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[Music] [Music] let me get right into it in my talk here is called building an automated content marketing machine and this is basically just a case study of what I've been doing with my business restaurant engine so restaurant engine is it's a web design service for restaurants as you might have guessed it's delivered in a kind of a sass solution 100% self-funded and launched it January 2012 so it's been about a little bit more than two years there was a beta period before that but really kind of collecting data for the last like two and a half years or so just slow steady growth over that time and we're gonna kind of look at how how that was done primarily focused on my content our content marketing effort so I had a few goals going into that first year when I when I first launched number one I needed to establish trust in an unknown industry I have no background in the restaurant industry other than waiting tables when I was in college so I you know I'm a completely unknown name restaurant engine is completely unknown how am I going to establish trust so that was one of the big drivers of really embracing a content marketing strategy I wanted to keep costs down you know 100% bootstrap self-funded I was kind of funding this using revenue from our first customers and a little bit that I carried over from some consulting work I wanted to avoid becoming dependent on unpaid channels primarily so I wanted to build something that was basically I just wanted to establish a steady source of traffic and customers from organic content channels something that's sustainable that can kind of carry through the the baseline of our first customers first traffic and that can hopefully you know carry over into the long term and that's what I built here and most importantly I needed to systemize automate and outsource as much of this process as I possibly can because as I'm sure everybody knows with when it comes to content marketing and blogging it's really time intensive and I can't be bogged down writing all these articles and doing the newsletters and the videos and stuff as a solo founder I need to have my time but I need to get the the benefits from this kind of strategy so we're gonna go through how he did that so we're just going to look at some of the results here we're looking at unique visitors for the past two a little bit more than two years as you can see it's just kind of slow steady growth last month we saw twelve thousand unique visitors so you know not not massive but you know the thing to take away here is that far and away the the vast majority of this traffic has come through organic and you know finding us through search word-of-mouth social sharing and whatnot this this next pie chart here shows seventy one percent come from organic sources I actually think it's a little bit more than that because that you know that doesn't include not provided there's another 15 percent that are direct visits so again the vast majority comes through organic google search we're on number one for all of our key phrases that that really matter for restaurant engines so and this has basically resulted in our first hundred customers and growing so we have a the last field on our signup form we I asked customers how did you hear about us and far and away 99% of them enter Google or they might enter the internet search or you know searching the web something like that that tells me that you know this actually pays off that is the number one source of our power acquiring customers and so it's really just you know something to build on again that that kind of baseline source of just organic traffic and customers so how are we doing this the blog obviously plays a very key role to this whole strategy what we do is we we put out a new blog post every Monday written by my writing team who I've been working with them for over two years now they've been amazing so they're actually the ones writing all the articles and putting them into the blog and scheduling them to publish every single Monday I've a couple of procedures one of them is for how I like to format the blog posts and that kind of includes instructions on how to source an image how to kind of you know format the headers and bullets pull a quote I use click to tweet out a few areas to take you know make certain items certain points kind of more shareable I mean just formatting the blog post in the right way is not going to produce results of course it's all about content and providing value in education but this kind of gives them a standardized system to to make things look you know kind of uniform throughout the blog what they do is they actually send me a preview of the article a couple days before it's got it's scheduled to publish and I might look it over and give them a few edits or tweaks I might change a headline but really for the most part these days I mean I've been working with them for two years I really trust that they're putting out quality content to the specifications and the strategy that I put in place so at this point I pretty rarely even look at it I just trust that okay we have a new blog article going up every Monday there my writers are actually also in charge of managing our editorial calendar so we use a Google spreadsheet for this we just have a long list of topics that they just populate we plan topics maybe two months out in advance and you know I I might go into the spreadsheet and look through the upcoming topics and give them feedback on those make a few changes change you know how headlines are worded or change some angles before they go ahead and write the articles but for the most part they're the ones populating it and and just you know keeping this this engine churning I've given them a few tactics for coming up with with highly relevant and helpful valuable articles and our blog one is though they'll go on to forums so these are like restaurant industry forums they'll look for those hot topics so questions that are just getting a lot of follow-up questions and answers you know you can see in any forum which threads are the most active those does make for you know somebody's asking about how to mobile-optimized a site that's a great topic for for a website for a blog article they'll also go on to industry blogs and magazines and just look for those articles that are getting the most shares and comments and whatnot you know not to take those same topics and reblog them on our blog but just use them as kind of like jumping off points for inspiration to get something you know come up with like any a unique angle on a popular subject what we're starting to do now now that we've been doing this for about two years is we're starting to gather data you know which of our articles are resonating most so we can look at traffic social shares and really more importantly email open rates and click through rates and I'll get into email now because that's really a central part of this you know keeping the the email and keeping your your customers coming back to your blog you