Content microsites have worked really well in my experience, especially for SEO. An example is https://www.atlassian.com/git.
Microsites are different from regular subdomains or subdirectories by being a closed environment. They have their own, unique layout, revolve around a single topic and are non-salesy, meaning at most you get email sign-ups but you're not pushy at all. They should be information hubs on your site.
All that gets you tons of organic traffic, brand exposure and returning visitors.
+1 for this, I turned an otherwise normal blog post into an 'open-source' microsite and it has outperformed all of our expectations - https://www.devmarketingguide.com/
Recording interviews with key stakeholders (or uploading older videos from user group events etc), having them automatically transcribed via online machine learning tools - and then giving them to our content editing team to reuse for blog posts, site updates, quotes etc.
Speeds up content marketing processes significantly.
At Heavybit, I use Rev.com for all of our podcast and video transcriptions - $1/minute and it's done by humans so it's incredibly accurate. We have some technical requirements for our interactive audio and video players that they can provide, but if I was strictly looking for usably accurate plain text transcriptions I would be using trint.com
Facebook private groups has been a good one for my company yogaclub.com.
First of all, you get way more exposure vs. Facebook pages. 60% visibility vs. 5%. Also, other people create the content for you. We have been growing the audiences leveraging our current follower based on Facebook, Instagram, Email, ect.
Reuse existing content (if you already have that), look at the content that is been performing stable over a period of time (xx visitors on a daily basis).
Usually this means that the content is already ranking for certain keywords or is still being shared on social media on a regular basis. If you are able to update the content with new information, remove broken links, update it with new information/tools that might have come up since you've published it then it will be a great thing to launch again and start re-sharing this.
This will usually lead to a spike in traffic again to these posts after which you'll hopefully gather more links, more social mentions which will boost the long-term performance of the content even more. Then put something in your todo list/calendar for a year from now and redo this all over again.
While working for a publisher on their audience development we started working on this more and more because it already provides you with the content, which saves you coming up with new ideas and executing on it and it immediately can provide you with a return on investment based on previous performance instead of having to convince other people.
This is definitely an effective, low-budget marketing strategy especially when you're sitting on a treasure trove of evergreen, highly performing content. Here are only a few ideas on how to repurpose your existing content:
HOW TO GUIDES
Turn existing insights articles into How Tos Guides/Videos
For videos that follow an interview/How To style, use shorter clips or quotes to form the basis of a Q&A/FAQ video;
Search for popular, relevant quora questions and turn them into guides/quotes
VIDEO/SLIDESHOW
Turn How To/Blog articles into an explainer
If got several "testimonial videos" from clients/partners, you can string together clips from the same industry to create a stronger case study.
Use clips from a promo video to showcase different awesome elements of your company culture or a tour/behind the scenes look
Turn Video transcripts into blog content (Ted already mentioned a couple of good software for this)
IMAGE/INFOGRAPHIC
Create Top X Tips from Interviews with partners and clients/customer
Extract Quotes/Inspirational Statements from Interviews and Publications
Events/Milestones/Product Features map showcasing important events
This one doesn't really count as repurposing, but one may search for relevant publications receiving guest contributions. You can easily cross-promote any of your upcoming articles.
To answer the question, "What is your best content growth hack?", I'll take a different approach than the usual "write amazing content" answer.
My growth hack and the one I've recommended to startups I work with, is using AdWords experiments on my content, before promoting it organically.
By testing and sampling content response on relevant queries using AdWords, you can get an immediate sample of the quality and engagement of your content pieces.
I'm a firm believer in data-driven creativity and not a big believer in magic bullet hacks. So my best content growth hack is simply to test, iterate and refine fast by putting paid dollars behind my content in test tubs.
If you wish to go beyond Search Engine Marketing, you can also run experiments on Facebook, using the Facebook ads experiments modules. But be aware that their experiment module has certain weaknesses.
Moreover, again, if you have data scientists working with you or have data science or advanced R programming skills, here is a good package you can use https://github.com/daroczig/fbRads
Oldie, but goodie. Segmenting current content subscribers by a factor like "most active, are customers" (depending on which type of content you're focusing on, I'm assuming you want more conversions to paid) and surveying/emailing to just ask -- what topic would they most like you to cover and where do they get information on X? Tip: How they word the topics is a great hint for actual titles, plus Google search is getting way more conversational, so they tend to fare better.
*Facebook Advertising - Audience Groups Optimization*
Target New Audiences based on keywords (competition) and interests
1. Go to "Audience Insights" (Power Editor) to learn more about your audience;
2. In the Interest Tab type a competitor’s name or search for relevant keywords. The estimated audience size should be > 1K Monthly Active Users
3. Adjust the new audience as you like including the region, age, gender.
3. Go to Page Likes to see what Topics they engage with;
4. You can use these topics as “interests” in future ad campaign or simply save this new audience
How to save a new audience?
