A Marketing Dream Turned Nightmare

Hey folks ??, I'm Kenneth Burke. #BurkeBits is where I share stories, data, and frameworks to help you become a better marketer. Subscribe for free to level-up.

We’d done something great, and we were proud of it—over 100,000 new people were coming to our website every month through organic search.

That was powering our inbound sales pipeline, so our reps didn’t have to worry about anything until someone booked a time on their calendar.

That’s the dream!

But then something unexpected happened.

All that traffic started to work against us, not for us.

Here’s the story.

How It Started

In May 2015, I went to Digital Summit in Atlanta and heard Quinn Tempest give a masterclass on blogging for profit. The main takeaways (still relevant):

• You’ve got to be posting regularly to get traction online
• It will take 6 months before you start to see any of that traction
• Progress builds the more and more frequently you post
• Play Moneyball—create “base hit” content that answers questions your target customers are searching for instead of trying to hit home runs by going viral

So that’s what I did for Text Request.

The content was not good—mostly veiled sales pitches about why you should text as a business. Over time I got better, started applying some of those research skills I picked up in undergrad, followed Gary V’s “jab jab jab right hook” approach, and hit publish 2-3x a week.

Exactly 6 months later, we started to see traction. Nothing that shaped the trajectory of the business, but enough to justify that we keep doing it.

What Kind of Content Did We Create?

I wasn’t as intentional as I should have been, so topics were all over the place. This lack of focus would come back to bite us. More on that later.

What did work was content that answered questions people were searching for that were semi-relevant to our product. For instance, posts like these ranked high in search results, often #1:

• How many texts do people send every day?
• The history of the smartphone
• How to write professional text messages
• How many emails do people get every day?
• 10 reasons Millennials hate phone calls
• 101 reasons why people text every day

We earned a ton of backlinks from reputable sites like Salesforce, Microsoft, Neil Patel, Forbes, and so on. What helped most here was other writers linking to our posts whenever they referenced our stats (which, thankfully, was a lot).

That fed the flywheel to bring us more traffic, which earned more backlinks, which brought more traffic, which brought in leads.

It created a 7-figure inbound pipeline. It was a bootstrapped startup marketer’s dream! Until it wasn’t.

The Big Problem

View the full story on burkebits.com.