Content Marketing Today

Content Marketing Really Works! Our Brand New 1st Page Google Ranking Proves It!

Ok, there is an element of shameless self-promotion in this headline.  But, until you have proved to yourself that your own content marketing delivers tangible results, it still remains partly in the realm of theory rather than reality.

I was certainly a content marketing believer before, but now I’m a card-carrying evangelist.  This transformation happened on January 8 when I searched for “content marketing” on Google.

Like most of you, I have checked our Google search rankings periodically to see whether our target audience is likely to find us easily.  When ContentMarketingToday.com made its debut in October 2007, we had no track record.  Although we had practiced the tenets of content marketing within organizations, we had not written much about it.  We had never created a dedicated web presence to explore every aspect of content marketing.

So until January 8, I had always been slightly discouraged because ContentMarketingToday.com was hidden somewhere in the Google boondocks.  Even worse, there were some sites on the first page of results that seemed to have a relatively little to do with content marketing.  How could our website–that was all about content marketing– be buried six pages under?

Imagine my surprise to find Content Marketing Today listed as number five in the search for “content marketing.”  I should mention that our colleague and co-author, Joe Pulizzi, is right next to us on that first page with his Junta42 blog.  

This was so startling that I decided to try Yahoo.com where we were miraculously listed as number one and number two.  Then pressing my luck, I decided to check out MSN where we also ranked number one and number two.  I know this might seem lame but I felt a little bit like Sally Field when she won the Academy award. “Google likes us.  They really, really like us.” 

How did this happen?

The logical explanation is that we have worked hard to provide a critical mass of content about content marketing.  We send our eNewsletter each week but it reaches a relatively small audience.  We have an RSS feed with just a few dozen subscribers (although that’s up from just eight a few weeks ago).  We have made some modest efforts to link to and to get links from experts in related fields, but we have not had the time nor the energy to do as much of it as we should.  These have been helpful for sure, but because our efforts were modest, so were our results.

In fact, the vast majority of our marketing energies have been focused on researching and writing blog posts that we hoped would be helpful to marketers trying to understand how to put content marketing to work within their organizations–or for their clients.  Since the best advice about the succeeding with Google search results suggests that it’s all about content and about making that content easily searchable, our efforts in that direction are finally paying off.

One simple metric shows what a difference improved search rankings can make.  Our organic traffic from Google has increased by 350% from October to December. Where it provided just a trickle of visitors two months ago, Google is now our most consistent daily source of free traffic.

We have a long way to go.  The number of people searching for content marketing is still very small.  But it’s great to know that as that number increases, a “content marketing”  search will drive a lot more people looking for “content marketing” to ContentMarketingToday.com.

And, I’d like to go on record by suggesting that what you just read may be the most intensive use of the term “content marketing” in a relatively short sentence.  I guess that would be search engine marketing.

Finally, I’d like to thank all of our regular readers for helping to increase our popularity.  I’d also like to thank those of you who take time to comment.  I love the dialogue. And I’d especially like to thank our colleagues who have graciously linked to us from their established and respected blogs. 

The bottom line

If we can do it, you can do it. Our budget is small.  Our investment has been primarily in time and effort. Take a niche that you’re passionate about and do your best to grab thought leadership. It will pay off because, as I have learned: Google is paying attention.