Dear Readers of the Wishpond Blog,
You may have noticed that Wishpond’s content output has been somewhat scant in the past month or so, and we wanted to explain why that is.
We’ve been shut away. We’ve been in the corner office, sitting on beanbags, leaning against giant stuffed pandas or lying in colorful hammocks with our headphones in and our eyes shut.
We’ve been thinking, really hard.
You see, Wishpond has invested in content marketing. We currently have four full-time content creators, two designers and a social media professional punching out an article every day, infographics, ebooks, Slideshares and guest contributions.
And between December 2013 and June 2014, we exploded. Our readership tripled from 30,000 per month to over 94,000.
Over a three week period in July we generated more than 1,250 new email subscribers. We were laughing.
But then something happened. Well, more accurately, something stopped happening, We stopped growing. Whereas between December 1st and June 1st our readership grew at a rate of 300%, between the 1st of June and the 1st of October our blog readership grew at a rate of 8.5%.
Not good. Many businesses would be satisfied with 100,000 readers a month and a reliable number of subscribers and leads. Wishpond is not most businesses.
And not only did we balk at the stagnation, we also noticed that the majority of our blog readership was coming from a few of the same articles each week. We have over 550 pieces of content published on the Wishpond Blog and more than 50% of our readership comes from only 20 of them. Even more frustrating, we noticed that about 80% of our monthly blog readers are new to the site:
These facts told us two things:
1. We’re really good at SEO.
Like, really good. We rate higher for our chosen keywords than businesses with a million readers, thousands of social endorsements and 10 or 15 more years in this business. We’d like to thank our SEO gurus Jordan and Matt for that.
2. We have very few loyal readers.
When we publish in the morning (9 a.m. daily) nobody is waiting with bated breath for what we’re putting out there.
Our content is good and our creators talented, but our focus on SEO was killing us.
So we had a meeting (actually we had about six). We laid in our hammocks and ordered pizza at 10 p.m. on a Wednesday and utilized both the overworked coffee machines and the beds in our break room. And we figured it out (or at least, figured out what we’re going to be testing).
How we are changing:
Content creation can’t rely on SEO
Yes, we want to be found for the content related to our tools (free landing pages, online ads, contests, lead gen tools, email marketing, etc).
But no longer are we satisfied with appearing on page one. We want to appear in your Twitter feed and your Google+ updates. We want to deliver content you bookmark, content that makes you say “Holy Sh*t that was worth five minutes of my day.” Content you share with your friends and colleagues and show up every morning at 9:02 to check out.
Content creation is about education
Our upcoming articles are feats of engineering, visual excellence and hours of research, writing and coding.
They will deliver a complete walkthrough of their subject. We’ll give you (our readers) everything you need, from best practices to proven formulas, downloadable templates you can use (without giving us your email address), how-to guides to the specifics. We’ll take you step-by-step from novice to mastery of whatever it is you need to know.
Content creation is about context and honesty
Why is the content we write important to your business? What made us write it, inspired us to dive in so deep or made us laugh when we came up with the idea?
You want and need to know who we are. We are more effective at educating our readers if they know where we’re coming from.
While much of our content will be solely educational, giving you step-by-step guidance to achieving online marketing success, much of it will also illuminate the method to our madness.
You’ll get transparency, honesty and graphs of our own analytics. If we have success we’ll brag about it (and tell you exactly how it works). If we fail miserably we’ll tell you why it happened and what we learned so you can avoid our mistakes.
Last but not least, Wishpond is made of people
Wishpond is made up of a community of people all looking to do the same thing: deliver online marketing tools that work to businesses that don’t want to pay $12,000 (or even $1,000) to find success.
We live and work in Vancouver, BC and have a movie night on Wednesdays, a catered lunch on Fridays and competitive foosball and ping pong tournaments in which our CEO receives as much smack-talk as our newest developer.
Our names are James Scherer, Krista Bunskoek, Samantha Mykyte, Claire Grayston and Nick Steeves. We are joined happily by graphic designers Alex Boisean and Jerry Ho and social media guru Cara Tarbaj. We are Wishpond’s voice and up until now I’m not sure you knew us very well.
This is what we look like and how you can reach us:
James Scherer
Krista Bunskoek
Samantha Mykyte
Claire Grayston
Alex Boiesan
Jerry Ho
Cara Tarbaj
Nick Steeves
Good to meet you.
In Conclusion…
We’re switching things up. We aren’t satisfied with what we have and, as a traditional start-up devoted to pushing the limits, we’re diving in headfirst.
We stopped creating new content, spending weeks honing a new strategy which you’ll get on Monday. We aren’t going to tell you what it looks or sounds like just yet, but trust us when we say it’s kickass.
We don’t know if this is going to work, but if it doesn’t, you can be damn sure it’s not because we didn’t give it everything we had.
So stay tuned, watch this space and be prepared for something big.
Yours truly,
The Wishpond Content Team
wishpond