

=IF(C2<(B2-(B2*0.2)),TRUE,FALSE)

Looks like this:

That formula asks if the number in Column C is 20% or greater less than the number in Column B. Then you can do conditional formatting to highlight those where that is the case.

Note: the data I’m using is from Google’s merchandising store so it’s kind of boring. It’s way more interesting if you’re using blog data because of the natural fluctuations in rankings and traffic over time. But alas, my personal site doesn’t have enough organic traffic and HubSpot probably wouldn’t love it if I shared screenshots of GA data, so Google demo account it is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The next question, if you’re losing organic traffic over time, is why? There are a few common culprits:

• You’ve fallen in rankings
• The SERP experience has changed (feature snippets, carousels, etc., have been added)
• Your click-through-rate has changed
• Search volume for your keywords has dropped

So, you need to triangulate. Tracking rankings is easy. Every SEO tools does it and you can also do it in Google Search Console.

If you haven’t dropped rankings, has your CTR fallen? Again, you can track this in Search Console.

If your CTR hasn’t fallen, has the SERP changed? If there are feature snippets, carousels, ads, etc., can you capture those spots without a herculean amount of effort?

If the answer is no to all those, it’s likely search volume for the keywords you were ranking for has fallen. You can get an approximation of this effect in Search Trends by looking at your position over time and your impressions over time, but it still won’t be precise: you don’t know which long tail keywords you may have been ranking for that dropped off, and the trends are approximate and averaged.

What should you do in that case?

My advice: Drink a glass of wine and take your dog to the park. Maybe learn a new language. Life isn’t all about SEO and marketing.

How to Find Articles That Are Almost Ranking Well

The best way to grow your traffic may be to publish net new articles. That’s true especially if you’re starting out. But it’s more likely, especially if you have a lot of content already published, that you’re almost ranking well for a ton of high value keywords. You’ve just gotta find ‘em, analyze them, and optimize them.

There are a few ways to do that. I’ll show you one of those ways (one that assumes you have an Ahrefs account, which you totally should have).

First, log into Ahrefs and enter the domain that you’d like to analyze.

It’s possible, too, that you just want to analyze a specific subfolder or subdomain if your site is set up that way (e.g. site.com/blog). Whatever the case, enter that in the domain explorer.

I’ll use CXL as an example since my personal site has virtually zero traffic (you can analyze any property you want in Ahrefs – pretty neat for competitor analysis or client work, but that’s another story).

You’ll see a variety of interesting numbers on your dashboard and features on the side. Ignore them all except for “Organic keywords” on the top. Click on the number (in this case “113K’”). That will bring you to a dashboard that shows all the keywords you’re ranking for in the search engine and the corresponding URLs.

From here, you’ll want to filter things down. It depends on what rankings you’d like to isolate, but I consider anything in the 10-21 range worthy of optimization (another nice set could be from 6-10 if you really wanna inch up on the results page, or 11-21, or really whatever range you want. These are arbitrary numbers for the most part).

So click on “Position” and choose which rankings you want to filter for.

After that, set up a filter for volume. Again, this depends on what you consider a worthy amount of volume. I try to optimize for keywords above 1k, but let’s set the bar at 200 for now.

This will allow us to combine similar keywords later in Excel to get a better picture of the overall opportunity (e.g. if “Customer Satisfaction Surveys” ranks for both “how to measure customer satisfaction” and “satisfaction survey template,” we want to include both of those in our opportunity analysis).

Now export your file to CSV.

Cut down the columns you don’t care about (historical rankings, etc.). You now have raw data, and actually, you can get a pretty good picture of which opportunities exist from a qualitative look at this data:

Especially if you add conditional formatting to the volume and difficult (or CPC) columns, you can see which blog posts represent the bigger opportunities for optimization.

However, my favorite thing to do here is to create a Pivot Table. Doing so can allow you to combine the volume of two or more keywords that a single blog post is ranking for.

For example, if Blog Post X is ranking for in position 12 for Keyword A (500 volume) and position 14 for Keyword B (1000 volume), then we can see that the average ranking for this URL is 13 and it’s got a potential of 1500 search volume (note: you don’t have to use average position. It can be confusing, but it helps me size the ease of an opportunity). This makes it easier to look at absolute opportunities.

Here’s how I set that up in Excel:

If you’d like, you can then pull these entries to a different sheet and order them by traffic potential. If we do that, we can see that the top 10 opportunities represent a search volume potential of about 500,000:

From there, you can head back over to your raw data sheet and check out which keywords correspond to the URL which high search potential. Here are the keywords for my example URL (on cognitive biases written by my past colleague, the super talented Shanelle Mullin).