1. Go to Audience (Under the Assets Tab)
2. Choose “Create Audience” and then select “Saved Audience”
3. Choose the location accordingly
4. Type the interests you found most relevant to your audience based on “Audience Insights”
5. Make sure you exclude the people who you liked your page
Tip! Alternatively, under the same tab “Audience” you can create a Custom Audience based on the people who visited your website. Depending on how wide/narrow you want your audience to be, you may create "look-alike audiences" with 1%, 3%, and 5% similarity.
Narrowing your audience you’ll be able to deliver a better marketing message
Create amazing content and post it where people can see. That's it. Nothing fancy about it. Post it where your readers, your niche, and 'your people' live. Actually using content to grow your product / website / presence requires you to actually use it.
For example, Poptin has run growth interviews for the past two months or so which helped marketers such as myself discover new companies which I have never heard of.
It's not my best but one I like is making sure to visit any ads I have running for clients on Facebook and invite all the people that engaged the ad to like the Facebook page. I feel like a lot of people forget to do this for their ads and popular posts.
Without a doubt, giving something valuable away for free. I don't know why but free makes people go nuts. Whether it's a free T-shirt that says "big mac" on it that was shot out of a cannon at a basketball game, or a free valuable tool that a SaaS gives away to draw in customers.
Kevin Indig
Content microsites have worked really well in my experience, especially for SEO. An example is https://www.atlassian.com/git.
Microsites are different from regular subdomains or subdirectories by being a closed environment. They have their own, unique layout, revolve around a single topic and are non-salesy, meaning at most you get email sign-ups but you're not pushy at all. They should be information hubs on your site.
All that gets you tons of organic traffic, brand exposure and returning visitors.
Ted Carstensen
+1 for this, I turned an otherwise normal blog post into an 'open-source' microsite and it has outperformed all of our expectations - https://www.devmarketingguide.com/
Olga Rabo
How cool! So you basically took a blog post and distilled it into a landing page!
Warren Eiserman
Recording interviews with key stakeholders (or uploading older videos from user group events etc), having them automatically transcribed via online machine learning tools - and then giving them to our content editing team to reuse for blog posts, site updates, quotes etc.
Speeds up content marketing processes significantly.
Jason Vedadi
What transcription tool(s) do you recommend for that? We do the same, but are manually transcribing now.
Ted Carstensen
At Heavybit, I use Rev.com for all of our podcast and video transcriptions - $1/minute and it's done by humans so it's incredibly accurate. We have some technical requirements for our interactive audio and video players that they can provide, but if I was strictly looking for usably accurate plain text transcriptions I would be using trint.com
Nicholas Nomann
Facebook private groups has been a good one for my company yogaclub.com.
First of all, you get way more exposure vs. Facebook pages. 60% visibility vs. 5%. Also, other people create the content for you. We have been growing the audiences leveraging our current follower based on Facebook, Instagram, Email, ect.
max gdn
Hi,
I'm not familiar with this, can you please explain what are private groups and how does it work?
Alexandre Dana
Awesome ! I have the same strategy, and it is working great
Would you mind sharing with me the URL of your private group ? Is it reserved to clients ?
Martijn Scheijbeler
Reuse existing content (if you already have that), look at the content that is been performing stable over a period of time (xx visitors on a daily basis).
Usually this means that the content is already ranking for certain keywords or is still being shared on social media on a regular basis. If you are able to update the content with new information, remove broken links, update it with new information/tools that might have come up since you've published it then it will be a great thing to launch again and start re-sharing this.
This will usually lead to a spike in traffic again to these posts after which you'll hopefully gather more links, more social mentions which will boost the long-term performance of the content even more. Then put something in your todo list/calendar for a year from now and redo this all over again.
While working for a publisher on their audience development we started working on this more and more because it already provides you with the content, which saves you coming up with new ideas and executing on it and it immediately can provide you with a return on investment based on previous performance instead of having to convince other people.
Diane Florescu
This is definitely an effective, low-budget marketing strategy especially when you're sitting on a treasure trove of evergreen, highly performing content. Here are only a few ideas on how to repurpose your existing content:
HOW TO GUIDES
Turn existing insights articles into How Tos Guides/Videos
For videos that follow an interview/How To style, use shorter clips or quotes to form the basis of a Q&A/FAQ video;
Search for popular, relevant quora questions and turn them into guides/quotes
VIDEO/SLIDESHOW
Turn How To/Blog articles into an explainer
If got several "testimonial videos" from clients/partners, you can string together clips from the same industry to create a stronger case study.
