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.