What can they do from here? Well, a few things, depending on the context.

The first thing I would do is type in each of these keywords into a) Google and b) Ahrefs and see what is currently ranking and the backlink profiles and competitiveness of the other sites ranking.

Let’s try that with “list of cognitive biases,” for which CXL is ranking #20.

It’s not a shock that many of the currently ranking articles are informational and come from top sites, like Wikipedia, Mental Floss, and Business Insider.

Another thing to note is that they’re more general than the CXL title, as they relate to all applications of cognitive bias and not just CRO. Realistically, it’s a better branding play for CXL to include the focus on CRO, but it may be limited the search traffic and intent, something to consider in optimization.

Next, I would look at how these results stack up from a competitive perspective. Plug in your own URL into Ahrefs and get your baseline data on quantity of backlinks, domain rating, URL rating, etc.

Then plug in the keyword you’re trying to rank for (reminder “list of cognitive biases”) in the keyword explorer tool:

Scroll all the way to the bottom of this report and look at the current rankings. You can see, side by side, the backlink counts, Domain Rating, URL Rating, and “Ahrefs Rank” (a sort of aggregate metric that attempts to tell you how strong your search capability is).

Learning from a quick scan: Wikipedia is a monster and won’t be fucked with, but the others are all subject to be overtaken.

It would take a bit more effort to analyze the quality of each of the articles on that list (and I won’t walk you through that), but you essentially want to match the search intent (clearly a list of cognitive biases), and you want to optimize on-page for that and build links).

Optimizing on-page is a huge topic, so I’ll defer to the master on that topic: On-Page SEO: Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page

You can also use a nice tool like SEMrush’s SEO Writing Assistant or other content optimization software like Surfer SEO.

Finally, you can work on Click-through-Rate to squeeze out even more traffic out of your rankings. Here’s a good article from Wordstream on how to do that.

So, to optimize this piece of content, we have a) a possible page title change b) some on-page optimization, c) internal linking d) some beefing up of the content to make it more thorough than the others and e) link building.

I won’t go into link building fully, as I’ve done that in a previous article on content promotion. But I want to briefly go over how to optimize your content to make it easier to build links (by building in linkable assets).

6 “Hooks” for Rankable and Linkable Content

One way to create linkable content is to genuinely write the best thing on the internet on that topic. It may sound grandiose, but that was the explicit content strategy we held at CXL.

Outside of that, there are other more tactical things you can do to help out with link acquisition and social media shares. There are a variety of these, but in my experience, it comes down to a few really effective ones. Scott Tousley and I call them “content hooks”:

• Original data & stats
• Original Images
• Charts and Graphs
• Quotes from influencers
• Frameworks
• Pros and Cons Tables

The mindset here is that you work backwards and think, “given the target sites I’d like to get links from, how can I craft my content to make it easier to acquire those links?” In the marketing world, if you have original data, new fancy frameworks, or original images or charts, it makes things leagues easier to add value.

A brief walk through these, with examples, is in order.

1. Original data & stats

This one is a bit of heavy lifting in terms of costs, but if you can pull legit, impressive data and publish it, you’re going to have a competitive advantage. Certain companies really excel at this, including CXL with their UX studies.

Buzzsumo also does this really well with their huge content analyses.

HubSpot has a whole research program dedicated to original insights.

2. Original Images

True story, I was recently at a conference where I saw that some original images we created to explain A/B testing had been used by a keynote speaker (w/o crediting us, by the way).

People search for images, especially when creating content (blog, conference talk, or otherwise), and if your images come up when they search, you get a link (as long as they actually credit you).

My line of thought is, if you’re going to use images, why not try to create your own wherever that is possible? We did that for HubSpot with our NPS survey image:

This is an especially helpful tactic if you can create a visualization for a complicated topic, like segmentation or multivariate testing.

3. Charts and Graphs

This one is sort of a hybrid between “original images” and “original data,” but essentially you want to give some impressive data visualization to explain concepts or insights. It’s a big trend for bloggers to write data-driven posts, and images like these give the impression of using data to support your claims (doesn’t matter if the chart is bullshit, it’s going to get links anyway).

Here’s an example of a CSAT journey map I put together in R for a HubSpot post:

I’m no master of data visualization, and things can get super sophisticated, especially when you start to implement interactive visualizations. Ryan Farley did a great job of this with his interactive retention visualization:

4. Quotes from influencers

Roundups are usually boring, but quotes from smart people help you a) create better content and b) promote that content on social media once it’s published. Working with smart people to put together content also helps you build relationships and support smart voices by giving them a platform.

