5 Entrepreneurs Who Built Their Brands with Content Marketing. Peep launched his blog in 2011 and had some early success with posts that went viral, including the first month when 50,000 visits rolled in. Not only does Neil regularly produce content for each of those channels, but he also consistently posts on NeilPatel.com. Above, I mentioned how Peep focuses on producing the best quality content. As of 2015, the sites were seeing more than 700,000 monthly visitors. Most impressively, Dan was able to grow his business from nothing to more than $1 million AUD in just two years, and he only spent about $180 on advertising during that time. She often shared content beyond the blog via Instagram, and her fans later helped design the line of products she launched in 2014. For Emily, content marketing wasn’t just a one-way channel for generating traffic to her site. Today, Emily continues to rely on the blog audience, as well as their social channels to drive engagement and solicit feedback for new products to ensure that customers always get what they want. As the stream of clients grew, Joy was able to transition from a part-time freelancer to running a full-time business.
with customers within the past couple of years.
Go back a few decades and the most effective way to reach your
audience was print, TV, and radio – the big three traditional
marketing channels. All a brand needed to stand out back then was a
massive budget, which only the larger incumbent businesses had at
the time.
Today, the
lead-generating power of those traditional channels is rapidly
diminishing. The most cost-effective channel that offers great
returns is now online content marketing.
The popularity of content marketing shows no sign of slowing
down because of the sheer volume of leads this channel generates
while minimizing costs. In fact, it costs
up to 40% less than paid marketing and produces
3x as many leads. And unlike paid marketing channels (social,
search, banners), where the ads disappear when the budget runs out,
content stays online until you pull it down.
That means the return continues to grow indefinitely.
There’s no shortage of major brands who are just killing it with
content marketing, ranging from comprehensive written content (like
Shopify’s blog or
HubSpot’s massive marketing
resource library) to emotionally impactful videos (like the
Olympics promotions from Under Armour and
P&G).
Content marketing isn’t exclusive to major brands, either.
More than 85% of B2B marketers employ content marketing as part
of their strategies, and
76% of marketers plan to produce more content over the next
year.
Startup founders and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking note
of this low-cost, high-return method for growing their brands and
executing successful launches. In this article, I’ll cover five
entrepreneurs who managed to build their empires primarily with
content marketing.
1. Peep Laja
Peep is the founder of ConversionXL, a blog that focuses on
conversion optimization and is largely considered to be one of the
best resources in its market. He also recently launched the
ConversionXL Institute to offer training and informational
resources for those who don’t have the budget or the traffic needed
for traditional optimization testing.
Peep launched his blog in 2011 and had some early success with
posts that went viral, including the first month when 50,000 visits
rolled in. The months that followed were fairly consistent,
which is a spectacular feat for a new blog.
By the end of the first year, Peep was starting to reach the
100k visitors per month mark.
Although there were already thousands of marketing blogs
crowding the online space, Peep knew he could stand out if he
specialized. By analyzing data and researching other blogs, he
found a gap that wasn’t yet fully addressed with quality content.
Specifically, he created a formula to produce evidence-based,
data-driven marketing advice centered around conversion
optimization.
He also optimized his posts for traffic based on the types of
content that racked up the most shares:
- Long posts between 1,800 and 3,000 words
- Posts with highly relevant images
- Evidence-heavy content in which every claim was backed up with
data – either with examples or links to credible research
The surges of traffic came from smart promotion and
distribution. At the time, there were fewer social channels
available than we have today, so Peep
had a consistent list he followed to promote content:
- Direct contact with companies mentioned in the content, which
resulted in those companies also sharing the content on social
media - Simplified, concise emails and tweets promoting the post
- The use of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to share
content - Content submissions to Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Hacker
News - Promoting content with the help of influencers (like Tim
Ferriss) - Writing guest posts for other sites to generate referral
traffic
A key part of Peep’s success was not focusing on quantity of
content. In his first year, he averaged…
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