Marketing Metrics is a conversion optimization and analytics blog that aims at understanding and analyzing various aspects of digital behavior by using case studies, running experiments and interviewing experts.
In Jan, 2021 I wrote my first post for Marketing Metrics. 2 months later my email list hit 300 with over 2,000 monthly visitors to my site.
No ads. No connections. No existing audience.
The site grew because I learnt 2 things:
1. How to write content that solves a problem for the readers
2. How to push my content round the internet
Content marketing is very competitive especially when one is competing for attention from other marketers and entrepreneurs.
I realized over the years that although there are lots of content available in most areas of marketing, conversion optimization doesn't get the attention it deserves.
More importantly, the advice that one can get from most gurus on this topic won't work for solo entrepreneurs and small businesses because
1. They don't have the traffic that popular sites have to conduct successful experiments
2. They don't define frameworks that can be applied to a specific type of audience, product and trust
For that reason I have started publishing results by studying what's working for other small businesses in the form of case studies and started building databases using information from hundreds of websites.
Here are my key takeaways from running this blog:
1. I regularly carry out my own experiments and document them that helps me build a knowledge repository. It also helps me understand online user behavior and evolving trends better.
2. Not all platforms are same for promoting a content. Twitter, Reddit and Indie Hackers are places where long-form sharing works. Facebook and Slack groups are a different ball game. Attention spans are shorter. Self-promoters get lynched.
3. How other people share your content is just as important as how you share it. You don't want people sharing different things on different platforms. You want everyone sharing the same thing on the same platform. Isolated sharing gets ignored. Concentrated sharing compounds.
4. Here is an aspect of content marketing that product marketers should know about- creating value won't help without having a strategy for transferring and storing the value. Value often gets lost in the fast world of internet. In my earlier blogs I underestimated the importance of storing the value by building an email subscriber's list. Having a list motivates me to produce more content and creating more content helps in building the list- so it's a virtuous cycle.