I certainly have an affinity for BigCommerce when they feature my opinions in their articles:

There may not be a direct route to a link here, but there is a pathway through increased social shares and distribution that usually leads to natural links. Plus, as I mentioned, if you curate your features well, it can help you create better content. Matt Gershoff, CEO of Conductrics, has certainly made my articles smarter than I could have made them on my own:

Roundups can work, too, if they don’t suck. Peep put together an awesome one on new GA features. Luiz Centenaro put together a nice one as well on community building:

5. Frameworks

When in doubt, invent a framework. Bonus points if it’s actually useful. I’ve done it a bunch at HubSpot:

This framework is admittedly not that useful. I just made an acronym out of the process for running customer satisfaction surveys. Who knows, though, maybe it helps someone remember the information better.

A better example is something like PXL, an A/B test prioritization framework that is undeniably useful. It’s something that I’ve used with clients to help prioritize experiments:

Brian Dean, however, is the king of this tactic. He not only uses this technique all the time, popularizing terms like Skyscraper Technique, but he also named the technique of naming techniques. Meta! His frameworks genuinely help explain SEO concepts in a simple and actionable way, so they catch on.

The best thing you can do is create a framework that truly helps fill a knowledge gap or helps people put a concept to use. I think Brian Dean, CXL, WiderFunnel, Reforge, and others have done this really well.

6. Pros and Cons Tables

The world is a confusing place. If you can help visitors clear up confusion on a given topic or set of solutions, you deserve a link. For example, there are lots of customer feedback survey types, so we listed pros and cons of each one to help people choose the appropriate type for their scenario:

We also created original images of these tables, combining that tactic as well.

Any way you can visualize or simplify comparisons or pros and cons can help users make decisions. Can you do it with software or pricing? Conversion Rate Experts did that really well with A/B test software comparisons:

Optimize On-Page SEO

There are tools now like Clearscope and Surfer that help you figure out what the gaps are in your SEO content.

Basically, you can plug in a target keyword, your text, and then get a score and recommendations to better position yourself to rank in search engines. They reverse engineer ranking factors and can help you find relevant keywords to use and generally make the article more seo-friendly to match the searchers intent. Here’s a screenshot of this very piece in Clearscope:

This will give you keyword, word count, subheadings, and readability recommendations. Outside of that, you can make marginal gains from improving title tags, alt tags, meta tags, etc. Same thing with internal linking and other HTML updates. At scale on a large enough website, they can move the needle, but on any one given piece, they’re smaller potatoes.

Sometimes, you need to re-sculpt the article to rank for an entirely different keyword. This happens when content doesn’t match the search intent of the search query driving people to the post.

Figuring that out requires some keyword research. You want to see, other than your target keyword / primary keyword, what search terms you already rank for and some new ideas for search terms you could target directly. These will likely be search terms that you don’t rank on the first page for.

For this piece, I rank for terms like “email blast examples,” but the piece is currently written as a generic high level guide. So I could re-write the piece to be more focused on the examples intent.

Relaunch: How to Get Back Off the Ground

After you beef up your content with some on-page optimization and add some link hooks, you should relaunch it. Give it a little velocity. It’s a new and improved piece, afterall. Why not give it some content promo love?

Basically, you can launch the thing like it’s new again. After all, it kind of is. As with most things content & SEO related, Brian Dean is the master and he’s already written a great guide/case study that covers how to do this. Check it out here.

Conclusion

Content optimization is important, often talked about, and rarely understood. How do you optimize content? What’s that even mean?

Here we’ve laid out two paths to doing so: improving conversion paths and improving traffic growth. Within those two paths there are multiple tactics for analyzing, prioritizing, and optimizing content for increased traffic, conversions, and whatever else you’re chasing after.

One can never truly encompass a topic and all the creative tactics that are possible, though. For that reason, I leave it as an open question: what am I missing? Any creative ways to surface optimization opportunities, uses of personalization, or otherwise? Feel free to comment or shoot me an email or whatever.

The post Content Optimization: How to Make Content Better appeared first on Alex Birkett.

A big part of my job at CXL was to do content marketing – create great shit, promote it, grow traffic, leads, etc.

Luckily, I did document a lot of what I learned while going through it.

This post covers a lot of what I’ve learned about content marketing and doing it well (in the context of CXL’s business, at least. May or may not apply to yours).

On creating good content

People tend to parrot easy-to-digest advice regardless of the veracity. This one comes to mind: “spend 80% of your time promoting content, 20% creating it.”

Bullshit.

For every 4 hours you spend writing an article, you should spend 16 hours promoting it? How long would Tim Urban have to spend promoting his content to adhere to this advice?

These tweetable pieces of advice catch on because they are simple, easy to remember, and directionally true.

