11 Content Marketing lessons

When I started my marketing career, I had the privilege of working with 20 of the top 100 blogs, according to Technorati. My job was to help them grow their traffic… and most would say I was wildly successful at it.
For example, I was able to grow TechCrunch’s traffic by 30%, and I was able to grow Gawker Media’s traffic by an extra 5 million visitors a month.
Although what I did may seem impressive… it really isn’t. All I did was tweak a few on-page elements, leverage social media and cross-link to grow my clients’ search engine traffic.

What was impressive is the fact that some of these bloggers took their sites from nothing to upwards of 100,000,000 pageviews a month. Over the years, I had the privilege to watch, study and learn from their strategies.

Here’s what I learned from them:

Timing is everything

Almost every single one of these blogs became popular because they got good at breaking news. And not just any news…but mainstream news. These sites went after mainstream news because more people searched for it, which meant the potential traffic opportunity was greater.

The way these