🏴☠️ ⚡️ Doubling our Blog Content Velocity and Social Volume to Identify Impact to Website Traffic (OKR Teardown)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
The Objective and Key Results
Select Commentary on Key Results (prerequisites, failures, etc.)
🛠️ OKR TEARDOWN
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THE OBJECTIVE & KEY RESULTS
As a point of departure, I’ve included the full OKR below to set the foundation for a teardown of our approach thus far…
OBJECTIVE: 2x increase in blog content and social post volume to uncover the impact on new site visitors
KEY RESULTS:
Create a backlog of 50x SEO-optimized blog titles
Create long-form blog posts (~1.2k words) using the titles created above
Establish an independent / extension brand for the current blog (name, header image)
Establish newsletter and subscriber sign-up mechanism to capture and profile / segment subscribers
Identify 4x compelling users for a spotlight feature and generate a recap post with video and text
Increase social volume to daily posts on Facebook and Instagram
Analyze results to uncover the correlation between content / social volume and new visitor traffic
SELECT COMMENTARY ON KEY RESULTS
Create a backlog of 50x SEO-optimized blog titles
First, a few bits of context to mention. Our blog is established (~100 posts), with all titles and content underpinned by ~4x priority search terms. Informing these priority search terms can be as simple as putting yourself in a user’s shoes and searching on Google to see who and what comes up. There will no doubt be competition for the most straightforward and basic search terms, so you’re job is to find ‘long tail’ search terms that include a decent amount of traffic (i.e., 100+ searches a month). If you can own a collection of long-tail keywords, it adds up to interesting traffic (1000+ searches / month), and it’s a more efficient approach than trying to compete head-on for the most common search terms. Ahrefs / similiar is your best friend for this foundational work.
These ~4x long-tail search terms are the basis of your SEO-optimized blog strategy (put simply: you are writing content to capture traffic from humans searching for these terms), though you’ll notice the content gets repetitive quickly, so utilize chatGPT / similar to find interesting angles on these topics by blending in trends, different perspectives, etc.
Establish an independent / extension brand for the current blog (name, header image)
High-value, unbiased content (aka not ruthlessly promoting your product) is your absolute best bet for building an audience. Many argue you should build an audience before you even have a product to sell. This audience can help inform the product direction, and it allows you to VERY quickly light up distribution once the product is ready to go to market (think: a few emails to make your audience aware of the product launch).
The question then is how do we build unbiased and authentic audiences to ultimately point them at our SaaS products?
Well, you can always buy an audience: Outreach Acquires Sales Hacker; Demonstrates Commitment To Fostering Global B2B Sales Community
For us, we have too much momentum on the SEO / organic search front (i.e., domain authority) to launch a totally new and standalone blog. As such, we plan to rebrand our blog to distance it from our SaaS product such that it can be a more trusted resource.
Establish newsletter and subscriber sign-up mechanism to capture and profile / segment subscribers
Blogs and Content Management Systems (CMS) don’t always provide functionality for email newsletters, so do your homework here. Furthermore, there’s some pretty slick tooling out there that may justify using a point solution for this in parallel with your blog / CMS. For example, some newsletter tools will grab the 4x highest performing posts and pull them into a newsletter on a weekly basis to accelerate execution and improve quality. This is worth a look…
Identify 4x compelling users for a spotlight feature and generate a recap post with video and text
The most valuable vantage point is that of your users so we try to blend a steady stream of this content into the bigger picture. We’ve written a lot about our point of view on the untapped potential for user-generated content (UGC) in B2B SaaS. This is that.
Increase social volume to daily posts on Facebook and Instagram
Your blog content should serve as a honey pot of long-form, which you can draw from, repurpose, and distribute via short-form posts on whatever social platforms are the most relevant for your users. Simply put, the blog feeds the social beast. Furthermore, the performance of short-form content helps you identify what to double down on for new long-form content. It’s a beautiful, reinforcing feedback loop.
Analyze results to uncover the correlation between content / social volume and new visitor traffic
Ideally, this exercise will prove that our content and social game is somewhat coin-operated. Meaning, the more we increase content velocity and social volume, the more website traffic we see.
Time will tell, and we’ll, of course, keep you posted…For the love of the game ;)