“Directionally True” is an infuriatingly amoral phrase that I believe Scott Adams coined when trying to apologize for Donald Trump’s mistruths (“You don’t want to assume his facts are literally true, although they are usually emotionally or directionally true,” he says).

Directional Truth does help here, though, in that most people should spend more time promoting their content. Most people hit publish with no pre-promotion plan and no post-promotion efforts and wonder why they don’t get traffic. Most people should do more.

But 80/20 is a proportion that only someone with an agenda would advise.

Content creation is important.

Don’t skimp on it.

First, you shouldn’t add to the noise of bullshit content online. It’s ruining the internet.

Even if you don’t care about your poisonous externalities, it’s more effective to put together 10X Pillar Content. This type of stuff tends to weather Google algorithms and other uncontrollable things. Focus on quality.

10X content doesn’t simply mean long content. There may be a certain je ne sais quoi about 10X content, but I know for certain the factor here is not content length. There are lots of 5000 word fluff pieces out there.

The truth is, it’s hard to say what an excellent piece of content looks like. Here are a few publications I think are doing really well:

• Inside Intercom
• HubSpot’s ThinkGrowth
• Mixpanel’s The Signal
• Shopify Plus blog
• CXL (obviously)

(Mandatory note: businesses need to care about ROI. You’re not a publishing company (probably), so first and foremost content is a business asset. The argument I’m trying to make is that, most often, you’re better off spending time crafting valuable and high quality content. The business case and choice is yours, though, as I’m sure some industries are better off pumping out mediocre stuff at scale. There aren’t many black and white answers, sadly).

On content promotion

Content promotion is about putting great content in the right places. Strategically, there’s not a lot of wiggle room here. If you put great content in the wrong places, it will be irrelevant. If you put bad content in the right places, it will be worse than if you had done no promotion at all: you simply annoy and spam potential visitors.

Tactically, what I’ve found is most effective is the least “scalable”: you have to build genuine relationships.

People are now obsessed with phrases like “influencer marketing,” but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it (morally and strategically). In a Reddit AMA, Ryan Holiday said about the same:

I’ve gotten enough cold emails to know that most people look for the easy way out. They read a Backlinko blog post and copy the process down (to the very email template recommended). It’s easy to see right through this (especially when you’ve seen the same template a hundred times).

You’ll find that authentic communication prevails. When you join a community, you want to be the one adding value, not just spamming your own content. When you email someone, you can’t just ask for favors all the time.

Voting rings and content sharing/upvoting quid pro quos can work to bring in traffic, especially if your content is actually worth being on the front page of a community.

But otherwise, it’s a stale tactic and you’re often marketing to the echo chamber. If you frequent Inbound.org or Growth Hackers, you’ve seen the mediocre posts on page one with relatively few or no comments (and if there are comments, they’re bland statements like “nice work!”).

How frustrating it must be to be a moderator in these situations, because the power users of the site are the ones causing the most abuse.

However, being a meaningful contributor to those communities was definitely valuable (still is). You forge connections, build credibility, and lo and behold, people share content for you. You don’t need to spam a bunch of strangers asking for upvotes (which simply feels bad for the soul).

One point that may not be helpful but is a personal vendetta of mine: when you are asking for a link or a social share, just come right out and say it. When you try to obfuscate your request through some weird request to “get you thoughts,” or “get your feedback on this article,” it comes off as super disingenuous.

You don’t want my feedback (trust me); you want my backlink. Stop sugarcoating things.

And whatever you do, if you’re sending outreach emails, at least don’t send a comically irrelevant pitch:

Apart from my rants, content promotion is mostly about finding a distribution channel where you have an unfair advantage, where the spoils outweigh the costs. If you can find a way to make scalable cold outreach or community spamming work, who am I to tell you not to? It’s just in my experience I’ve seen that may not be the most effective use of time.

On content optimization

It wasn’t until very late into my role at CXL that we looked into content optimization seriously.

Well, we started early on fixing broken links and testing different opt-in offers, but that’s table stakes, low hanging fruit. When you look at content optimization as a lever which you should be focusing on as much as creation and promotion, things change tactically and strategically.

Instead of simply looking forward at your editorial calendar, you ask questions like:

• Which blog posts are getting high traffic but are driving very few conversions?
• Which blog posts drive few, but very high value, conversions?
• Which pages rank at 7-8 in SERPs that would be worth trying to push up to 1 or 2?

If, for instance, you find that your highest performing pieces of content in terms of traffic are bringing in little to no quality conversions, you can look to 1) improve the offer on the page 2) improve the content itself 3) focus on producing different content that actually aligns with conversion intent.

