What I understood about content marketing when I analyzed 614 posts

Neil Patel, creator of the marketing startup Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and the founder of KISSmetrics, analyzed posts in his own blog and told how content pays off, why different formats are suitable and what texts they share. The material is translated by the New Night team for Relap.io .

Can you imagine that I posted 614 posts on Quick Sprout? My first post was released on April 16 back in 2007.
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Today, almost eight years later, more than 700,000 people visit the blog a month. However, considering how many years I have been leading him, there should have been more visitors, and, ideally, their number should grow faster.

For the sake of interest, I decided to analyze all my posts and understand what exactly causes the growth of visitors.

Here is what I found out:

Infographics works very efficiently.

Links to infographics are divided by 42.4% more often than links to regular posts. However, they collect 129% fewer comments. In addition, every time I send an infographic by e-mail, the return traffic is 28.3% less than usual.

However, in general, infographics works extremely efficiently. You are probably wondering why I say this if the numbers say the opposite.

The reason why infographics works the most efficiently for all the rest is that posts with infographics generate 37.5% more backlinks than regular ones.

So what does this mean? During the first three months after release, infographics usually accounts for 22.6% less traffic than a regular post. However, for the year infographics receives 35.1% more traffic.

In other words, infographics effectively attracts traffic in the long run. It continues to attract users, even when it becomes outdated, while a regular text post does not produce such results over time.

Users like to read personal and ambiguous stories.

My most popular posts are mostly personal and at the same time ambiguous stories. For example:

• Having spent $ 162 301.42 on clothes, I earned $ 692 500
• How I earned a million dollars on Ferrari
• What I learned by spending $ 57,000 on Instagram

These three stories really attracted a large number of users. After these stories, I received many hate letters and evil comments, and in many cases I could be wrong, but this is normal. However, these posts have become the most popular in my blog.

But that's what I found out for sure: people judge you by the headlines of your posts. Many do not read further - they just make assumptions based on the title.

From the point of view of traffic on social networks, this kind of stories attract a lot of visitors. The post about clothes gained almost twice as many reposts as the second most popular post on Quick Sprout.

As a result, I learned that if I want to accelerate the growth of traffic, I have to write ambiguous and personal stories. I must do this with caution so as not to offend other people, and also ensure that the content remains educational.

Time matters

For many years I tried to release posts on different days and at different times. It turned out that it is best to release posts from Monday to Thursday at about eight in the morning Pacific Time. It’s not at all necessary that this time is ideal for any blog, but it is definitely suitable for Quick Sprout.

I tried to release at other times and on other days, but eight in the morning was always the ideal time. In particular, Monday is most likely the best day of the week, but the period from Tuesday to Thursday gives equally good results.

I haven't really experimented with the issue on Saturdays and Sundays, but judging by the rest of my blogs, these are the worst days in terms of traffic, especially in the inter-corporate sector. For this reason, I never release Quick Sprout posts on weekends.

Guides are ranked higher than regular posts (but not for the reasons you thought about)

In Quick Sprout, when searching by headlines, manuals appear higher than other posts. At first I thought it was because they were referred to a lot of places, they were reposted a lot, and they contain on average more than 30,000 words, but this is not the point.

All these factors really help, but when I decided to find out why, when searching for terms such as “online marketing”, they occupy such high places, I found one distinctive feature that I assigned to them, because of which all the guides find themselves in the search above.

Can you guess what it was? I added a link to absolutely every guide in the Quick Sprout sidebar. After 30 days, search sites began to grow at a tremendous rate, and after three months I found an incredible increase in search traffic for these guides.

If you want to increase your search for your high-quality posts, add links to them in the sidebar of your blog.

People love data

Looking at all the text publications that I posted on Quick Sprout, I found one feature: publications containing statistics and data collected 149% more reposts and 283% more backlinks.

And this is logical, since posts with graphs and diagrams also gain more reposts and backlinks .

Many of my posts, including this one, already contain a large amount of statistics and data, so I just have to continue this trend and write more posts based on data.

Also, I should think about hiring a full-time guy who will look for information for me in order to improve the quality of my posts.

The only thing that I haven’t done so far is that it didn’t include a sufficient number of graphs and diagrams in the posts. For example, this post contains a lot of data and I could insert charts to visualize them and facilitate understanding.

I just get too lazy and get rid of it. Otherwise, I can always pay someone to add graphs or charts to my posts.

Good headlines work better in the long run.

I looked at all the titles in Quick Sprout and noticed that some of them are very vague, while others are very specific.

Blurry headlines, such as " How to become rich " receive an average of 44% more traffic from email. But in terms of social networks, posts with more specific headlines gain 29.1% more reposts.

When I studied long-term data (a year or more), I found that meaningful headings take higher places much longer and generally receive 65.2% more traffic.

In general, when I follow my own heading rules , I get more traffic. Now I just need to stick with them.

Conclusion

If you want to increase the amount of traffic, do not just upload more content. Instead, take a step back and analyze everything you wrote before.

What exactly worked best for you? And what not? These two simple questions can drastically change your approach. Why? Because it is worth focusing your strength on content that increases traffic and sales.

Source: What I Learned About Content Marketing by Analyzing 614 Posts

Translation: Polina Pilyugina for Night and Relap.io