Last Thursday, September 10th, 97th Floor’s CEO Chris Bennett spoke at the SearchLove Conference in San Diego. SearchLove SD is an especially great conference for those who are really interested in learning about good tactics. This was the fourth SearchLove conference at which Chris has spoken. In the past, he has also given presentations at SearchLove conferences in Boston, London, and New Orleans.
Chris was a bit hesitant to speak on the topic he presented because the tactics were not earth shattering, but that was the point he wanted to make. His presentation, “How to Never Lose at Content Strategy,” emphasized that you don’t have to chase the newest tactics to succeed in content marketing. In fact, sometimes by just working a little harder and longer during the preparation stages, you can gather insights and data that will dramatically increase your chances for success. Particularly, he recommended not skimping when it comes to keyword research—SEO 101.
In the end, focusing on results is what really matters. Chris gave several examples of different campaigns that reaffirm this, including some that did not end up going viral and garnered very few social media shares, but which still significantly improved organic traffic to the site—which directly translated to revenue. Meanwhile, another campaign seemingly had all the right ingredients for success but only resulted in a brief spike in traffic. This focus on results shows through not only in 97th Floor’s work for its clients, but also in the company’s culture. It trickled down to the company’s employees when 97th Floor became a Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE.
While each of these concepts seems very intuitive, it proved to be exactly what the audience needed to hear. Overall, the presentation was very well received.
SEO 101: Remember the keywords! Do real keyword research, not 5 minutes, 3 hours. @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Julien Brandt (@Julienbrandt) September 11, 2015
Ohh boy! >> "Add 3 hours to the 5 mins of keyword research you usually do" - @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Megan Cynaumon (@MeganCynaumon) September 11, 2015
The 90s called: they want their keyword research back. @chrisbennett #searchlove
— Marli Mesibov (@marsinthestars) September 11, 2015
Sometimes, the best presentations remind you to just do basics #notshiny #searchlove @chrisbennett
— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) September 11, 2015
Not only that, Chris’s presentation was featured as one of the top decks on SlideShare a few days later.
The final takeaway is that no matter your resources, everyone can work a little harder and focus more on the details. This is exciting, because it means that anyone can can compete when it comes to content.
View the full deck from Chris’s presentation below:
O.K. before you keep reading I have to apologize, I hate case studies and examples of sites that don't show the sites involved. One of the things that I try to do to set us apart from a lot of blogs is to give specific ideas on how to do things, but in the case study below I can't. We are growing and have a lot of clientele that just won't let us share their info, or even mention them as a client. That is fine, I guess if I was a 100 million a year plus company with very intelligent competitors I wouldn't want our service providers giving away our secrets either.
With that said this will still be really cool to share and I will show you (doctored) screen shots from their analytics.
We helped a friend/client launch a blog in October and it has been some of the most successful blog marketing we have done to date in the realms of blog optimization and social media saturation to a brand new domain and website.
The blog is general and covers a lot of different topics mostly internet and advertising related, which helps. If you have a niche blog you can still have tremendous success in blog promotion, especially in terms of links and subscribers which is the most import aspect of a blogs success in my opinion.
The Stats: The blog is exactly 39 days old it has a total of 21 pages, it has received over 165,000 uniques, over 3,000 links and over 1,117 subscribers. The subscribers and the amount of branding we have seen (see below) are what we are most exited about.
We have had campaigns that generate more traffic and links then this blog (I am working on another case study where I will actually show you an example of an article that had over 150k visits in one day, and has had over 3k links just to the article), but what is different about this site is the vast amount of subscribers and the consistent traffic. Barely any of this traffic is from Digg, the blog is receiving thousands of visitors a day on a consistent basis. So it has been a combined effort on behalf of the posts instead of one home run submitted to Digg with one traffic spike and virtually no traffic a week later. The lowest day so far as been over 1,600 visitors and the highest has been 14,922 with several days over 10k.
Graph screen shot of the blogs entire life so far: 
Page Views to some of the URL's: 
Traffic Sources: (what is best about this is Direct Traffic to the domain, is over 14% which is over 24,000 visitors. Remember this blog is only 39 days, that is some sweet branding) 
The majority of the initial traffic came from StumbleUpon, I think that is why the subscriber rate has been so good. We also get a tremendous amount of traffic from other hub sites picking up our stories and linking to them.
How to do it: I would credit a handful of things the the sites success.
1.) The site owner has fallen in love with marketing and has done a great job with generating outstanding content. He has engulfed himself in Social Media and in his competing blogs and really understands how to generate good content for his audience.
2.) We mapped out and understood our audience prior to launch. We actually had a good amount of posts ready before launch so that we wouldn't lose steam. After the first few pages being submitted to social sites we let the sites subscribers and community promote the rest of our content as it was created.
3.) The Domain is easy to remember, easy to spell and all that. By watching the direct traffic to the homepage and branded search terms in Google we are really seeing that a good domain can go a long way.
Again I apologize for not being able to give away more. I'm working on about 3 posts that all give away the farm with specific examples. Also remember this site/company did not exist before the last week in October, there wasn't a huge brand name to piggy back off of or any prior marketing or advertising to build off of. This was brand new, raw straight out of the gates marketing.
