What I understood about content marketing when I analyzed 614 posts

Neil Patel, the creator of the marketing start-up of Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and the founder of KISSmetrics, analyzed the posts on his own blog and told how the content pays off, for which different formats are suitable and what texts are shared. Material translated by New team for Relap.io .

Can you imagine that I posted 614 posts on Quick Sprout? My first post came out on April 16, back in 2007.

Today, almost eight years later, more than 700,000 people visit the blog per month. However, given how many years I have been leading it, there should have been more visitors, and, ideally, their number should grow faster.

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

Here is what I found out:

Infographic works very efficiently.

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

Nevertheless, in general, infographics work extremely efficiently. You are probably wondering why I say so, if the numbers say otherwise.

The reason infographics work more efficiently than anything else is because posts with infographics generate 37.5% more backlinks than regular ones.

So what does that mean? In the first three months after release, infographics typically account for 22.6% less traffic than a regular post. However, infographics receive 35.1% more traffic over the year.

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 It continues to attract users, even when it becomes outdated, while a regular text post over time does not produce such results.

Users like to read personal and controversial stories.

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

These three stories really attracted a large number of users. After these stories, I received many letters of hate and malicious comments, and in many cases I might be wrong, but that's fine. However, these posts have become the most popular on my blog.

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

In terms of traffic on social networks, this kind of story attracts a lot of visitors. The post about clothes scored 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 traffic growth, I must write ambiguous and personal stories. I must do this with caution so as not to offend other people, and also make sure that the content remains educational.

Time matters

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

I tried releasing at other times and other days, but eight in the morning was always the perfect time. In particular, Monday is most likely the best day of the week, but the period from Tuesday to Thursday gives no less good results.

I didn't really experiment with the release on Saturdays and Sundays, but judging by all 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 posts on Quick Sprout on weekends.

Guides take higher places than regular posts (but not for the reasons you thought about)

On Quick Sprout, when searching through headings, manuals appear higher than other posts. At first I thought it was because they were referenced a lot, reposted a lot, and they contain an average of more than 30,000 words, but that is not the point.

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

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

If you want to increase your search in 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 gained 149% more reposts and 283% more backlinks.

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

Many of my posts, including this one, already contain a lot 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 to improve the quality of my posts.

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

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

Content Titles Work Better in the Long Run

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

Blurry headlines like How to Get Rich get an average of 44% more email traffic. But from the point of view 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 content headlines took higher places much longer and generally received 65.2% more traffic.

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Translation: Polina Pilyugina for New and Relap.io

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