Looking for words that work? With a number of fantastic resources on how to create amazing content, Copyblogger is the place for you. Looking for ways to improve your own marketing strategy? With 5 lessons we learned from Copyblogger’s own strategy, this article is the place for you.
Copyblogger is one of the most influential content marketing blogs in the world. Founded in 2006 by Brian Clark, it has passed a long way from a high-quality content resource for wannabe bloggers to one of the most successful companies in the field of content marketing.
The About section on their own website clearly states their mission: “Copyblogger has been teaching people how to create killer online content. Not bland corporate crap created to fill up a company webpage. Valuable information that attracts attention, drives traffic, and builds your business.”
Lesson #1 – A 3-Step Method to a Profitable Blog
The entire marketing strategy behind Brian Clark’s huge success with Copyblogger could be broken down into 3 steps:
Step 1 – Consistently publish informative and useful content until you create comprehensive resources that may be referred to as cornerstone content. Brian Clark did this by publishing some of his epic pieces of content such as Copywriting 101, Blog Triggers, Magnetic Headlines, and a report titled Viral Copy.
Step 2 – Give away compelling content that addresses some of your audience’s issues (e.g. ebooks, guides, microsites, case studies, and so on). Content this valuable is supposed to cost money. But Clark gave it away completely free. This helped him earn credibility and gain a huge audience of loyal readers.
Step 3 – Finally, offer valuable products or services that provide additional value to your audience and simply ask them to buy it. It was enough. Why? Well, the years-worth of high-quality content he gave away for free helped thousands of bloggers worldwide. So, the paid stuff had to be even better, right? Or paying for the new stuff could be just a small way of showing appreciation for all of his previous work.
Believe it or not, it’s as simple as that. And it worked for Copyblogger like a charm.
Lesson #2 – Put Your Audience First
When Brian Clark first started out with the Copyblogger website in 2006, he didn’t really have a product to sell. He didn’t even have an idea for a product to sell. His one and only objective was to build an audience around Copyblogger.
In an interview with Matt Hunckler, Clark said: “I didn’t really plan out the business. I built the audience at Copyblogger with the faith and understanding that I would identify problems and desires they have, and then I’d figure out what to make in order to satisfy those problems and desires.”
From the very beginnings, Clark attracted the audience by serving them with top-notch, informative content. By doing so, he gradually got an even deeper understanding of the problems his audience had with content creation. So, the next logical step was to offer them products that could help solve those problems. Both his software and his content were adapting and evolving in accordance with his customers’ changing needs:
“I somehow fell into this adaptive, iterative content development process. I didn’t plan too far in the future. I would always see what happens, do more of the good stuff, and do less of the bad stuff.”
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During all those years of success, one thing has never changed – Clark’s obsession with the need to put the audience first.
“It can be tempting to make the quick buck, but I was never going to do that, and I think that’s why we’ve never had a product fail. It’s always about the audience first, and we ended up getting rewarded for prioritizing correctly,” Clark said.
Lesson #3 – Offer Premium Content in Exchange for Leads
In May 2013, Copyblogger decided they have to do something to get more of their 500,000 unique monthly visitors to sign up. With that in mind, they launched the MyCopyblogger redesign of their website. Basically, they turned their homepage into an email sign-up driving machine that encouraged visitors to access premium content by providing only their email address.
Clark compared this principle to social media, where “you don’t get access without registration”. By offering some of their premium content (still for free) in exchange for an email address, Copyblogger managed to increase their email sign-ups by 400%.
In an interview to Mixergy, Clark explains his premium content strategy of the times:
“Yeah, so, a big part of our strategy overtime was, okay, so when I started Copyblogger in 2006, I started writing it almost like a book in that I would write posts or articles in series along a certain theme. So, the first thing I did was write 10 articles, I wrote a couple of other posts in the mix to keep myself from going crazy, but ten posts on copywriting, called Copywriting 101. I aggregated all those posts on a landing page, what I call a content landing page.
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So what’s not obvious is that each of those landing pages, which are the topics of the e-books are taking search traffic and instead of it being a bounce or transient traffic, it’s basically driving them into our email system as well.”
If you want to learn more about how Brian Clark turned Copyblogger from a blog into a $7 million company, feel free to check out his entire Mixergy podcast interview. Or, if you’re stuck with ideas and looking for some inspiration, take a look at our selection of top 6 Mixergy startup stories to inspire your business efforts.
Lesson #4 – Create Partnerships That Provide Additional Value to Your Customers
Over the years, they launched the Copyblogger’s Authority educational platform, the StudioPress website builder for WordPress, Synthesis, Scribe, and a certified content marketer marketplace. As their influence grew further on, Clark started partnering with other businesses and products to expand his own offer, all the while having his own audience’s best interests in mind.“A lot of people approached me to partner because I had an audience. I said ‘no’ to 95% of everything. But I said yes to things that were right for my audience—not just right for my wallet—and it turned out to be right for both,” Clark said.
One of Clark’s most successful partnerships resulted in Rainmaker Digital. It is a company that provides digital marketing services and technology solutions, which he started in 2010 by teaming up with five of his ex-business partners.
Lesson #5 – Be (Only There) Where Your Audience Is
In October 2014, Copyblogger’s Facebook page had 38,000 fans. Today, it doesn’t exist. How come?
Copyblogger explained killing its own Facebook page by saying that “their presence on Facebook has not been beneficial for the brand or its audience”.
The problem was that the page had tons of the so-called “junk fans” (those accounts that have little to no interaction on social media – they just go around liking stuff and never coming back to it), which were useless to the brand. In fact, their existence actually damaged the visibility of Copyblogger’s posts in Facebook’s algorithms.
Then, they realized – not every social media channel is a fit for your brand.
When it comes to social media, Copyblogger has been actively engaging with its audience through Google+ and Twitter. But Facebook just didn’t work for them. A case study by Erika Napoletano, posted on the Copyblogger website, shows average actions per Facebook post type for the Copyblogger blog, the Your Boulder website, and Erika’s page.
As can be seen from the data above, there was a significant shortage of likes and shares on Copyblogger’s page, even though they had a lot more fans. These findings have only confirmed what Brian Clark has suspected for a while – Facebook and Copyblogger just might not be compatible.
So, they decided to leave Facebook and focus on the places where their audience already likes to interact with their brand (such as Twitter and Google+).
We’ve presented you with 5 lessons you can learn, but at the end of the day, the entire Copyblogger marketing strategy could be summed up in one sentence – listen to the beat of your audience and act accordingly to accommodate their needs in the best way possible.
