What should be your primary goal if you're blogging for business, not as a hobbyist.
Traffic is a vanity metric. Unless of course you make money out of raw traffic. Like selling banner ads for example.
If your goal is to acquire new customers and growing your business, what's the point of going viral and bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to a blog if none of them will buy from you? It may be good for your ego, but not for the bank account. So instead of trying to generate as much blog traffic as we could, we focused our efforts on bringing highly targeted visitors, who would convert into customers and bring money to our business.
Content marketing teams love to set themselves all sorts of nonsensical KPI's:
- Number of published articles per week
- Number of blog visitors per month
- Number of email subscribers per month.
These are all bad KPIs if you want to grow your business.
- Number of orders or sales per month.
This is the primary KPI that you should care about in the first place. You should treat your blog as a customer acquisition channel. Not a traffic acquisition channel.
Break down three main customer acquisition channels and explain how blogging expands them.
- Word of mouth
- Google's search results
- Ads
Do you even need a blog in order to tap into these three main customer acquisition channels? Let's say you own an e-commerce store that sells shoe-laces like lacesout.net. Let's take a look at this article from their blog that teaches different lacing styles. According to Ahrefs, this single article ranks in Google for over 600 related search queries. Here are some of them: "how to lace nikes", "how to lace nike shoes", "how to lace air max 90" etc, etc, etc. So people search for these kinds of things in Google, they find this article at Lacesout blog, they enjoy it, they dig deeper into lacesout.net website, and eventually they buy laces from it. This is a nearly perfect example of how content marketing can drive customers to your business from Google. So let's put blog next to "Search" customer acquisition channel.
What about the word of mouth? Well, this article teaches you some cool and unique ways to tie your sneakers. Guess what people will do once they learn a new way to tie their laces? Post it on social media, of course. There's even a hashtag #shoelaceart on Instagram for that. And once their friends and followers ask them for a tutorial where they learned to tie laces like that, they will give them a link to this article. See where I'm going with this? It's not just the positive experience with your company and your product that can generate the word of mouth. You can also generate a lot of buzz with your content. So let's put blog next to word of mouth too.
And finally, you can spend money to promote the content, that talks about your product instead of promoting the actual product directly. It may sound counterintuitive, but quite often the content that promotes your product will have a much higher conversion rate than a sales page for that product.
Showcase one very simple, but immensely important realization that keeps people away from rapid blog growth.
As long as you invest your time and effort into publishing new articles and promoting them in every way you can, your traffic seems to be growing. This is where the popular "you should publish new content regularly" advice comes from. But as soon as you stop publishing new content, the results that you have achieved so far will start fading almost instantly. But it shouldn't be this way. Because this is not how growth looks like. I can only call this kind of performance "survival."
If your content marketing efforts don't add up over time, you're doing it wrong. So here is how this graph should look, if you make your efforts add up.
As you can see, the traffic to each newly published article doesn't fade to nothing. Even the opposite, it slowly grows over time, till it reaches a certain point. This way every single article that you publish adds up to the total traffic of your blog. So even if you stop publishing new articles for a while, all your progress won't immediately fade to nothing. It will stay exactly where you left it. Or maybe even grow a bit on it's own. This is called "the compound effect of content marketing."
Focus on driving passive consistent traffic to every article that you have on your blog. As opposed to get an immediate spike of traffic to your newly published article, which will soon fade to nothing.
Two years ago, Ahrefs Blog team were publishing 2-3 articles per week, and the traffic didn't show any signs of growth. It was basically a flatline despite all the effort. Today we publish 2-3 new articles per month and our traffic is growing steadily and consistently, as you can tell. But most importantly, our blog is driving thousands of customers to our platform every single month, and the more we grow our blog traffic, the more customers we get from it.
The importance of making every article that you publish bring you consistent traffic every single month. Because growth happens when the traffic to your articles doesn't fade over time.