3 Lessons Learned from Growing to 30,000+ Visits a Month
Listen on the go by downloading the audio of today’s video here.
- Ever since AutoGrow started publishing Matt Hacks four times a week in addition to our weekly blog posts, website traffic has shot up.
- In this video, Matt reflects on three actionable lessons you can use to achieve similar growth.
Hi, my name is Matt from AutoGrow.co, and welcome to another episode of Matt Hacks, where in 10 minutes or less I share marketing tips to make you more awesome and otherwise accelerate your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
Today, I'm sharing three very important lessons I learned from growing to 30,000 visits to our site per month.
First off, the proof is in the pudding. Here you go. You can see that for the last 30 days, we have crossed the 31,000-visit threshold. That means we're averaging over a thousand visits to our website per day.
The Three Lessons We Learned with Our Website Growth
Now, let's hop into the three lessons that I want to share with you from growing to 30,000 visits.
Lesson One
The first lesson is that publishing frequency accelerates your growth, but beware of email list burnout. What do I mean by publishing frequency? Well, I'm referring to how often you actually put out content on your blog.
So in our case, we went from publishing once per week. Every Tuesday, we would put out one in-depth guide or resource on our blog. We went from doing that once a week to now publishing five times per week.
We're still putting out that in-depth guide or resource every Tuesday, but we're also posting these Matt Hack videos, where I'm getting on camera with you, sharing the journey, answering common questions and looking to give you actionable tips that will, as I like to say, accelerate your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
So we're publishing more often by a factor of five. We went from one to five. That seems to have had the biggest impact on our growth, as we started this process about six weeks ago, and then traffic really picked up after that.
We were at 23,000 visits, and we grew and surpassed 31,000 visits, as you can see. When we started to do that for the first two weeks, we were actually sending an email newsletter every weekday with the content that we were coming up with for that day.
However, I started to notice that engagement would drop. In other words, the open rate started to go down and the click rates went down as well. I believe that it would have gotten to a point where it would have leveled off and stabilized, but I knew that for our business, we don't want an email list of subscribers where 99% of them aren't interested.
Most of the time, for whatever reason, the topic isn't relevant to them because we have over 12,000 subscribers that are active. We also have a lot of different interests and we have the list fairly segmented as well.
As I know from my own experience, from all the newsletters that I'm subscribed to, I read very few of them. The reason I read very few of them is that I only trust a few people to put out really high-quality content that is also very relevant to me.
So to have a better relationship with our list, I decided to segment it out. We created a separate email list just for these Matt Hack videos and put the people on there that were subscribing to get them. This way the engagement rate stabilized at a higher level for that email list, where there was more interest in the first place. We would still send the newsletter email list every Tuesday, though.
So that's why I say beware of list burnout, because you want people to open your emails and you want to be relevant, otherwise you're just going to get ignored in the long run. People are busy, so you want to do your best to maintain that relationship and put out quality content so people trust you.
Lesson Two
The next lesson is that titles matter as much as content.
What we found was a real-life demonstration of Pareto's 80/20 Principle, which says that statistically speaking, you're going to get 80% of your results from just 20% of your efforts. In our case, from putting out these videos and putting out a lot more content more frequently, this became even more clear, because we put out the video with the transcripts, but some performed much better than others.
For example, one that performed really well was titled, "This ‘Dumb’ Lead Magnet Idea Added 1,500 Subscribers to Our Email List." That title by itself was very effective, because a lot of people clicked through to watch the video, read the transcript and even take action to the point where we started getting feedback about it. People were writing us back weeks later giving an update that they had actually taken action on it and were telling us the results they were getting.
So titles are a really key point of leverage, and I think that from observing this data, it shows that there's much more room for improvement, as far as just writing better titles that are going to entice people to want to open our emails more often, and click through because our content is really valuable.
Lesson Three
Onto lesson number three. People trust people, not brands or the big anonymous "we", as I like to say.
In some of our blog posts, we'll use the word "we", which is referring to the team and I. More often than not, though, I use "I", which is talking in the first person when I'm trying to illustrate a story, a case study or something that I personally did.
People like to connect with people, and I know this for a fact because it is reflected in our ROI. In other words, I've noticed a direct relationship. Even before we started doing these videos every single weekday, I did some tests where some days I would send out a video and some days I wouldn't send one, and I noticed very clearly that sales would go up on the days where we had a video.
I can tell now that’s because people like to connect with people and video is a medium for us to interact, where I'm answering your questions and giving actual tips. People prefer to consume it that way.
It also just humanizes our business by getting on camera, and building the connection and trust that much more, so that when I make an offer to you or another member of our audience, you are more likely to be enticed about it, check it out and even buy that offer. If not, you might invest in it, because you know we're willing to get on camera and we're being that much more personal by kind of putting ourselves out there and being transparent. You see me sharing a lot of data and being as transparent as possible in these videos, so again, that builds trust and people connect with people.
Of all the brands online that I don't buy from versus the ones that I do, I can tell you that it's often because the founder or someone on the team is just being that much more personal in the way that they're either telling stories, getting on camera or even in the way they write their blog posts.
So here’s a quick recap: Lesson one from growing to 30,000 visits is that publishing frequency accelerates your growth, but beware of email list burnout.
Lesson two is, titles matter as much, if not more, than the content. Then lesson three is that people trust people, not big anonymous brands and not the almighty anonymous "we."
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