Want to launch your blog like a rocket?
Great piece by Anum Hussain on launching a business blog (full post here https://www.anumhussain.com/presentations/how-to-launch-blog):
Launching a business blog is not easy. Maintaining one - or worse, growing one - is even more difficult. But I didn't realize just how difficult this was until I joined the Sidekick Team at HubSpot.
After two years of blogging and producing offers for HubSpot's audience of 1.2 million readers, I was suddenly faced with an audience of zero. I went from a team of brilliant content creators to ... me. And when I Googled, "how to launch a new blog," I got the crappiest advice.
"Network, network, network!" - okay, cool, and that accomplishes what exactly?
"Start writing, and keep writing!" - yeahhhh, about what?
"Share your blog on social media!" - right, because everyone on Twitter is just DYING to read my latest gibberish.
Fortunately, I was working with an amazing team. My manager, Brian Balfour, had perfected the art of audience research. And my colleague, Dan Wolchonok, had the perfect mix of technical expertise and growth passion to quickly ship experiments. The three of us worked together to launch what is now the Sidekick Blog, and within five months we generated over 22,000 engaged email subscribers and retained an average of 30,000 monthly blog viewers.
Below is the documented playbook for how we did it. I present it here now with the hope of rescuing future marketers from the frustration I was met with. The presentation should walk you through everything. If you prefer reading detailed copy over visual presentations, the entire, detail-heavy, written version of the presentation is below.
Their number one solution to capitalizing on this channel?
Publish.
Publish all the damn time.
But now there are 152 million blogs on the internet. And this means we need to handle things a bit more strategically. As detailed in the presentation, I see it coming down to the three core stages below. I've hyperlinked each stage and its subsections so you can easily jump around this guide.
Stage 1: Deeply understand your target audience. [Jump to Stage 1]
- Audience Research
- Sidekick Research Case Study
Stage 2: Produce Posts that attract & scale traffic. [Jump to Stage 2]
- 14 Blog Optimization Tips
- SlideShare-Specific Tips
- Lead Generation Specific Tips
- HubSpot Forms Case Study
Stage 3: Fuel growth of blog subscribers.
- Why Subscribers Matter More Than Leads
- 8 Ways To Generate More Subscribers
- Sidekick Unsubscribes Case Study
Let's dive into each of these major steps more specifically.
Stage 1: Deeply understand your target audience.
The very first - and most overlooked step - of starting a new blog is conducting audience research. Audience research is when we take a step back to fully understand the way our end users / readers / customers think and operate. These findings then translate into an abundance of learnings, including how we tackle our content strategy.
All this audience research takes is:
- Contacting at least 10 people in your target audience. This can be done by pulling current users in your database or even just searching LinkedIn for people with job titles that match your desired customer.
- Scheduling 1-hour interviews. Once you get a few people to agree, try to meet them in exchange for a free coffee or lunch. If only virtual interviews are possible then send a gift card.
- Ask them five sets of questions:
- Find out who they are: Company name? Age? How long have they been in their current role? how large is their team? Why do they do what they do?
- Find out what they do: What motivates them? What is the end game for them? What are their aspirations? Why did they change from company A to company B?
- Find out what they want: What are their hopes and dreams? What content are they attracted to or read now?
- Find out how they see themselves: How do they compare themselves to co-workers? Do they think there's more to learn about their profession? Do they hangout their co-workers outside of work?
- Find out how they spend their day-to-day: What do they read? What do they share? How do they learn about new stuff? New articles? What do they hate about their day? What do they love?
After asking these questions to a group of people, you'll begin to notice patterns and trends across your audience. Aggregate these results to build an initial illustration of your target blog audience.
You may be thinking - well, that's insightful, but sounds like a decent amount of work. I recommend dedicating at least one full-time employee to this project. If this person has to take on other projects post-launch, so be it, but the actually time needed to launch a blog correctly is best achieved when you have a dedicated resource. (I'll be posting about what to look for in this hire in the coming months. Subscribe to the right to get alerted when it's published).
Stage 2: Produce posts that attract & scale blog traffic.
Audience research should be used to plan your content strategy and structure. I mentioned earlier that there's a growing abundance of businesses employing content marketing, which is resulting in content clutter.
To combat this, our strategy on the Sidekick Content Team is to focus on quality over quantity. But in order to make quality work, we need every blog post we publish to give us the power and results of multiple blog posts.
Stage 3: Fuel growth of blog subscribers.
Every marketer launching a new blog makes the same first mistake: We instantly optimize for leads.
We see all the stats on how blogs can generate more leads. We feel pressure from executive management to prove the ROI of blogging. We crave immediate satisfaction of every post we publish. But here's the thing: The goal of a new blog is growing email subscribers first, NOT leads.
Now, I'm not saying your blog can't be a power source for generating leads - it absolutely can (and should) be. But building a blogging machine means building an audience to funnel through that machine first.
That's where the importance of email subscribers come in.
Our blog email subscribers are the people who have opted-in to receive our blog posts through email updates. When we first launched the Sidekick Blog, our first OKR (Objective Key Result) was to generate blog subscribers. Why? Because when we publish a new post, that post gets emailed to those subscribers, who in return promote it, bringing in a wider audience of new people. Looking at the Sidekick Blog today, nearly 77% of all views to our blog posts come from these email subscribers. [Click to Tweet]
HubSpot's Blog machine is built the same way.
Before joining the Sidekick Team at HubSpot, I worked on HubSpot's core content marketing team. When looking at any of our posts on the Marketing Blog, we noticed that roughly 70% of all first week views to HubSpot blog posts came from our growing list of email subscribers. [Click to Tweet]
Think about it: The larger the initial audience you send your content to, the greater the opportunities to validate to Google that this post is relevant. By having a set number of people reading the post, you're giving Google actual cues of your content's value.
So, you could start a blog with the sole intention of generating leads. But then every post you publish is a game - which posts will succeed, which won't? You end up comparing a post with 5 views to a post with 30 views, thinking that the latter is better because the internet somehow sent it more attention.
But the internet is a black hole. There are far, far too many factors that go into why certain posts get noticed, and some don't. Or, you could start a blog by first building an email subscriber base.
Growing an email subscriber base guarantees you some level of success for every post you publish. Let's say you grow to 200 email subscribers. Overtime you see that roughly 18% of your subscribers see your new posts on the day of publish. That ensures that every single post you publish will garner at least 36 views. That is now your accepted base level of success for any post your publish. It's not a publish and pray-someone-notices game.
From there, these 36 engaged readers will share the post beyond your current subscribers through tweets, email forwards, etc., helping you capture even more new visitors. As your blog gets shared, some posts may remain at 36 views, some may blow past 100 views. But at least now you can accurately assess what content you publish is better than others, because you know that your core audience has helped decipher what is and isn't interesting.
If you optimize for leads right out of the gate, you'll never build your audience, which means your content traffic will always remain flat or grow linearly rather than exponentially.
By focusing your blog strategy on generating subscribers before leads, you're setting up your business for long-term growth. You're allowing yourself to build a core audience that will build a machine that can consistently attract visitors and convert them into leads. Your blog simply can't generate leads if it doesn't have a consistently growing audience to convert.
So how do you generate blog subscribers?
By now you hopefully understand why blog subscribers are so critical to blog growth. When you first start a blog, a simple growth tactic is merely inviting people to read it - genius, right?
But before we can send out these email invitations, we have to ensure we have a crisp message for why our blog is different than others - this is where the audience research from stage one comes into play once more. Ask yourself:
- Can you describe your blog in one sentence?
- Would your researched persona read it?