David Doss
Notes from Content Marketing Lessons From 10yrs and 41m+ Website Visits
David Doss, February 05, 2015

David Doss was kind enough to share his notes from Content Marketing Lessons From 10yrs and 41m+ Website Visits by Hiten Shah.

Slides on slideshare.

Co-founder

  • KISS metrics
  • Crazy Eggs
  • Hello Bar

All marketing is content

  • marketing = creating better content
  • measuring marketing = measuring how good the content is

Find pages with high traffic and high bounce rate

  • opportunity to:
    • test
    • improve and grow

Examples of useful tools:

  • Unbounce
  • Moz open site explorer
    • check backlinks for content
    • SCO
    • Linkbuilding
  • Buzzsumo
  • Quicksprout
  • kissmetrics
  • Google Analytics

Facts:

  • banner blindness
  • only 32% of marketers say they are effectively executing enough content
  • odd numbers of words work better than even numbers of words for headlines
    • More shares
    • More read-through
  • SEO – search engine optimization is still highly important
    • Organic search is driving most traffic for most sites

Rules:

  • quality + quantity = eyeballs
  • figure out what’s working; do more of it
  • figure out what’s working for others; imitate it but don’t rip it

What works for Kiss Metrics:

  • 30+ marketing guides
  • 70+ webinars
    • 1 a week
  • 60+ infographics
  • good content
  • timeless content
  • timely content

Other content ideas:

  • quiz
  • video tutorial

Content marketing can be reverse engineered, for example search factors (in decreasing order of importance):

  1. organic
  2. direct
  3. social
  4. referral
  5. other
  6. email
  7. refer to friend is usually not important (to them)

Content helps you tell your story

  • if you already have a blog, you can
    • share customer successes
    • fight your own battle better (deal with PR crises, etc.)
  • Posts for conversion
    • trust-content
    • updates, advice
    • will have lower traffic though
  • Posts for traffics
    • social media
    • but this generally has bad conversion rate
  • Content @ kiss directly leads to:
    • newsletter subscribers
    • webinar attendees
    • website visitors
    • trial signups
    • downloads
    • backlinks
    • attention
  • Kiss Metrics traffic drivers:
    • Matching things with Google Analytics phrasing
    • Log In with Google
    • Match everything with Google Analytics color scheme / design
    • Enter in your website URL
    • Link to a 3-minute overview

Key takeaways:

  • Blog is 80-90% driven by guest posts
  • Use the right tools
  • Find what works, and do more of it
  • If the content and quality is valuable, and matches up with what the majority of your customers, then you have achieved your goal
  • Vary the content type
  • Practice, practice, practice!
  • Get some interns, but only once you know how to do it yourself!
  • Ghost writing: a blog post is about a 20-minute call
  • Repurpose existing content onto twitter
  • At KISS metrics, the blog is so popular that many people don’t even know what the product is.
  • If you don’t have any audience, go get an audience!!!

Q&A

  • Most Useful?

    1. Blog
    2. Email
    3. Webinar
    4. Lists

  • What sites would you invest in?

    1. Google
    2. Facebook (knows how to grow user base)
    3. Twitter (better platform, but doesn’t know how to grow its user base as much)

Filmed February 05, 2015 at Zendesk