Contentacle Monthly Blog Report: November 2015

Every month we publish the progress we’ve made in our own content marketing efforts. We’re open about what went well and what didn’t go so well so that hopefully you can learn from us.

What the team has been up to this month

In November, we’ve been mostly focusing on our product and making big improvements to the design and experience.

We cleaned up our dashboard, and made some changes to the way integrations are handled (teams can now publish to multiple blogs, yay!).

If you’re interested in trying it out, we offer a free trial.

On the content marketing side, I’ve been focusing on building up an email course, and refining drafts that I wrote a few months ago. Jake has been busy editing my pieces before they’re published.

I reached out to various company content marketers to ask them to contribute to our course, and to my surprise all of them responded. I’m very happy with the progress of the course, but I’m unsure about whether to include videos.

How did our content do?

This month we’ve increased the amount of sessions and users on our blog, but the number of page views and the duration in which people stay has decreased.

Here’s a rundown on the content we published this month in order of publish date:

Formality: Are You Writing for the President, or Your Pet Cat?

• Page views: 5
  
• Average session duration: 2 minutes 21 seconds
• Comments: 0
• Average read: 5%

Polar Bear, Panda or Octopus? Why We Use Animals for Our CSS Colors

• Page views: 153
  
• Average session duration: 1 minute 34 seconds
• Comments: 0
• Average read: 100% (I’m skeptical about this, but it’s what SumoMe tells me!)

Your Content Is Boring, Stop Sending Your Readers to Sleep

• Page views: 31 views
• Average session duration: 3 minutes 20 seconds
• Comments: 1
• Average read: 70%

Guest post: 4 Easy Ways to Make Your Sales Season Content More Visual

• Page views: 57 views
• Average session duration: 3 minutes 12 seconds
• Comments: 0
• Average read: 42%

Stop the Jargon: Writing in a Way That Everyone Can Understand

• Page views: 38 views
• Average session duration: 5 minutes 21 seconds
• Comments: 1
• Average read: 33%

How We Gained 100,000 Twitter Impressions After 2 Months

• Page views: 49 views
• Average session duration: 4 minutes 15 seconds
• Comments: 0
• Average read: 35%

4 Social Platforms to Gain Traffic and How to Ace Them All

• Page views: 48 views
• Average session duration: 4 minutes 22 seconds
• Comments: 0
• Average read: 10%

We received a total of 7,521 page views (4,652 unique) and 19.2% of the readers were returning.

What went well

I was interesting to see that content with personal stories at the start seemed to perform better. Perhaps it was because they were more relatable to the readers.

The more actionable content we published this month seemed to receive a far higher average session duration. I’m pleased to say that a few companies have told me that they’ve used our content to help with their own content marketing efforts.

What went badly

The article about the inbound process being broken had a long duration, but that may have been because it was hard to read and didn’t provide much substance. It was pretty self-promotional.

I need to focus improving my writing skills so that the content flows better and more readers reach the end. While we publish a lot of content, I need to spend more time looking into research to back up my claims.

What to do next month

I’d like to publish more psychology based articles, how to improve writing and also condense research and statistics for people to understand.

I’m also thinking about asking various content marketers to guest post for our blog. Not only will this free up time for me to focus on product and networking, it will help them gain exposure and perhaps open opportunities for me to guest post.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on how you think our content can improve, leave a comment or shoot me an email. We’re always keen to make our blog more valuable.