Content marketing case studies you can actually use.: Recent Episodes
Glen Allsopp / ViperChill
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January 31st, 2009 was a day I will never forget. At just 20 years old it would be the last time I (hopefully) ever had to call someone “boss”. I had just quit my job in South Africa and moved back home to Newcastle, England. While I love England, having the freedom to go anywhere in the world meant that I didn’t want to stay there too long. In South Africa I had made friends with someone called Dirk who was also building websites, and told him I planned to move to Amsterdam in a few months.
Normally I wouldn’t share great ideas on a Friday as less people are reading this site closer to the weekend, but I’ll be honest: I absolutely love this idea. The concept is simple: You create some kind of calculator or slideshow which lets people know how much they can expect to pay for something relevant to your niche.
Most of the content ideas I share on detailed are text-based opportunities that anyone can follow. Today’s opportunity will require some more technical skills, or the hiring of a programmer who can help you put something together. That said, I can’t imagine anything you need to build costing more than $100 at a place like Upwork, so it’s not the most out-of-reach angle you could replicate.
The thing that makes hosting awards so lucrative is that those who are nominated for the awards (and win them) typically share their success with their own audience.
I've just went live with my longest ever blog post, and I would really love your feedback for future updates.
I’ve recently noticed a trend of people making a certain ‘claim’ in headlines, and having that result in their work being shared thousands of times. Let me give an example to help you see why I think it’s working so well.
If you were tasked with growing traffic and links to a personal finance blog, if I told you that writing about lightbulbs would get you noticed, you would think I’m crazy. But that’s exactly what one finance blog did to get people talking.
Right now my list of content marketing case studies to talk about on Detailed contains 188 rows. I couldn’t recall most items on the list without looking, but there’s one which always stood out, and I’m not really sure why.
It’s engrained in us as humans to want to know the best solutions or the best tips for a particular problem, or even the best people at a particular sport. We care about what’s really good. But we also care about what’s really bad.
While free can often be mistakenly seen as ‘low value’, there are many benefits to giving something away. Not only does valuable, free content get shared, but you can use it to establish your authority in a niche, funnel people towards your premium offerings and use it to entice people to join your email list. That is exactly what Fairpixels.co have done with their side-project, Logodust.
Usually the best performing content on a site is a mix of blog posts, videos, and interactive articles. One site I recently came across, A Real Me, offers just one type of content: Quizzes. They have a quiz on every topic you can imagine.
After learning how giving away free content on Amazon helped one writer attract 15,000 new email subscribers in just six months, I need to rethink my marketing strategy. Nick Stephenson helps authors get their first 10,000 readers, and decided to write some mammoth PDF’s to go into detail on the topic.
What if you could turn a hashtag into a movement, build awareness for a great cause and pick up links to help your search engine rankings. That’s exactly what Reedsy did recently when they built a side-project around the hashtag #IWriteBecause.
What’s the most common thing you see on websites these days? A logo? A navigation bar? A contact page? OK…the second most common thing you see on a website these days? Some kind of opt-in form and usually a giveaway to go along with it.
If you’re going to start a serious online business, it’s usually advised to pick up a .com domain or something country specific, like .co.uk for the UK. While there was a time many popular sites were hosted on Blogspot or WordPress – using [name].blogspot.com or [name].wordpress.com – the trend died out many years ago.
If you run a newsletter, especially a large one, you might have experienced your list slowly degrading over time, with more and more people not finding your emails as relevant as they did before. It’s likely not your fault – people sign up for things and just aren’t interested in them not long later – but there is something you can do it about it.