What's Your Digital iQ

Copyblogger.com has become perhaps the greatest example of a business using content marketing to grow a multi-million dollar business. Today, Brian Clark (CEO) and Sonia Simone (CMO) are sharing their content strategy that has propelled them to more than 170,000 subscribers and nearly 90,000 paying customers.

Back in 2006, Brian started Copyblogger.com as a blog. Today, it’s a multi-million dollar business with 22 full-time employees. It’s a business built on a foundation of content and Brian and Sonia shared some of their secrets.

3 Critical Content Types

At CopyBlogger, all content can be categorized one of three ways.

Cornerstone

This is the foundational content of your strategy. It represents the core offering of your business and educates the visitor on your capabilities. For small businesses, that means content focused on your main services. For us folks in the agency world, it means identifying the core attributes of the product or service and pairing it with what the consumer is looking for. This takes trial and error, but over time the content strategy will find it’s own sweet spot.

Connection

Connection content gives the reader something to read, share, and use to connect with others. For the content marketer, this means creating content that is sharable. Sometimes that means it’s content that has utility and other times it means being slightly controversial. Content that inspires new connections introduces new audiences to your content and brand.

Customer

Customer content convinces the customer to do business with you. This content often presents itself in ebook, white papers or webinars. Customer-focused content takes your foundational “cornerstone” content and adds aspects that convince customers to make a purchase decision.

Publishing Strategy

In the early days of CopyBlogger, Brian was the only writer and was publishing 2 times each week. In today’s content marketing world that seems crazy as we talk about posting everyday and sometimes more than once per day.

At modern day CopyBlogger, there is a team that edits and publishes the content at CopyBlogger. Quality is a big deal. Many folks think that blogs are informal enough that you don’t have to spend the time editing and reformatting. That was never the case at CopyBlogger. Today, the volume of content coming into the CopyBlogger offices is substantial enough that they can send articles back to the author for revisions without hurting their publishing schedule. Regardless, quality has always been a top priority.

Engaging Influencers

One of CopyBlogger’s secrets to success is that they began to write content that was made to be shared by influencers. In the old days, this was called “link baiting.” Today, it’s a writing strategy that provides useful and tactical information that influencers in a category will find fascinating and want to share with their own audiences. Consider influencers as your “second customer.”