Blog launched, not much happening: Welcome the after launch hangover!
You set up your blog, wrote the first blog post(s), and sweated to create that e-book to catch leads. You launched your blog. And waited actively for leads to pour in. Yet nothing much happened.
Now you, your team and especially your boss are questioning whether this was such a good idea after all.
Welcome the after launch hangover!
Opening the doors to your blog is an important step. You have proved that you and your team can create content. Congratulations! You are ready to the next phase: Creating success.
Success just don’t happen. It seldom happens with just great content. It has to be made. You have to make it. And luckily there is a formula for success.
How successful your company’s blog will be is determined by essentially five success factors: assets, volume, greatness, fit and promotion.
Let’s introduce The Company Blog Success Formula:
Assets x Volume x Greatness x Fit x Promotion = Success
Assets: Successful blogging builds assets that help you succeed better as you go along like email subscribers, social media followers, blog post archive and backlinks. The more assets you have, the easier it is to get traffic for your new posts. But in the beginning, you might have to start from almost nothing making early traction so much harder to get.
Volume: Content marketing is very much a volume sport. Blog is like a magazine, not a book. The more often you post, the quicker you build audience. The more keywords you cover at Google. The more social media presence you have. The more needs you fulfill. A post per week means you will have 52 posts in one year and 156 in three years.
Content Marketing is a volume sport. #blogsuccessformula
Greatness: A well promoted blog post will not get you anywhere if the content is not great. You might know “the great marketing, bad product” syndrome which might even kill a company. Same applies here. Great promotion of a shitty piece will alienate your potential audience. On the other hand, a great post will get read, shared, linked… It might even get viral. Great post provides high value, is high quality AND is unique from competition.
Great promotion of a lousy content will kill your company blog. #blogsuccessformula
Fit: Great content that answers questions nobody is asking, or leaving audience’s questions unanswered are both roads to failure. Success is only possible when great, valuable content meets large enough audience with unanswered needs. You need to find Content - Audience Fit.
Promotion: You need to promote your content to drive traffic and turn part of that traffic to audience. In very rare cases, a great post gets found and promoted by someone else. In all other cases you need to work really hard to promote the piece to drive in traffic.
And if you get these right, you will achieve success.
Success: Success in itself is relative to your business goals. You need to define success in your case, verbally and in metrics you can meter. But during your journey to the goals, you need analytics in order to learn and improve your game.
When you start, your game is likely to be quite weak in every factor. You don’t have followers. You have just written first posts so you don’t have content volume. Your posts are, well, not too embarrassing. Almost nobody have read the posts, so you don’t know whether they interests your target audience. And finally you barely remembered to do any promotion.
To illustrate how the formula works, let's do an exercise:
Give yourself score on each success factor 0-10 where 1 states minimum acceptable level. Let say you give yourself 0.8 on each, which I would say is quite typical during the first 5 posts or so. Now let’s do some math. That would get you to 0.32 as a result. Not very good. So you probably guess why you have that hangover.
Now consider the best. They can get close to 10 on each. That would mean 100 000 against your 0.32. Seems disportioned, but this is how it is going to be. I am following several small or smallish businesses who are there attracting some 1 million unique visitors monthly. Each. And they all started where you started. It’s possible.
Your target audience and potential might be a lot smaller, but getting to more realistic 2-3 on each will make quite a difference to your success. 2.5 as an average would mean 100.
This was all imaginary with no scientific background whatsoever, but illustrate the exponential success potential. Improve your game on each factor, and magic will happen.
The Company Blog Success Formula Series:
- The Company Blog Success Formula, what makes or breaks your company blog, and how to achieve success
- Rich blogger, poor blogger: How to build your audience and content assets for success (Assets)
- Behind every legendary blog is a great promoter (Promotion)
- 11 finishing steps that make your blog post great [ Greatness ]
- Blogging is a volume sport, why? [ Quantity ]
- Without [ Content - Audience Fit ], your company blog will fail
- Road to blogging success is paved with constant small improvements
- 7 must-haves of a Minimum Viable Blog [ CHECKLIST ]
DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE SERIES [FREE EBOOK]
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Written by Antti Pietilä Antti is the founder and CEO at Loyalistic (Simple Content Marketing Software for B2B Companies) who loves to help SaaS-companies to grow at Software Entrepreneurs (@ohjelmisto_ry) and cycle. Say hello to him anytime @anttipietila. |
