The Only Chart You Need to Know (If you’re into content marketing)

I’ve been meaning to share this one for a while - it’s from a brilliant slide deck on “Why Content Marketing Fails.”  The information may be 2 years old but it's well worth the 10 minutes it’ll take you to skim through it.

Here’s What The Chart Tells You

• Website created in April 2009
• For the first two years traffic never exceeded 100 visits a day.
• Five years in the site now averages over 100,000 visits a month

Here’s What The Chart Doesn’t Tell You

• 20 blog posts a month (mostly)
• Posts tend to be around 1,000 words in length
• Content is loosely based around the idea of Travel
• Writing is often hilarious

So What?

I know - you’re not in the travel business, you don’t have time to write a 1,000 word blog post every day and if you were funny you’d be in comedy but, stay with me here. 

There was no significant event in the life of the writer, no sudden advertising spend in mid 2011, so what was the reason behind the eventual increase in traffic?

It’s Not Just Consistency

If you look at the list of the website's most popular posts, not one of them came from the first two years.  I'd posit the reason things took off is that the writing got better.

If you're pumping out the same lame content across your digital footprint as everyone else, you're unlikely to see a similar growth curve.

If Gladwell's 10,000 hour principle only applies when practice is intentional, content strategy only works if you push yourself.

Are you pushing yourself?

Find yourself procrastinating and avoiding your work? Listen to this, it really helps you get things done

Image Credit: Why Content Marketing Fails by Rand Fishkin