How ActiveCampaign Grew Their Blog to 100K Monthly Readers
Whether you’re a business owner or a hobby blogger, knowing how to grow your online presence should be one of your top priorities. Blogs serve as an effective tool for growing your brand and securing leads, and there are numerous ways you can grow your blog to reach more readers. But how do you do that? Today, we’re going to look at ActiveCampaign, a cloud software program that provides software for email marketing, CRM, sales automation, and marketing automation.
In December 2017, ActiveCampaign’s blog only brought in 8,765 visitors from organic search. However, a year and a half later, 39,723 visitors reached their blog through organic search. By November 2019, ActiveCampaign pulled in a staggering 119,037 visitors from organic search. So, how did they pull off such a massive increase in monthly visitors? Two simple strategies: writing longer long posts and optimizing those blog posts for search engines.
Below, we’ll go over ActiveCampaign’s two strategies that helped them bring their blog to new heights, which you can use to help establish your brand.
Longer blog posts
As the content marketing adage goes, “content is king.” ActiveCampaign capitalized on this belief and put it into practice to help grow the number of monthly readers on their blog. The reason longer blog posts perform better than shorter blog posts is that it allows you to answer questions readers care about more in-depth.
When it comes to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, they want to see websites providing new and helpful information to their audience to make the internet a better place. Writing and publishing informative pieces are often rewarded by search engines by putting your content toward the top of the search engine results page (SERP). Traditionally, the higher up on a SERP you are, such as positions 1-3, the more likely a user will click on your link.
Writing longer blog posts allows you to answer very specific questions in-depth. But just because a blog post is long doesn’t mean it will rank well. Your blog posts need to contribute to the internet and be helpful to the reader. ActiveCampaign offers four pieces of advice that helped their longer blog posts increase the number of monthly readers:
1. Give people exactly the information they need
In today’s day and age, people want information fast. Most don’t have the time or want to spend their time searching for information. With that said, it’s important to give people exactly the information they need. Take Shareable for Hire’s post above on the Five Qualities of a Good Employee. Right away, readers see the top five qualities to look for: strong work ethic, team player, a positive can-do attitude, self-motivated, and integrity. If that’s all the information they need, readers can stop reading. Or, if they want more information about why each quality is important, they can scroll to find an in-depth explanation of the importance of each quality.
2. Choose a really specific question and answer it fully
Readers don’t want half of an answer. The last thing you want is for a user to come to your blog in search of an answer, only to leave your page because they couldn’t find what they were looking for. To prevent this, choose a very specific question and answer it fully.
In most cases, broad questions, such as “How to create a YouTube channel” will populate a variety of answers that might not be relevant to your readers. Instead, make your questions more specific, such as, “How to create a YouTube channel for a construction business.” Doing so will populate fewer results on the SERP, meaning you’ll have a greater chance of ranking in a higher position.
From there, go into detail and answer the question fully, such as how to create a YouTube account and providing tips on types of content a construction business should produce, such as DIY videos and tool reviews.
3. Use the voice of customer language (i.e., use the words your readers use)
Your audience wants to feel like you understand them. This means you need to use the words your readers use. Using big words and jargon can confuse your readers and actually make them view you as less intelligent. To captivate your readers and convert them as regular visitors to your blog, be clear, concise, and easy to understand. Doing so not only makes your readers happy, but also helps you find more specific questions to answer, identify relevant keywords for SEO, and give your readers what they need.
4. Instead of just giving advice, show people why the advice is right
You can give readers advice, but if they don’t know how to use it, there’s no point at all. When writing your blog posts, you want to surprise your audience with ideas that counter their assumptions. This will engage them and then provides you with the opportunity to provide detailed explanations with solid evidence that supports your position.
Optimized blog posts for search engines
Along with writing long and detailed blog posts, ActiveCampaign emphasizes the importance of optimizing posts for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of visitors to your site through organic search results. There are numerous SEO best practices that can help your blog posts rank well on SERPs, giving your website more authority over time. Some of the practices ActiveCampaign used in their posts include:
- Using WordPress plugins and SEO tools like Yoast SEO
- Using internal links between blog posts to increase crawlability
- Link building to boost domain authority
- Making posts mobile friendly
- Using keywords in H1s, H2s, and H3s, along with title tags
- Giving images alt text and optimizing image file names
- Using page speed insights to improve page speed
Using these tactics, you can make your blog posts and website more SEO-friendly, which can help attract more organic traffic and grow your brand.
Wrapping up
Getting a blog off the ground can be a challenging process, especially if you don’t know the best practices for creating a successful blog. ActiveCampaign serves as a tried-and-true example of how to grow the number of monthly readers who visit your blog. Their two main strategies, writing long blog posts and optimizing those blog posts for search engines, help make your website more visible to search engines, thus bringing in more organic traffic to your site. As you begin to get started on creating a blog, take time to make a plan for the types of content you can write and how to make that content successful.
Samantha Rupp
Samantha Rupp holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. She is the managing editor for 365 Business Tips as well as runs a personal blog, Mixed Bits Media. She lives in San Diego, California and enjoys spending time on the beach, reading up on current industry trends, and travelling.
