Case Study: How we got 100+ subscribers and 1700+ hits from a single post !

Right now i’m on cloud 9 because of how well our last post (our startup pre-launch strategy) did. I put a lot of effort into it but, didn’t expect to get this much traffic / shares / subscribers from a single post.

It took a lot of effort creating this traffic:

I spent less than 1 day creating the last post and a full week distributing it which still isn’t finished.

And here is where the traffic came from:

Right away we can see a couple things:

• The importance of sharing buttons. If you have good content, people will share it.
• Buffer was the second most used share button. It’s not a default option in most share widgets.. Check yours.
• Direct traffic is awesome but sucks because we can’t track it! I think it’s because we’re not HTTPS we can’t track the referrals properly.
• Another blogger Pierre reported the same problem + solution.
• Quora rocks for us
• Fastlane forum rocks for us
• Surprisingly social had the lowest bounce rate overall
• A lot of stuff didn’t work for us

 

Our current overall blog conversion rate (visitor to subscriber):

108 subscribers from 1726 hits.

6.2% overall conversion!

New goal conversion: 10% (was 5%)

 

Biggest source of conversions:

SumoMe‘s popup.

Averaging around 4%+ overall conversions.

 

Lowest source of conversions:

SumoMe’s top bar

Averaging under 1%- overall conversions.

 

Other conversion sources:

Side Widget (not tracking) & In content call to action

Around 1.2% overall conversions.

 

How we’re going to try to increase our conversion rate:

• Most importantly, work on the overall ‘voice’ of the blog. I really want people to feel like their a part of this journey and also share theirs with me.
• Install Hellobar (top bar) so we can A/B test different messages.
• Refine our popups message / CTA
• Create better in-content Easter eggs a.k.a lead boxes – Also create custom images for the opt-in buttons in content.
• Create an about page for people to visit and learn more about us / ‘buy in’ mentally.
• I really want the sidebar widget to scroll with the content but don’t know how.. Need to figure this out.

What traffic generation techniques didn’t work?

Warrior Forums & Digital Point Forums

• Warrior forums doesn’t not allow email signature so it would be a waste of time marketing there
• Digital point has for the most part a really low class type of marketer that I didn’t think we would benefit from

Newsletters

• Even though the list is amazing, we had didn’t get any features from any of them.
• One reply saying that they only do personal entrepreneur stories and the plan was just a plan at that point. (Hopefully a future post will be more interesting to them)

 

Roundup post outreach was a HUGE fail!

The first type of outreach I did was submissions to round up posts.

We got featured in 2 out of 20+ that I emailed which is pretty bad. I think this can be attributed to lack of content and horrible outreach skills.

Lesson learned:

Even though people do round up posts, submitting a link and hoping to get featured does not work.

 

Next I tried outreaching for links, another HUGE fail!

I went out on the search for relevant posts that I thought our post would fit in with and emailed them asking them to do it.

Obviously this isn’t going to work… What a waste of time and effort.

Here is one of the responses via Twitter:

(he’s the founder of wordstream and a PPC genius)

 

 That lead to my next idea…

Let’s interview people on outreach so I can learn from the pros and then make a post about it!

Great idea right? Nope…

This is a single tweet out of ~20 he sent to me.

The quick version of his advice was:

• Build out your content before asking for anything from influencers
• It’s hard for influencers to say yes because they don’t know who I am / the voice this blog has (with such small content)
• Use your traffic as leverage (when you get it)
• And gave a suggestion for a series of posts

He also subscribed to this blog which is really cool since i’m personally a huge fan of his.

(check out his blog here)

 Quick takeaway from influencers: They’re awesome as long as they can see that you’re legitamently trying to do something and not just a random SEO company emailing for links. Giving me feedback took more time out of their day and only helped me.

 

STILL, I wouldn’t give up on outreach

There has to be a way I can get links from relevant content without growing my own blog first.

The SEO benefits are nice but I really want that traffic from the links mainly.

But how?

Grinding it out

After all that failing (about 2 1/2 days of straight emailing people) I did what anyone should do…

I read just about every blog post on outreach there is.

• http://www.sparringmind.com/perfect-email/ – Was my favorite

What I found is people have a general idea from past experiences of what a good outreach email should look like but, there is no framework you can take from industry to industry.

So I decided to create my own outreach framework based off lots of research

Created a framework, tested it out and it’s currently at:

• 21% conversion rate from complete cold email to link on first response!
• Follow up after holidays should increase this even more. 

I’ll be writing about the outreach emails in-depth in the next blog post.

 

What traffic generation techniques actually worked?

Quora

Drove 52 hits from 2 days of work

• Worth noting that the questions were also only answered 2 days ago so they may consistently drive more traffic.

The hard part was consistently answering them well. It’s easy to get burnt out doing the exact same thing over and over for a full day.

Lucky for us, there was a lot of these questions. One thing I did right away is create a ‘base’ template to answer the questions from since they were all very similar questions.

Hopefully this traffic keeps coming in consistently – If it does then this was definitely a success.

(stuff in the red box is a canned response).