B2C Content Marketing: How We Grew a B2C Blog to 70,000 Pageviews in 14 Months

When CognitiveFX (a concussion treatment center based in Provo, Utah) reached out to us last year to do their content marketing, we were unsure if we’d be able to help them. There were a number of reasons why we thought that they might not be a good fit for us or our process: They were a B2C (business to consumer) company and historically we’d...

3d

Scaling a Digital Agency: The Tactics CPC Strategy Used to Grow During an Economic Downturn

For most people, scaling a digital agency in the late 2000s was a fool’s errand. Due to the Great Recession, the economy had tanked and the future looked bleak. But for Nii Ahene and his partners, 2007 turned out to be a perfect time. Nii was in the midst of a promising new career with eBay. He was content with his first gig right out of UC Berkeley....

Apr 2020

SaaS Content Strategy: How We Scaled Leadfeeder’s Signups to Over 200/month

In September of 2017, a few months after announcing we were starting our agency, Leadfeeder signed with us as our fourth client. At the time, our content marketing strategy was heavily based on stories. These were growth stories, marketing stories, business stories and narratives where people had done things of interest to the target customer. Here’s...

Mar 2020

Does Content Marketing Make Sense for Early Stage Companies? Our Thoughts.

We often get asked the question, “When doesn’t content marketing work for your clients?” Devesh and I have been thinking about this question a lot lately and having looked back through all of the clients that were challenging to work with (or didn’t lead to successful outcomes), the common theme is that they’re always early stage companies. We define...

Feb 2020

Content Distribution Strategy: Why We’re Doubling Down on Paid Promotion and SEO

Our content distribution strategy has always been the same: know who your customers are, find out where they hang out online and get the content in front of them. However the tactics that we use to accomplish this have changed a ton since we’ve started our site and our agency. When we started our site back in 2015, the main distribution channel that...

Jan 2020

The Detail Principle for Writing Good Blog Posts

Lately I’ve been evaluating tons of freelance writers, reading more portfolio pieces than I can count, editing a bunch of client pieces, and helping multiple new writers understand how to write a good blog post. This means I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts in the past few months. First, I read candidates portfolio pieces. Then for writers who...

Oct 2019

How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Work? A Case Study.

One of the top questions we get asked on our sales calls is “how long does content marketing take to work?” Most people have probably read answers online, or heard from agencies or in-house marketers something like: “it takes 3 months, 6 months or even a year before content marketing will work.” The truth is: you shouldn’t listen to some random figure...

Sep 2019

Positioning Case Study: How We Created a Premium Content Marketing Service

Several months ago, we published an article titled “Positioning Is the Part of Product Market Fit You’re Likely Ignoring”. It was motivated by our feeling that our work was heavily dependent on clients getting their positioning right. We define positioning as the “market fit” part of “product-market fit”: If your positioning isn’t dialed in, it...

Jun 2019

Why Your Content Needs “Originality Nuggets” to be Effective

We think marketers have become too focused on length being the key factor to “great content”, which has produced too many long posts that have nothing original to say. How many “epic” 3000+ word blog posts have you read that haven’t really taught you anything new? For me, too many. So, in our opinion, length is not a sufficient definition for great...

Apr 2019

How Nat Eliason Used Pain-Point SEO to Increase Sales 300% in 2 months

A couple months ago, Benji and I were having a conversation about SEO, content marketing, and turning it into ecommerce sales. I’d expressed some frustration that the organic traffic to one of our blogs, Cup & Leaf, wasn’t converting as well as I’d like it to. We’d done a good job building up our traffic, but it wasn’t turning into sales. Benji...

Mar 2019