Week 9: Winding Down at Yazamo

As my SRP comes to an end, I'm continuing to run the blog and brainstorm various ways to drive traffic to it. So far we've been using our LeadQuizzes Facebook page as basically the only promotion channel, but the email campaign we're working on will help with that as well. I'm also using Reddit Marketing to promote a few articles which provide genuine value to the readers there.

We haven't been running any paid advertising to the blog at all, but we're already starting to see some sales from the blog quiz, which means at least some of the articles have been useful to readers and effective in getting them to sign up for our software service. Hopefully the LeadQuizzes blog will continue to build momentum and grow sales for Yazamo even after my SRP comes to an end!

Week 8: Blog Going Strong, Email Campaign Getting Started

This week at Yazamo, I continued with our process of creating, editing, and publishing articles on our LeadQuizzes blog. Things are running smoothly there with our three articles per week goal being met consistently. I've started using a program named Buffer to schedule out the times every week when our articles get promoted on our Facebook page (usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). This way, our readers know when to expect new content releases from us each week.

I've been writing a few emails for our automated email campaign as well, which will probably launch next month. I've analyzed some data on a few of our previous clients' case studies and put those together in a few emails. Overall, things are going well but a few SEO aspects still haven't kicked in like the long tail keywords and Google search rankings. This is normal, however, since SEO usually takes quite some time to implement (around 6 months to see good concrete results usually.)

Week 7: Creation-- Check, Promotion-- In Progress

After spending a few weeks finding a writer, training her to write for us, and finally settling into a cycle, I’ve become familiar with the content creation side of things and it’s running smoothly. Content promotion, however, is an area which I haven’t been able to explore yet.

The potential with effective content promotion is truly astounding -- after all, even if you’re producing the best content in the world, it won’t help your business if nobody’s consuming it. In fact, some digital marketers even recommend spending twice the amount of time on promotion as you do on creation.

My mentor wanted all the creases to be ironed out with the blog’s content creation before we moved to to content promotion, so we’re finally starting to brainstorm methods to get traffic to our blog and increase interaction.

The main method we are planning right now is leveraging the size of our preexisting email list, which includes many qualified leads and potential readers/clients. We’re working on setting up an automated email campaign which will run over approximately two months in an effort to expose our leads to blog content, case studies, and the LeadQuizzes brand in general. Hopefully this will help nurture leads and generate sales in the future, while bringing us more traffic as well.

Week 6: Establishing a Cycle

This week was steady, although rather uneventful in terms of new advances or new areas of work. I’m continuing to work with our writer to edit and publish three articles per week, and I’ve been focusing on improving SEO functionality within the blog. This means including only relevant images -- graphs and charts are great, but stock photos and other random images only serve to interrupt the flow of the article.

I’m also working on including long-tail keywords into the blog, which we can rank for more easily by going up against sparse competition. By focusing on phrases that are more unique and contain more words, we’ll come up higher on Google search when someone happens to search for one of those phrases -- this brings us more organic traffic. In contrast, if we try to compete on phrases which are concise and extremely popular, we’ll generate virtually zero organic traffic because we definitely won’t make it onto the first few pages on Google search. Those spots are already taken by the established companies with greater size and resources.

The LeadQuizzes team has also finished development of a new feature which allows users to embed quizzes directly into their web pages. This is proving to be highly useful to many of our clients, and I’ve started embedding our own quiz into all new articles.

Week 5: Consistency With Content Creation

This week, my mentor and I discussed our strategy for content creation at Yazamo, which revolves around our blog. Although we have just one writer, which could be a risk in case of an emergency with no backup options, she is doing well and our communication is improving.

I’m continuing to act as the editor for our publications, assigning our writer topics and providing feedback each time so she can improve in the future and align the style with our company culture. I’m also adding content in when necessary and finding relevant data charts and images to act as visual additions.

The editing time is steadily decreasing and our overall efficiency is climbing. I’ve asked the writer to submit four articles per week instead of three, which means one article goes into our backlog each week. We published three high quality articles this week, although I haven’t yet begun to promote them heavily (only through our Facebook page). It’s exciting to think about how the blog will help boost our SEO and bring us more traffic in the long run!