Use clips from a promo video to showcase different awesome elements of your company culture or a tour/behind the scenes look
Turn Video transcripts into blog content (Ted already mentioned a couple of good software for this)
IMAGE/INFOGRAPHIC
Create Top X Tips from Interviews with partners and clients/customer
Extract Quotes/Inspirational Statements from Interviews and Publications
Events/Milestones/Product Features map showcasing important events
This one doesn't really count as repurposing, but one may search for relevant publications receiving guest contributions. You can easily cross-promote any of your upcoming articles.
Maxx Plank
To answer the question, "What is your best content growth hack?", I'll take a different approach than the usual "write amazing content" answer.
My growth hack and the one I've recommended to startups I work with, is using AdWords experiments on my content, before promoting it organically.
By testing and sampling content response on relevant queries using AdWords, you can get an immediate sample of the quality and engagement of your content pieces.
The simple route is using the actual AdWords Experiments modules https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6261395?co=ADWORDS.IsAWNCustomer%3Dfalse&hl=en
Or if you have the privilege of working with data scientists who know R and AdWords, you can use the RAdWords Plus package http://vilaingeek.com/radwords-plus-nouveau-package-r-adwords/
I'm a firm believer in data-driven creativity and not a big believer in magic bullet hacks. So my best content growth hack is simply to test, iterate and refine fast by putting paid dollars behind my content in test tubs.
If you wish to go beyond Search Engine Marketing, you can also run experiments on Facebook, using the Facebook ads experiments modules. But be aware that their experiment module has certain weaknesses.
Moreover, again, if you have data scientists working with you or have data science or advanced R programming skills, here is a good package you can use https://github.com/daroczig/fbRads
Hope this is helpful..
Hassan Raza
Hi Alouschka, Our latest successful hack has been to use T-Rex as "Cheezasaurus" mascot for Round House Pizza in Islamabad. Check out this video. https://www.facebook.com/Roundhousepizzapk/videos/1427230527330463/
Ashley Greene
Oldie, but goodie. Segmenting current content subscribers by a factor like "most active, are customers" (depending on which type of content you're focusing on, I'm assuming you want more conversions to paid) and surveying/emailing to just ask -- what topic would they most like you to cover and where do they get information on X? Tip: How they word the topics is a great hint for actual titles, plus Google search is getting way more conversational, so they tend to fare better.
pierre le poulain
Wow, sounds great ! I gonna try it really soon.
Gary-Yau Chan
Ask them to subscribe via chat instead of email
chat has upwards of 60% open rate vs. email open rate 10%-15% maybe (?)
Nicholas Nomann
Chat is good, but the unsubscribe is also really high.
Nitin Upparpelli
Engaging users in facebook group.. which is niche to your product or services
Diane Florescu
*Facebook Advertising - Audience Groups Optimization*
Target New Audiences based on keywords (competition) and interests
1. Go to "Audience Insights" (Power Editor) to learn more about your audience;
2. In the Interest Tab type a competitor’s name or search for relevant keywords. The estimated audience size should be > 1K Monthly Active Users
3. Adjust the new audience as you like including the region, age, gender.
3. Go to Page Likes to see what Topics they engage with;
4. You can use these topics as “interests” in future ad campaign or simply save this new audience
How to save a new audience?
1. Go to Audience (Under the Assets Tab)
2. Choose “Create Audience” and then select “Saved Audience”
3. Choose the location accordingly
4. Type the interests you found most relevant to your audience based on “Audience Insights”
5. Make sure you exclude the people who you liked your page
Tip! Alternatively, under the same tab “Audience” you can create a Custom Audience based on the people who visited your website. Depending on how wide/narrow you want your audience to be, you may create "look-alike audiences" with 1%, 3%, and 5% similarity.
Narrowing your audience you’ll be able to deliver a better marketing message
Kira Leigh
Create amazing content and post it where people can see. That's it. Nothing fancy about it. Post it where your readers, your niche, and 'your people' live. Actually using content to grow your product / website / presence requires you to actually use it.
Execute it. Employ it. Measure it.
David Gordillo
The question remains about the "where people can see". It's not only that they can see it, they need to pay attention to it...
Cassie Lance
Case studies.
Users love case studies.
For example, Poptin has run growth interviews for the past two months or so which helped marketers such as myself discover new companies which I have never heard of.
Robert McMillin
It's not my best but one I like is making sure to visit any ads I have running for clients on Facebook and invite all the people that engaged the ad to like the Facebook page. I feel like a lot of people forget to do this for their ads and popular posts.
Marvin Russell
Without a doubt, giving something valuable away for free. I don't know why but free makes people go nuts. Whether it's a free T-shirt that says "big mac" on it that was shot out of a cannon at a basketball game, or a free valuable tool that a SaaS gives away to draw in customers.