No one ever gets paid $2 million to create a blog post, but Josh Steimle proved that you can definitely earn $2 million as a result of placing a blog post in the right channels.
In this session at Content Marketing Conference 2017, Steimle covered all of the critical points in building up your brand that go beyond simply writing a quality post and pitching it to prestige outlets.
Even if your piece is picked up by Forbes, TechCrunch, Mashable, and other websites with incredibly high traffic, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will translate into a positive impact on your bottom line.
What about the metrics associated with the post such as bounce rate, the time spent on the page, and the amount of shares across social networks?
Depth of Visit
Getting a lot of visitors to a blog post, whether it’s on your own site or another channel, is definitely better than getting no visitors at all.
Steimle delved into how far visitors had read his marketing agency’s posts on Forbes and other websites, and found that the $2 million blog post didn’t have an abnormally high amount of visitors compared to his other pieces.
However, it did get more people reading all the way to the end and a much larger amount of social shares.
By having genuinely helpful content that answers some burning questions for the audience but leaves enough unanswered, it gets the audience interested and wanting to share the post.
Sharing is the ultimate signal that you are doing something right! When a blog post gets lots of shares, the readers are doing the work for you which is what makes content marketing so effective.
Encouraging Topic Discussion
Leaving enough unsaid so that the readers want to contact you to discuss the topic further is also an effective tactic.
Steimle used analytics to trace his leads back to the Forbes piece (if they did not specify that the post at Forbes is what established their trust in his expertise) to determine who converted after reading it.
However, chances are that your own website is likely not getting enough traffic to pull this off. People trust major names like Forbes and utilizing channels like it is crucial to making your own “$2 million blog post”.
In addition to having posts listed on sites with very high traffic, Steimle pressed the importance of influencers. In addition to having followings that trust them, influencers also often have access to the key decision-makers at these high-traffic channels.
Establishing Trust with Influencers
Influencers can help develop your brand and positioning so that it establishes more trust with the audience and doesn’t read as advertising.
No one likes feeling like they’re being sold to, so in addition to the content itself being purely helpful instead of “sales-y”, having the validation of an influencer can elevate the content even more than the place it is being posted.
When people trust an influencer’s opinion and follow them, this also makes them more likely to share content and read it all the way through.
All of these aspects will contribute to a $2 million blog post of your own!