know using your newsletter it goes hand-in-hand with with a blogging strategy it's very very important so how are we actually growing our list in the sidebar of our blog we have an email opt-in and we're bit and we also have one at the end of articles as well basically two things happen here one they can opt in for a free checklist and what this is it's basically a two page PDF educational content for restaurant owners you know like it's like a checklist to look at your site and determine okay is it up to today's standards and might am I getting the most out of it so they can enter their email and that's they'll get that instantly that they get some piece of value today at the same time though they can check the next box there and at you know it's pre checked everybody goes through this they're also opting in for a six lesson email course again just delivering value over time so they get that upfront piece of value today and then they get a drip autoresponder over the next it stripped out for about two weeks so the reason why I wanted to you know not only do that instant checklist PDF and actually go through with the autoresponder is I wanted to increase email engagement I didn't want people to join the list and kind of you know have like a one-and-done thing like get on the list get that PDF and then never look at it again I wanted them to get on the list and really engage with the list engage with my emails I want them to get into a habit of you know expecting a new piece of value every few days it kind of sets a precedent for it says the president for these subscribers to expect that every email that I send them is going to have something of value because after the two-week email course they're now on our mailing list so they're going to get those weekly emails you know promoting the latest blog article and I'm gonna get into that right now so I mentioned that we put out a new blog article every Monday every Tuesday we send out our newsletter and that's basically just announcing hey check out our latest blog article here's what it's about here's a click here's a link to to go read it and really the importance of sending out once a week with your new blog article is to get those most loyal readers coming back again and again and that's how you see that steady growth in traffic you know rather than kind of hovering around a baseline level the nice thing about how how we've systemized the newsletter is that it's completely based on a template so I've instructed my team to you know every single Tuesday I'm completely out of this at this point they this is just handled every week they they'll go on to the blog they'll take our most recent article copy the headline grab the featured image grab the excerpt text and link up the button schedule to send out Tuesday morning now that excerpt text but what I've done there is I've actually instructed my writers to write a very compelling you know one or two sentences in it in that excerpt that this is the excerpt in WordPress you know make it really compelling to actually click and to make you want to click and read the article and I've instructed them that not only is this going to be used on the blog you know like in the archive pages but it's actually also going to be copied into our as as the text in the email newsletter so it's being reused both ways and they and they write it a quarter so that way that my assistant who actually sets up the email newsletter doesn't have to start you know coming up with with creative copy and whatnot that's already written for them they just need to pop it into the template guest blogging is another important tool that I've been using to to build traffic and and bring new people gain more exposure for the brand what I've done there is I've targeted a couple of highly relevant industry blogs and I've built up relationships with those blog editors and it's at the point now where they expect me to come back to them I do it every month to come back with a new pitch for a new article I have actually my writers are the ones who write the articles for me I'll give them the topic that I've that I've had pitched and has been accepted and they'll write the article I'll then actually spend a little bit more time myself editing and you know really making it as as highly valuable as I can because they you know when you're guest blogging you want to put your very best stuff out there to kind of you know really expose the best stuff that you have I have a call to action at the end of my author byline and it's not just you know this is by Brian coswell here's the link to restaurant engine it's a very actionable piece of value here that I'm adding I can't really read it but it's um it's a you know get your free restaurant website checklist by visiting the restaurant engine blog so it just really gives them the incentive to to click through and actually check out more and then get on the list I have set this as a repeating monthly to do I use follow up dot CC for that so every single month I have a reminder for myself to reach out to those blog editors and pitch another guest article so you know that that's kind of the the system for that right now I mean guest article writing is sometimes not the most scalable thing in the world but now that I have it on this repeated to do it kind of helps so here are a few improvements that I'm in the process of making right now and moving into 2014 these are some of the things that I'm doing I'm creating a few more targeted landing pages so aside from the actual blog itself we're driving traffic paid and organically to highly targeted landing pages for more targeted email courses so I'm actually creating several email courses now one you know on a very targeted topic like online ordering another one specifically targeted at food trucks because they've become kind of a growing customer segment and a few more focused topics so really giving them highly relevant educational content these are things that we're doing right now webinars is something that I've been meaning to get into I think it's a really beneficial part of any content marketing strategy and something that I'm hoping to get on pretty soon podcasts and repurposing content so on restaurant engine I kind of experimented a little bit with this back in 2013 I'd like to do a little bit more of it you know going back into our our blog our archives and converting some of those articles into slide decks and then recording some audio kind of talking through the main points creating the you know putting those out as a podcast that just kind of helps repurpose content and bring in viewers listeners through different channels so that basically concludes my talk that's my email Brian Cashman comm I have a much longer more in-depth version of this case study that I posted on my blog a few months back it's like 45 minutes long so if you want to check that I just shoot me an email I'll send you the link I have that that's my blog there I've got my my personal newsletter where I talk about you know bootstrapping lessons at the podcast ah thanks