Content marketing has become too trendy. Here’s what we plan to do about it.

Content marketing has become the new buzzword for marketers.

Lots of companies are spending a ton of MONEY on it, and lots of entrepreneurs are spending a lot of TIME on it.

But the hard truth is that few are getting serious results from content marketing.

The internet democratized content and allowed anyone who had something valuable to say to become a thought leader and reach thousands, if not millions of people.

However, the same medium that gave us access to so much great information and so many worldly opinions has now left us sifting through a lot of BS and garbage to find a few quality gems.

It’s gotten to the point where people who’ve built their entire brand through content marketing are starting to lose hope.

Maybe content marketing has become too mainstream that its competitive advantage has ceased to exist

— levels.io (@levelsio) November 6, 2015

Low quality content is killing content marketing. Stop regurgitating information and write something new, actionable and helpful. #rant

— William Harris (@wmharris101) November 16, 2015

The sad part is: I’m a content marketer, and I agree with both of them.

Most people are approaching content marketing with the wrong mindset.

Most people are putting out high level blog posts that provide little value and are wondering why they aren’t getting any traffic — or why their content isn’t amounting to monetary returns for their investment.

Content marketing isn’t just about making money.

It’s about providing value. It’s about sharing expertise and helping others.

If you’re going to be successful growing a blog, then you better be sharing a story, an opinion, or teaching someone how to do something that they don’t know.

People want to learn.

Writing about the ‘5 best meals you had for dinner last night’ or something to that effect just doesn’t cut it anymore.

So, how do you get ROI with content marketing?

Well, good question.

This is what we plan to show you with this blog.

But before we do that, let’s back up a couple of weeks to when I met my partner Devesh.

“WAIT. You’re doing this with Devesh?”

I met Devesh Khanal for the first time a couple weeks back at one of Sujan Patel’s GrowthChat dinners here in San Francisco.

Devesh is an expert in list building and CRO (conversion rate optimization), and helps a number of notable companies increase conversions.

We got to talking at dinner and the topic of conversation was if content marketing still works for businesses.

The table was split — half of the people thought content marketing still worked, and the other half shared the same sentiment as the people above — That ‘content marketing has gotten too saturated and that businesses should invest in other areas if they’re looking to grow.’

After having just built a blog that grew ThinkApps substantially — I knew that content marketing still provided a ton of ROI for businesses (if it was done right).

That’s when Devesh and I came up with the idea for this site.

The Goal: 40,000 unique visitors in 6 months, and a 5,000 person email list

We’re here to prove that if you provide value to your audience, you can grow an engaged community of loyal followers.

This is going to be a live case study of us growing a site from nothing to a site that helps over forty thousand people every month become better at content marketing (and we’re going to be completely transparent about what we’re doing and the ROI that we’re getting). Here’s our most recent update.

I’ll be writing mostly about content marketing/strategy and Devesh will be writing about list building, nurture email campaigns, and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The goal is that between the two of us — we’ll show you how to build an entire content marketing funnel from the ground up.

We’ll be sharing:

• How to develop a content strategy for various types of businesses
• How to promote posts to drive tons of THE RIGHT traffic
• How to convert visitors to e-mail subscribers, and much more…

We’ll also be sharing:

• All of our stats
• Our content promotion strategies
• Our failures and successes along the way

This isn’t just for the solopreneur, “make money online” folks. We’re going to break down how to do it for businesses of all types, and focus especially on SaaS businesses, startups, enterprises, e-commerce sites, service businesses, and product businesses.

Ready to learn?

Join us on our mission to 40,000 visitors and 5,000 email subscribers and learn how to grow an engaged audience.

Some content to get you excited:

Our Content Strategy Unveiled: Our Plan to Grow to 40,000 Uniques in 6 months

Blog Traffic and List Building Update: November 2015

Building a Content Team: Hiring In-house vs. Outsourcing vs. Hiring Freelancers

Want us to write an in depth case study or story about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

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