Week 4: Things Getting into Full Swing at Yazamo

This week at Yazamo, I continued working with our writers to review and edit their content, format everything in WordPress, and get it published to our website. The editing is currently taking more time on my part than expected since the writers are still pretty new.

One of them is producing solid content regularly (about 3 articles per week) which we can work with easily, but the other writer has not been responsive or efficient. We gave him a warning but the quality of his work still didn't live up to what we had expected when we hired him. We ended up releasing him (he was a contractor, not an employee) so we now have only one writer, but she's doing an excellent job of producing high quality articles on time every week.

I had a call with AZ Big Media this week, as well, where we discussed the angle the writer was going to take as well as additional details on the LeadQuizzes story. In other news, we managed to get featured on Entrepreneur as a top app for startups thanks to a contact we had who writes for them (unrelated to me).

Here's the article if you want to take a look: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272084

I'm also continuing my Facebook Ads course and learning a lot on that side of the business as well. A solid week overall, although I need to structure my schedule more firmly next week so I'm using all my time efficiently and publishing articles more regularly.

Week 3: First Publication on the Blog, Other Learning Opportunities

This week at Yazamo, I continued emailing and contacting media writers and journalists about my LeadQuizzes story. After quite a bit of work, I finally landed a piece with a smaller local publication which still has a good niche audience, AZ Big Media. 

I also set up a board on Trello where our team can enter all requested posts and article ideas, and our writers can claim each piece and begin working on them. My two writers began on their first official articles for Yazamo and submitted their work, which I will edit and provide feedback on.

I worked with Jeremy (one of Yazamo's co-founders) to establish a content calendar for the blog so we can publish regularly and spend the rest of our time optimizing the content and promoting it to drive more traffic, comments, and social shares. I also started on a Facebook Ads course to begin learning that aspect of the business, since we use the platform to run all our clients' ads to promote their quizzes. I am also planning to learn more about Google Analytics so I can use it efficiently to monitor our website's traffic and progress.

Week 2: Preparing for Blog Takeoff

This week at Yazamo, I focused on growing the writing team to prepare us to (re)launch the LeadQuizzes blog. Our goal is to publish five long (1500+ word) articles per week, and to create a backlog of content ready to be published if anything goes wrong or we stop producing articles down the road.

Because we were looking for writers who could technically write from anywhere in the world as long as the content was high-quality, we did not need to have people coming into the office for interviews or working with us locally.

We utilized a platform called Upwork, which connects businesses with freelancers around the globe, to look for potential hires. After writing up the job description and publishing the posting, I received around 20 applications within a couple days, of which I first conducted an initial screening to see who was qualified (I ruled out people who didn’t appear to have the required English skills or didn’t align with our goals for other reasons).

I then messaged the smaller pool of qualified applicants -- about a dozen -- about the final test in determining who would win the job: a writing assessment where we would assign a common topic to the applicants which was relevant to our online marketing area, just as they might have to write for our actual blog in the future.

We gave all the applicants the same amount of time, about three days, to complete the article and submit it for review. Not all the applicants even submitted any work, but out of the articles we received I evaluated two which stood out from the rest and we hired those two writers for the blog.

I also continued the PR work, sending out about 10 more targeted emails while following up with my 30 previously contacted journalists as well. I seemed to have trouble getting traction on the PR front, so next week I’ll be developing a new email template to test out-- perhaps a case study on how we impacted one of our clients.  

Week 1: The Big Goals of an Inbound Marketer

Hi, I'm Hari. I'm a proud inbound marketer.

Have you ever been spam emailed or cold-called by a marketer, trying to sell you his new company’s new product or sign you up for his company’s new service? Of course-- it’s a familiar experience for all of us (that’s why we have a junk email section and a “block caller” phone capability).  

But that form of traditional "outbound" marketing is getting outdated. It’s not very effective, and it gets on the nerves of the customer. The new form of marketing is known as inbound marketing-- that is, getting the customers to come to you willingly rather than getting in their faces with your new product. Inbound marketers help customers rather than annoy them. (Yazamo works in the field of digital inbound marketing.)

