It’s Not About Creating More Content

The following is from Digital CoLab partner, Colin of Time to Get Awesome. There is a special at the end, so don’t miss it!

Three years ago I found myself working daily on a website I had started with a friend. It made some money, but I knew it could be doing a whole lot better. We had just paid thousands for a professional re-design, modeling it after one of our favorite professional blogger’s website, and we knew we had the best content on our topic on the internet. So I continued blogging each week, hoping that if I just kept creating content, eventually the website would skyrocket to success. And nothing happened.

When It’s Not About Creating More Content

Finally, out of desperation I begged a friend, who happened to be president of an internet marketing firm, to look at it. He took 30 seconds looking at the homepage and what he said shocked me: “I don’t know what you want me to do when I look at your website. You don’t have a traffic problem, but more of a conversion problem.” It turns out our sexy, newly re-design site looked great, but was actually less effective at walking our audience through our content and turning them into customers than our ugly, old design. Once he unlocked that secret, it changed everything for me.

Since then, I’ve spent the last 3 years becoming an expert in conversion, SEO, and content strategy. As a result, we have seen conversion increase by 300%, traffic by 500%, and the business has gone from bringing in only a couple hundred dollars a month into a healthy 6-figure a year website. More importantly, in the process, some friends and I have been able to use our expertise to help other professional bloggers and internet business owners grow and improve their websites through effective content marketing.

Finding Wins by Solving The Right Problem

It turns out this problem was not unique to my website. While many bloggers are experts at their content, being marketing experts is a whole other story. It is not unrealistic to find that someone can make twice as much from their website from their existing content. For strong writers, is easy to think the solution is more blog posts and the SEO around those posts, while there are often better ways to grow revenue. The secret is knowing what problems to look for, how your visitors are engaging with your current content, and creating a content strategy and website experience that solves those problems.

We have helped websites nearly double in revenue by focusing on improving a few of their existing blog posts. We’ve discovered that some websites had been hit by a Google penalty, but they were unaware that small changes to the layout were costing tons of traffic and revenue. Other websites suffer from a high bounce rate and low return visitor rate. Those problems can effectively be solved by implementing a content campaign that gets visitors coming back and appropriate calls-to-action to let readers know where to go next. When you know what areas of weakness to look for, as well as how to solve them, small improvements can have huge payoffs.

Bringing Clarity to Your Blogging Efforts

As much as my 3 year old wants to wear a dress and no shoes in the rain, my wife and I make sure our kids are properly dressed for the weather before going outside to play. In the same way, as internet business owners, we want to make sure our content is going out with the highest chance of success as possible. By auditing a website’s traffic, we are able to discover what type of content is most effective with their audience and how to best optimize it for search, engagement, and return engagement. This gives the content creator more clarity and effectiveness as they move forward in their efforts.

If you’d like to unlock some ways that you can increase revenue on your website, we would love to help you solve that problem through a content audit. For the month of September, we are offering a deal exclusively through DigitalColab. The first 10 people who sign up for a content audit will receive $250 off the Digital CoLab price!

To read more about the content audit process and how to get started through DigitalColab, visit the Content Audit services page to learn what is included.