Once you’ve produced a pile of content, it’s important to learn from the data and shift the strategy. It’s too easy to look forward and keep pumping out the content you know how to without seeing if it’s actually effective. Plus, the lowest hanging fruit, in terms of traffic and conversions, is usually in this optimization lever.

It’s quite a similar approach, here, as you’d take with conversion optimization in general: look at the data, run experiments, and move the needle.

The bottom line is: this will increasingly be a powerful and competitive lever for content marketing. Don’t skip it.

On content marketing program management

Content marketing, like anything else, should be viewed as a system.

There are multiple levers, or inflection points, that can affects your outputs. Most people, as I mentioned earlier, have a keen focus on both content creation and content promotion (more so with creation), but they forget about content optimization.

All three of these levers matter when it comes to quantitative outputs. A parallel is how most people view growth marketing – there, we tend to agree that we can experiment across the different nodes (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral).

You may choose to focus on one of these levers for a quarter or another mark of time, but all of them matter in terms of your end results. Usually, one lever is substantially weaker at a given point in time, so focusing there will bring more results.

An example with content is that if you’ve optimized your content creation lever and you’re churning out 4 stellar pieces of content per week, you’ve got that down. Let’s also say you’ve got an SEO/growth person that continues to optimize content, but you haven’t increased social or referral traffic in 6 months. You may, then, want to look at content promotion and how you can improve that area.

In addition, bringing efficiency to processes within each lever is important as well.

As an example, how you manage guest or freelance writers is super important to your content creation productivity and results.

That was one of my earliest challenges at CXL. I was a solo marketer, and I had other things to do than writing content. Getting guest writers would help free up my time for other strategic efforts, I thought.

This is true in theory, but rarely the case in practice. As someone managing other writers, you’ll often resonate with the following cliche:

“If you want something done right, you better do it yourself.”

Lots of things go wrong, mostly in the chain of communication and expectations, so you end up spending more time and energy to get a guest post published than if you had simply written it yourself. This isn’t always true, as you’ll surely work with some straight professionals (and this frustrating process allows you to find the gems that you work with longer term).

But be careful as wasted time begins to creep up on your productivity as well as your stress levels.

There’s been a lot written about the relationship between marketing manager and guest/freelance writer, but here’s what helped me:

• Find writers whose work you already know and admire.
  • I found those whose work I was already reading on Growth Hackers, Hacker News, etc. I simply reached out to work with them.
• Create editorial guidelines and add a “brown M&M’s” clause.
  • This should be a detail that isn’t necessarily hidden but will prove to you that the potential guest writer has read the guidelines.
  • Mine was a specific subject line that the guest writer needed to lead with.
    • If the subject line was different, I threw out the email.
• Create a shared Trello board so guest writers (once accepted) can see where you’re at in the process and what other writers are working on.
• Try to work with writers who actually do the thing they’re writing about. I know there’s a big debate on subject matter experts vs. writers, but at least in the domain of CRO, it was always way better working with subject matter experts than those that could write well. I can make the writing pretty, but I can’t put knowledge in someone’s head.
• Give up after three drafts back and forth.
• Give clear, straightforward, and constructive feedback. Don’t focus on minutia (commas), focus on structure and themes. Critique like you’re your own audience (what questions would they have?). I like blunt feedback, but some writers aren’t going to be prepared for that.
• If a writer works out well, try to get them to write regularly, or if possible, hire them. Good writers are really hard to find; don’t think your ad hoc guest writer pipeline will expand forever.

Similarly, I created a baseline process/checklist for content promotion early on.

A lot of research went into who the movers and shakers in the CRO space were, which communities were vibrant, and what channels we could have an unfair advantage in.

We used this for a long time in the beginning, but later on as we learned more and got feedback to the process, we slowly shifted to higher performing distribution channels and dropped out the low performing ones.

Bottom line: If it’s tough to create an individual piece of content, it’s much harder to continue to produce great content, and promote and optimize it, with consistency.

Build the system, don’t obsess too much on the one-off tactics.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of people who will simplify things in content, saying things like “you should spend 80% of your time on promotion and 20% on creation.” Be careful when listening to black and white maxims like this.

In fact, be careful listening to the advice in this article. It’s simply things that I’ve learned in my specific context that worked for me.

In truth, anything worth doing is difficult and, while you can follow a content marketing playbook of sorts to get a baseline, to truly excel at the sport you need to operate using first principles, systems thinking, and a whole lot of brilliant tactical execution. How that looks on an individual level differs, but it certainly never looks like the mediocre, templatized version of content marketing you often see written about.

The post What I learned about content marketing at CXL appeared first on Alex Birkett.