The primary purpose of my work is to drive traffic to our website and help increase our sales. The product which Yazamo currently markets and sells is LeadQuizzes, a software which we recently launched to help small to mid-sized businesses efficiently generate leads and boost sales. Our clients can come in and build their own quizzes, which are then marketed to the public via social media advertisements. Here’s what the software looks like on the inside.

During the first week of my project I worked with my supervisor to outline general goals for myself, which we broke down into three major categories:

1. Revamp the Yazamo/LeadQuizzes blog (SEO included)
2. Work on PR to increase our exposure and drive traffic to our website
3. Start guest blogging and promote our content

I started working with Yazamo about a year ago, so I already have an adequate understanding of how things work. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of each aspect of the company which helps us function day-to-day, however, I’m going through detailed training in a few core areas-- beginning with Facebook Ad Management.

I’ve started working toward all three of my goals in the past week, but the primary focus has been on the first two. We’ve been following Neil Patel’s blog challenge over the past few months, in which he aims to generate $100k in monthly revenue within the first year of starting a new blog from scratch. Neil’s challenge has been going for ten months now, and he’s very close to meeting his goal. Hopefully we’ll be able to see similar results with the Yazamo blog.

In order to generate blog traffic, two factors are key: consistency and optimization. This means posting as many times as possible, preferably 5-7 times per week. And this is no easy task when each article is targeted to be 1500+ words (that’s the optimal length for shareability and search rankings). If you don’t believe me, take a look at SerpIQ’s research-based chart below.

In order to stay on top of the consistency area, we may look to hire additional writers to help us out with the content creation process. I’m going to be the one managing, optimizing, promoting, and writing whenever possible for the blog. I’ll go into more detail on the SEO process in a later post.

On the PR side, I’m trying to get Yazamo and LeadQuizzes as much publicity as possible, and this role goes more into sales than marketing. I’ve started tracking down journalists and reporters, sending out emails pitching potential stories about our company. We’ll wait to see the results roll in, but I’m already learning a lot. For example, here’s a critical tip from Cameron Herald’s book Double Double: don’t contact editors. They’re usually the ones waiting to reject new stories each morning, whereas writers and producers are better targets.

I’m not going to start guest blogging for other business sites or promoting our content until I can fully launch the blog and get it rolling. In the meantime, I’ll continue with the PR work and start on the Facebook Ads course. The company blog will take some patience, however, as SEO and blogging usually only provide results in the long game.

Do you think I’ll be able to start bringing in traffic and generating sales for the company? What’s your impression of marketing as a whole? Let me know in the comment section below.  

Project Proposal

Statement of Purpose

I plan to research the extent to which content marketing can play a role in resulting sales. Which strategies work best? How can small businesses reach their ideal target markets? How low can the cost per lead drop when it comes to large scale, targeted B2C marketing?

Background

I have been working in the field of digital marketing for the past year or so. I have received my Inbound Marketing Certification from HubSpot, which verifies my understanding of core marketing concepts such as buyer persona, lead conversion funnels, and search-engine optimization (SEO) management. I have written marketing articles for our company blog and for other business sites.

Significance

A vast number of young businesses and entrepreneurs face difficulty generating traffic, leads, and sales during their early years. My research will examine the role digital marketing can play in resolving many of these issues quickly and efficiently.

Research Methodology

My research will primarily consist of direct observation and online research. My role at Yazamo will allow me to witness and take part in client interactions and to carry out real-world case studies on digital marketing and lead generation. I will analyze specific client goals as well as the overall reach of our marketing software. I will also keep track of lead conversion rates, cost per lead, and sales for both Yazamo and for our clients.

Anticipated Problems

One obstacle I may encounter is initial breakthrough as a writer for large business sites. Content creation and promotion is a primary method of lead generation, and plays an important role in ensuring marketing success. I have guaranteed roles as a Yazamo writer and likely opportunities to write for various more specific business sites in addition to the large ones. Another potential issue is identification of optimal marketing strategies for our product (LeadQuizzes). Due to the extremely young age of the product, it may take some trial-and-error before I am able to identify the top working marketing strategies and pursue them accordingly.