Scaling a Blog: How I Grew Blog Traffic from 0-35,000 Monthly Uniques in 6 Months

How do you grow a blog with limited resources? That was the challenge I had when joining the company ThinkApps as the first marketing hire and 4th full-time employee.

ThinkApps is a software development company, and at the time, I knew nothing about software development. After doing some research on the industry, I realized that there wasn’t anyone writing really great content about software development. I set out to create a blog that served as an acquisition channel for the company.

The strategy: write better and more in-depth content than anyone else in the space.

This fireside chat that I did at Google Launchpad with Josh Fechter, goes into the detail about how I scaled a team of writers to create content on a topic I knew nothing about, how we got our first 20,000 views in one week, and how we doubled down on content marketing to grow to 35,000 monthly unique readers.

It also goes into detail about how we approached conversion on our blog to convert readers into 5 and 6- figure contracts directly off of the blog.

Sections in the video:
00:00 – Meet Benji
00:55 – How Benji got started in marketing and content marketing
04:58 – The difference between marketing for startups and large companies
06:58 – Why user research is so important in content marketing
11:44 – What would you suggest to a content marketer that is making the argument to invest more in content marketing?
16:31 – Which is most important SEO or Content?
20:05 – How to outsource your content creation to a team of freelance writers
27:50 – Great startup resources
29:52 – What is your definition of EPIC content?
35:02 – The story: From 0 to 35K
50:28 – Finding great content stories
53:28 – Backlink optimization
56:28 – You MUST create good content
59:23 – Measuring conversions
01:12:02 – When to use tools/ which to use for conversion
01:17:02 – Finding writers
01:19:22 – How to find Benji’s resources?
01:20:54 – How to contact Benji

Here’s the video of the talk: