Get More Out of Facebook: 12 Effective Tactics to Get More Shares and Likes

Everyone who uses Facebook for their business asks themselves the same question:

“How do I get more shares and likes?”

Even if you’re not active on Facebook, your readers can still share your content on Facebook to help you get even more traffic.

For 99% of businesses with an online presence, it makes sense to get as many shares and likes as possible.

Each time a Facebook user shares or likes your content, that content gets exposed to all of that user’s friends.

It helps you get more traffic, subscribers, and eventually customers.

But why Facebook when there are many other social networks you could focus on?

The simple reason is that Facebook is by far the largest social network, and it is still growing.

On top of that, Facebook has become a place where most users go to consume content, which means that users are in the right mindset to visit your site.

Getting likes and shares starts with creating great content, but there’s more to it if you want to maximize their number.

In this post, I’m going to show you 12 actionable ways that will help you improve the number of likes and shares you get on Facebook.

1. It’s all about “you”

Social networks are all about the user.

Everyone creates their own profile, which shows who they think they are to all their friends.

It’s about customizing their own experience and seeing content from the people and connections that they want.

In some sense, social media is a platform designed for users to focus on themselves.

The reason why this is so important is because you need to understand that users are mainly focused on content directed at them.

Ideally, that would mean tagging users so they would get a notification.

Obviously, that’s not possible for most businesses.

However, you can still learn from this by making your Facebook posts more about the user who is reading them.

In simple terms: use the words “you” and “your” a lot.

Here’s what I’m talking about…

When I post on the Neil Patel Facebook page, I post two main types of things:

• links to blog content
• inspirational messages and quotes

For the second type, I focus on messages that focus on the reader (mention “you”):

Using the word “you” is a lot like writing someone’s name—it makes the reader pay attention.

This rule also goes for writing content in general.

Whenever possible, I try to use “you” in my headlines and content:

2. CTAs work on your website or on Facebook

Calls to action (CTAs) are unbelievably effective tools to get readers to take action in almost any situation.

They are one of the most important factors when it comes to landing page conversion rate.

The main reason why they are so effective is because there’s almost always a disconnect between what you want and what other people think you want.

When you post a link to your content on Facebook, what are you looking for? Primarily likes and shares (maybe comments) for the reasons we talked about before.

But think of it from a user’s point of view.

Let’s say they click through and love the content.

Then what? Although it’s obvious to you that you want the content to be shared, it’s not to most readers.

But if you ask them to share your post if they like it, then all of a sudden it is clear what you’d like them to do.

And if they really liked the content, many readers won’t mind sharing it.

Dan Zarrella conducted some really interesting research regarding CTAs on various social networks.

First, he looked at Twitter.

He found that the most retweeted posts contained one of six common phrases/words in them.

Every single one of them was a call to action or part of a call to action.

Adding “Please Retweet” to a tweet more than doubles the expected number of shares—that’s huge.

More importantly for us here, he also looked at Facebook posts.

He found that posts with the word “share” (as in “please share this…”) got about twice as many shares as posts without it.

Another interesting finding is that including the word “share” also nearly doubles the number of likes a post gets.

The takeaway is very simple:

If you want a particular post to get extra shares, just include a call to action such as “Please share this post.”

Although I’ve yet to see it studied, it makes sense that this approach would be most effective when you use it only once in awhile.

If you include the same type of call to action in every post, it may lose its potency (depending on how often you’re posting).

3. Hop on trending topics early

Most ways to get more likes and shares revolve around making your content more appealing to your existing audience.

However, another option is to get a status post in front of a new audience that is eager to like and share posts.

The way to do this is by jumping on trending topics.

You can find these in the top right-hand part of your newsfeed:

Users who spend a lot of time looking at trending topics are the ones that care about knowing things first.

They want to like and share such posts to show to their friends that they’re “in the know.”

When a user clicks on one of those links, they see all related to that trend posts.

You don’t have to do anything special to show up there as long as you link to an article with the main keyword (the link’s anchor text) in the headline or mention it in your description.

That being said, the results prioritize high engagement posts. So, the first posts that a user will see when they click on a trend will have lots of likes, comments, and shares.

However, even with a few dozen likes, you should still get a decent amount of extra exposure.

The most difficult part is finding a relevant to your business trend.

This won’t work for every business, but if yours has anything to do with entertainment, it could be a great way to grow your audience and get extra shares.

4. Reduce the social competition

For many sites, it makes sense to prioritize the biggest social networks.

Instead of trying to get traffic from several networks, just pick two or three, including Facebook.

You might have noticed that over time, I’ve reduced the number of sharing buttons on the side of Quick Sprout posts.

As of writing of this post, there are only two buttons.

If a reader wants to share your content, they will usually decide which network to do it on (if they use more than one) based on the buttons displayed.

So by limiting the choices, you control where most of your shares will end up.

This is really important because sharing works in an exponential way. Each extra share has the potential to send an increasingly large amount of traffic.

Put in simpler terms, it’s better to get 50 shares on Facebook than to get 5 shares on 10 different networks.

The second benefit of reducing the number of buttons vying for your readers’ attention is that it may increase your overall shares as well.

There’s a classic example of how limiting choice can increase output.

In 1995, a study was conducted to examine how choices affected purchases of jam.

The researchers alternated displaying 24 types of jam with displaying only 6 jams.

Although the 24 choices of jam attracted more attention, only 3% of those who tried a sample actually bought a jar.

On the other hand, 30% of people who tried one of the 6 jams bought a jar.

Limiting choices actually increased the conversion rate by 1,000%.

People get overwhelmed when they have too much choice. It becomes a chore to consider the benefits and drawbacks of all options.

When you have 6-8 sharing buttons beside your content, it will take extra time and effort for the reader to decide which network to share the content on.

Although having sharing buttons is not like selling jam, it’s not a coincidence that many other content providers have found that they don’t get any extra shares with more sharing buttons.

5. Increase your reach by integrating more shareable content

If you’re active on Facebook, you need to understand “EdgeRank.”

EdgeRank is Facebook’s algorithm that determines what a user should see.

If your post has a high EdgeRank, more of the people who have liked your page will see it.

If your post has a low EdgeRank, fewer people will see it.

Originally, your EdgeRank depended on 3 main factors:

1. Affinity – the level of relationship between the user and the content provider
2. Weight – a number based on the type of post you created
3. Decay – how recently you’ve posted

Now, the term EdgeRank isn’t really used by Facebook, but most marketers still use it just because that’s what everyone is used to.

Facebook stopped using the term because the algorithm has become much more evolved.

Although these 3 factors are still important, other things are important as well.

One, in particular, could be classified as part of “affinity”—your past engagement history.

Basically, if your past posts have gotten a lot of engagement (likes, shares, and comments), Facebook’s algorithm thinks you post things that users like.

Therefore, it increases your EdgeRank, and any future posts you make will have a larger reach.

How to inflate your EdgeRank: Once you understand EdgeRank, you can tailor your posting to increase your EdgeRank for important future posts.

If you just post links to your blog content, your reach isn’t going to be great in most cases because blog content isn’t hugely shareable.

But what you can do is post highly shareable content (think pictures of cats) that attract a ton of shares, likes, and comments.

This will boost the EdgeRank of all your future posts, exposing your posts to more of your followers. In turn, you’ll get more traffic, shares, and likes when you share your blog content.

You can see how I use this simple strategy on my Facebook page.

I mix in pictures with quotes and inspirational messages because of this:

These types of pictures attract hundreds of extra shares and likes when compared to a blog post, which means that they have a significant impact on my posts’ EdgeRank scores.

6. Take a stand to stand out

People share things to shape how other people view them.

If you want to be thought of as a caring animal lover, you share posts about volunteering for animal shelters.

If you want to be thought of as a super cool marketer, you share Quick Sprout posts, right?

So if you want your content to be shared a lot, it has to stand for something.

There’s a spectrum for this.

You could write an article like “11 Tips for Content Marketing.” If someone shares it, they show their interest in marketing to friends.

However, it doesn’t really take a stance on anything.

Their friends who actually know anything about marketing certainly won’t think that the sharer is an expert on the subject for sharing that.

People don’t want to just be seen as interested in something important to them. They want others to think that it’s a huge part of their lives and that they are an expert in it.

Consider the difference that sharing an article like the one below makes:

Alright Google, You Win…I’ll Never Use Private Blog Networks Again!

Private blog networks are a controversial topic. By firmly declaring that you stand on one side, you make your opinion known.

This does two things:

• friends who agree with you think that “you know your stuff”
• friends who do not agree with you think you’re an idiot
• friends who don’t know anything about it think you’re going up against Google, and that means you must be doing something impressive

If your friends share your opinions, which often happens, when you take a stance on a controversial topic, it only strengthens their view of you. This is why most people do it without realizing it.

That post about private blog networks is real, by the way. It generated over 480 comments and hundreds of shares.

You can take advantage of this motivation behind a lot of sharing in just about any niche.

Pick a controversial subject, and then clearly state which side you’re on.

For example, in the United States, the future of Social Security (essentially a pension plan) is a very controversial topic.

Bernie Sanders posted a very clear statement and link that shows that he supports expanding Social Security:

Anyone who wanted to show their friends that they care about the well-being of the elderly (and future elderly) is extra motivated to share something like this.

Also, people who want to show that they are politically active also shared this.

Put all that together, and this post received over 1,000 shares and 6,200 likes in the first 18 hours.

People want to share posts that reflect them and that show others who they are. Take a stance shared by many people on an important topic, and they will be extra motivated to share your post.

7. Data tells you what works best

The most difficult aspect of a lot of these tactics is that it takes a fair bit of knowledge and practice to get things working just right.

Although you can try any of these tactics right away, it may take several posts (or more) before you actually start seeing a significant increase in shares and likes.

The more you do them, the more you’ll understand the principles behind them, and that’s how you’ll learn them.

However, not all tactics are like that, including this one.

The ideal scenario is to minimize guesswork. To do that, we need data and analysis.

What you should do, at least once every few weeks, is look at how your posts have performed:

Record all their likes, shares, and even the number of comments in a simple spreadsheet.

However, you should also put those into a category.

Those are fairly broad categories, which is fine to start with. Once you’ve made over a hundred posts or so, you can start getting more specific with your categories.

For example, instead of just “Writing,” you could divide those posts into:

• Writing better
• Writing faster
• Writing tools
• Editing

The point of doing this is to see which types of posts receive the most likes and shares.

Once you have a decent sample size (at least 20 posts in each category), you can calculate average numbers of shares and likes.

These are just hypothetical results that I could get from my posts (not real numbers).

The takeaway is pretty obvious: to write more about social media and less about entrepreneurship and writing.

The numbers clearly show that posts about social media get by far the most engagement, while entrepreneurship posts don’t get much.

By simply writing more about subjects that get more likes and shares, I’d immediately get a better average engagement.

Additionally, this would help my EdgeRank, which would result in even more likes and shares in the future.

8. Create posts that make users feel obligated to share

Another big reason why people share posts on Facebook is because they want to bring awareness to an issue.

Creating posts that highlight an important issue or cause to your followers, as well as including a call to action, will result in getting many more shares than usual.

Again, this will improve the EdgeRank of your other posts, resulting in even more long term traffic, shares, and likes.

Let’s look at an example of what I’m talking about.

A humane society was running a food drive in order to collect food to give to pet owners in need.

It’s easy to see why anyone might be touched by this gesture, let alone actual pet owners, volunteers, and activists that follow the society’s Facebook page.

They made a post about this on Facebook, and although the description could have been written more effectively, it still garnered over 300 likes and 75 shares.

The best subjects for these types of posts are charities. Your followers feel that you’re doing your part to help out, and they should too by sharing the post.

This is one of the few tactics that’s difficult to implement if you’re in a marketing niche since there isn’t a whole lot of charity going on.

However, in most other niches, you can simply go to Google News and search for “(your niche) charity events.”

A post on either of these topics would get a lot of engagement and would be perfect for any business in the animal niche.

9. One type of post gets more shares than all the rest

A study on Facebook content found that certain types of content get more of particular types of engagement.

There are a few things that stand out.

First is that status posts get a much higher percentage of comments than all other types.

If you want more comments on your posts, start posting more interesting status updates as opposed to links, photos, and videos.

It makes sense when you think about it.

Status updates are mainly posted by regular users to be seen by their friends, and friends converse with each other.

But it works the same way even if you have a Facebook page. Michael Hyatt occasionally asks questions to stimulate discussions.

This one has over 35 comments:

The other thing that really stands out is that videos have a much higher share percentage than any other type of post.

Shares are typically considered more valuable than likes because they are effectively an endorsement of your content. They usually (but not always) lead to more traffic and engagement on a post.

It’s simple: If you want more shares on your posts, start including more video.

Ideally, create your own videos to get the benefit of the content views as well.

But you can always post popular videos related to your niche if you think your followers will enjoy them.

Finally, just remember that you should test this for your specific business. Those study results were drawn from all niches.

I’ve personally seen video work really well on Facebook in some niches but not in others.

A good plan is to test how your followers react to video content by sharing videos made by others at first. If it goes well, then start creating your own.

10. Optimize every post for sharing

SEO and social optimization have a few things in common.

One component is the use of meta tags. But they use different types of meta tags.

With social networks, you need to include specific og (Open graph) meta tags in your content in order for it to format optimally on social networks (including Facebook).

I’ve written in the past about how crafting custom titles and descriptions in these tags led to a 174% increase in Facebook traffic to Quick Sprout. It’s an easy thing to start doing, but it can have big results.

What it looks like: If you don’t include any meta tags in your content, Facebook will do the best it can when someone shares a link to your site.

Sometimes it will do it well, but other times it will only find the title and introduction, and your link will look something like this:

Honestly, that’s terrible. It’s not going to stand out from all the other well formatted content in a typical feed. It’s unlikely to drive you any additional traffic.

But when you include the right meta tags, Facebook knows exactly where to pull your title, description, and image from. You can ensure that no matter who shares the link on Facebook, it will show up as intended.

Setting your tags: There are tons of og tags that you can set, but pretty much all social networks only pull data from a few main ones.

It makes sense to focus on these to save your time:

1. og:title - The headline that shows up on Facebook (usually same as post)

Example: <meta property=”og:title” content=”How I’m Going to Achieve the $100k a Month Challenge without Using My Name”/>

2. og:type - Specify the type of your content. That way, Facebook knows whether it’s a video, post, or even a local result. There are many types; choose from this full list.

Example: <meta property=”og:type” content=”article”/>

3. og:image - The URL of your preferred featured image.

Example: <meta property=”og:image” content=”http://ift.tt/1Qk30ib;

Note: You can make more than one image tag. If you do, Facebook (and other networks) will pick the image with the best size for its users.

4. og:url – The original (canonical) URL of your post.

Example: <meta property=”og:url” content=”http://ift.tt/1KHTWFd;

5. og:description – The small description that appears under the headline on most social networks.

Example: <meta property=”og:description” content=”  Last week I posted about my setback on the $100,000 challenge. Some of you were happy with the results so far, while others were disappointed about how mu”/>

Although you can manually edit these tags for all your content, the simplest way to do it is to install Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. Whenever you edit a post, you can scroll down to the plugin to add the most important tags in appropriate sections:

11. Embed sharing buttons on your website’s images

This change takes under a minute to do, but it will earn you extra shares from all your content on a regular basis.

One of the problems with your readers sharing your content on Facebook, or other major networks, is that they just post the link.

You can fix it from showing up incorrectly by creating the tags I just showed you above.

However, there’s one other situation that needs fixing:

Some users just want to share photos.

All major social networks are visual. Pictures get the most attention from users. In turn, most users tend to look for good pictures to share to get likes, comments, and re-shares.

When they find a good picture on a site, most have to save a copy, then go to the social network, login, and upload the picture…it’s a pain.

And as you might know, people are lazy.

On top of that, they often mess up the link or description.

You can make it really easy to share pictures from your site on Facebook by using the SumoMe image sharer plugin.

It adds a sharing button to every picture on your site for whatever social network(s) you choose:

Now visitors just need to click the Facebook button, and it will open the image ready to be shared on Facebook with everything filled in correctly.

12. Add share buttons to email broadcasts

The final tactic you can use to get more shares and likes is to ask your email subscribers for them.

These are the people who like your content the most and who usually are going to be the most willing to help you spread it.

Ideally, you want to have a link that says something like:

Click here to share this post on Facebook

To do this, create whatever anchor text you’d like, but set the address to:

http://ift.tt/1Xotfcp URL HERE}

For example, the Quick Sprout home page would be:

http://ift.tt/1LRRonU

It’s pretty easy to mess up, so I suggest you use this free share link generator. Just paste your URL in the Facebook field:

And the tool will spit out a link to use.

When your subscribers click it, they’ll see something like this in a new tab:

Again, if you have your meta tags configured, you can be certain that your posts will look good when shared.

Conclusion

Getting more social shares and likes on Facebook is important. It’s a major source of traffic for businesses in almost every niche.

I’ve outlined 12 different tactics that you can use to get more likes and shares.

Don’t try to use them all at once. It’s better to use a few at a time, observe your results, and optimize your strategy.

Over time, keep trying more until you’ve gone through all 12 tactics. By then, your typical likes and shares should more than double.

If you have any questions about getting the most out of Facebook, just leave them below in the comment section.

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Learn From the Best: 12 Lessons from 5 Content Marketing Case Studies

Not everyone will have to solve a specific problem for their content marketing.

However, you can often learn methods to make your current or prospective content marketing more effective.

The way to achieve this is to study other people who have successfully used content marketing to grow their own or their client’s business.

There are 2 schools of thought:

Study companies similar to yours and emulate their strategy. Or study companies different from yours and apply their tactics to your niche.

Both have their merits.

You need a complete view of content marketing as a whole, and to get that, you need to study a wide variety of ­­examples.

For instance, you should study how different companies use content marketing for different purposes.

According to a recent report, the top 3 goals of content marketing are:

• lead generation
• thought leadership
• brand awareness

There are many different ways to achieve each of these 3 broad goals.

Some will come to you naturally, but others won’t make sense until you see the successful example of others.

The problem is that you can’t study just any random company because most don’t understand what your objective is.

In another report, it was found that only 30% of B2B marketers thought that their organization used content marketing effectively.

Although that’s a respectable percentage, it means that at the same time, there’s a lot of poor content being produced.

You want to steer clear of that since there isn’t much to learn from it.

This is where case studies come in. Typically, only businesses with something to actually show off create public case studies.

I’ve rounded up some of the best case studies I’ve come across that illustrate some important aspects of content marketing.

I’m going to be breaking down 12 lessons from five case studies to show you how you can apply them to your content marketing efforts.

Some may just be good refreshers, while others may be brand new for you. I think most marketers will be able to learn at least a few substantial things from these case studies.  

Case Study #1: PTC used content marketing to go from 0 to 100,000 visitors per month

(Original case study)

For me, crossing the 100,000 visitor per month threshold has always been an important goal.

If you can get to that level, you can sustainably grow just about any kind of business.

This content marketing campaign was more about brand awareness than anything else.

PTC wanted to create awareness for their new product launch in a very crowded space and had the secondary goal of getting initial sales for this product.

Most successful products aren’t brand new inventions. It’s likely that you’ll never sell one.

Nevertheless, you may sell products that are innovative—that improve upon others. Your challenge will be breaking into a crowded market.

You just may be able to learn from this case study.

A quick overview: I’m not going to go into too much depth, but let me give you a quick rundown of what PTC is.

It’s a huge software company that sells software to other companies in a variety of high-tech niches.

First, they decided to try to use content marketing to improve awareness of a new product they were about to launch—Creo.

Creo is a design software that solves many of the problems that other types of CAD software often have.

Without a doubt, it’s a quality product, which is where you should always begin.

Lesson #1 – Outsourcing content marketing can work: One of the reasons that companies are afraid to really invest in content marketing is because they believe it will take away from their existing marketing efforts.

They believe that they need to get employees to spend time creating blog posts and promoting them.

Understandably, it’s tough to make this kind of commitment when most employees are already overworked.

On top of that, most employees don’t know how to create effective posts that will get results.

The companies that do try content marketing usually conclude that it’s not effective.

There are 2 good reasons to outsource your content marketing:

1. You don’t have the manpower to execute a content strategy
2. You don’t have the expertise to develop or execute a content strategy

In this case, PTC hired Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, both well-known top content marketers (even back in 2010).

A company like PTC isn’t short on resources, but they didn’t have the expertise for this kind of work.

Joe and Robert got the industry and company knowledge needed to create a great content marketing strategy by working with some of PTC’s key employees.

One concern when outsourcing content marketing is that you’re stuck with them forever, but that’s rarely the case unless you want it to be.

Most content marketers will spend a majority of their time creating a strategy for you to follow and then figuring out the best way to execute it.

In most cases, including this one, the content marketers will find writers who are also experts in a particular niche.

Joe and Robert hired Barb Schmitz, an experienced writer in their industry, to kick off the blog content. She continued contributing to the blog for another 4 years.

Even if PTC completely stopped working with the content marketers they hired, they’d still have a plan in place and writers who could continue to contribute.

Lesson #2 – Know your content marketing goals: As we looked at earlier, content marketing can fulfill many different goals.

The actual goals that you are trying to accomplish will influence what type of content you produce and your overall content strategy.

In this case, PTC had one main goal that was made clear from the start:

Goal: To create buzz and launch the new Creo product (in the following 8-9 months).

At that point, their target audience had never even heard of Creo, which was another important factor.

If you create a blog for a popular product (e.g., Canva’s design school), you can be successful writing content such as product tutorials.

If you don’t have a product yet, tutorials aren’t going to draw much attention. Instead, you will need to educate the market to provide value.

As you become more trusted, you can steer attention toward a product launch.

Goals dictate what type of content to produce, but also how much to produce.

Since there was a limited amount of time before the launch, Robert and Joe were fairly aggressive with their editorial calendar. They published around a post a day (although the posts were on the shorter side).

Lesson #2b – Goals can change: Your content marketing strategy should always be evolving and growing with your business.

Once the product launch was complete, they shifted  towards improving sales and market share.

If you go to the Creo blog today, you’ll see a different type of content:

Now that Creo is well known (and multiple versions of it have been released), content can also include product tutorials that show in what way Creo is better than its competitors.

If PTC didn’t re-evaluate their goals, they would have stopped the blog after the product launch.

Instead, they were able to continue to grow the blog and hit 100,000 visitors per month in a pretty “unsexy” niche.

Over 70% of those visitors are also new to PTC and are potential leads.

Case Study #2: Growing to $100,000 per month in revenue behind content marketing

(Original case study)

If you ever want to study a recent example of growing a business using content marketing, Groove is an excellent place to start (also check out my 0 to $100,000 case study posts).

Groove was far from a struggling company when they began their content marketing, but it still had a long way to go in order to hit their goal of $100,000 in monthly revenue:

If you’re not familiar with Groove, they sell help-desk software, which means that users pay a regular subscription fee every month.

Since they started blogging back in 2013, they’ve easily surpassed their original goal, which shows the effect content marketing can have on sales:

Lesson #3 – Content marketing isn’t always slow (if you can do this…): One of the things I always make sure to mention when I write about content marketing is that it usually takes time to produce results.

You’re not going to get tens of thousands of readers overnight, but it also doesn’t necessarily have to take months to get any traction.

Groove was one of the very notable exceptions to the normal growth of a blog.

On the very first post they published, they received more than 100 comments:

You can check out the dates on these comments, but most of them were made when it was first published.

And it wasn’t just random people. They even got Gary Vaynerchuk to chime in:

Considering that these influencers not only commented on the post but shared it as well, it’s not surprising that they were able to pass 1,000 subscribers from that single post.

These aren’t typical results, but they’re possible if you have 2 things:

1. A really interesting idea
2. Extensive promotion

One of the key things for Groove was being able to pitch the idea of a behind-the-scenes look at how they were growing their income. Even experienced marketers are interested in that if it’s executed well.

As for the second part, they identified a ton of relevant influencers and found ways to connect with them.

After that, they sent a really well-done email to formally introduce the idea and post:

If you want big results quickly, you need to implement content marketing tactics better than everyone else.

Lesson #4 – Transparency and content marketing should go hand in hand: If you look at just about any of the content that Groove has published on their blog since its inception, you will get smacked over the head by the transparency (in a good way).

Now that transparency is more common these days (thanks to marketers like Pat Flynn), Groove took it a step further.

Instead of just showing their successes, like most “transparent” bloggers do (which is still pretty interesting), Groove doesn’t hide much of anything.

As long as it adds value to content, they include it for the reader.

When they try different experiments, they share the results of all of them, even the bad ones:

The real value is in explaining how they overcame their challenges and achieved their successes.

And, of course, they share that too.

One final note on this: Don’t be transparent for the sake of it. Be transparent if it adds value to your content.

Since Groove usually focuses on their marketing efforts and experiments, the private data behind them actually adds a lot of value to the content, so it makes sense to include it.

Decide what parts of your business your readers would actually be interested in, and don’t be afraid to shed some light on them.

Lesson #5 – Always be actionable: In theory, it’s fairly simple to succeed using content marketing. Just create content that is as valuable as possible.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that in practice because there are many ways to go about it.

There are many key factors behind valuable content, but none is probably as important as its ability to be actionable.

If you can get readers to take action and achieve success with it, you will make your content extremely valuable to them.

By continuously providing actionable content, you attract loyal hordes of readers.

Any chance they get at the Groove blog, they show exactly how they tested something.

Case Study #3: 1,000 new email subscribers with one content marketing tactic

(Original case study)

This case study isn’t of an overall content marketing strategy—it’s of one specific content marketing tactic.

Jimmy Daly of Vero used Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique and got some amazing results:

• 30,000 page views
• 1,000 new email subscribers
• #2 Google ranking for a fairly competitive term

I think most content marketers would be happy to get these kinds of results with a single piece of content.

Lesson #6 – Quality always makes the difference: The key principle of the skyscraper technique is to look at the content that contains a particular keyword or subject and then create something on a much higher level.

If you truly have the highest quality content, along with good promotion, you’ll get great results on a consistent basis.

If you’d like to take a look, here’s the post that Jimmy made. Judge the quality for yourself, but I think it’s very high, especially compared to his competition back then.

At the time, he had the following table of contents for the post, which I think is very creative:

I’ve actually used this table of contents as an example of an effective formatting tactic a few times in the past.

Compare that to your typical table of contents modeled on Wikipedia:

Sure, it’s still useful, but it’s not of the same level of quality.

Show the 2 different tables of contents to a reader, and most will be unimpressed by the second one, but really impressed by the quality of the first.

If you actually check out his article now, he’s changed his table of contents to this:

It’s still more attractive than a typical table of contents, even if it’s simpler. I suspect that the reason for this change is to increase usability for mobile readers.

Regardless of the outcome, the intention was good. Jimmy was trying to make his content as high in quality as possible.

If you improve the quality of your content in as many ways as you can, you’ll get amazing results with your content marketing.

Lesson #7 – Influencers can drive explosive results: There are many different ways to grow a website (or more specifically, a blog’s readership).

There are 2 main types of successful blogs.

The first is the grinding blog. They do all the promotion themselves, find their readers, and convince them to come to the blog.

It works, but it can take a very long time.

The other type is the one that comes out of nowhere and becomes very popular in its niche.

Those are the ones that other established influencers love.

Once you can get influencers to support you, they can send you a great deal of consistent, high-quality traffic quickly. If you have enough influencers supporting you, you’ll have everything you need to become one yourself.

This is the ideal case; it’s very difficult to actually implement unless you’re offering something truly exceptional.

But it’s not an all-or-nothing situation.

Just because an influencer isn’t mentioning you at every opportunity doesn’t mean they won’t mention you at all.

Getting a few shares or article mentions from an influencer is a much more realistic, but still really effective, way to grow your blog.

One of the reasons why Jimmy was able to drive the initial burst of traffic to his post was that he connected with a few key influencers.

He emailed them beforehand, telling them about the post, and asked for a short piece of advice to feature in the article.

One of the influencers was Alex (the chief contributing blogger) at Groove:

Guess what happens when you feature someone in an article like that?

They are much more likely to share and help you promote the article (at least in little ways).

Look for ways to connect with influencers in your niche, and give value to them (in some form). That’s how you start to gain their support, which can accelerate the growth of your blog.

Case Study #4: 500-700 organic search traffic visitors per day with a simple strategy

(Original case study)

The first 2 case studies focused on the results that you can achieve with a great content marketing strategy, but I understand that not everyone is at the level where they’re aiming for hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

This case study features good results, but nothing anyone else couldn’t achieve too.

After following their content marketing strategy, Express Writers were able to get about 18,000 search visitors per month to their blog—definitely a solid number, but nothing incredibly difficult for someone else.

They are in a fairly crowded niche: selling writing.

They offer a wide variety of writing services to businesses, such as blog post creation, press release writing, etc.

What was the strategy? In the words of one of their bloggers, Julia McCoy:

Four 2000-word pieces per week for our own blog, along with 4-6 more pieces per week for major guest blogs including such high-authority sites as Search Engine Journal, Site Pro News, SEM Rush and Content Marketing Institute.

The result of following that strategy was being able to outrank most of their competitors and getting consistent search traffic:

Lesson #8 – Successful content marketing is consistent: Unlike a few of the case studies we’ve looked at already, there’s nothing big or peculiar about this strategy.

That’s actually a really good thing.

You don’t want to count on going viral to succeed. It’s nice if it happens, but if you need it to grow your blog significantly, you have other problems.

Most marketers should be growing their blogs by consistently producing high quality content.

Express Writers created 8-10 strong posts every single week, and it led to these results. Keep in mind that the average visitor in this niche is a high value one. A business hiring a writer can spend thousands of dollars on a regular basis.

Additionally, from their regular readers, new readers from search engine results, and visitors from other places, they are able to get about 700 visits a day to their content shop (main sales page).

 

With a decent conversion rate, they are generating solid, consistent, and recurring revenue.

Lesson #9 – Practice what you preach: On top of driving traffic to their website with this content marketing strategy, the company enjoyed one other huge benefit—proof of success.

Since Express Writers is a company that sells content creation services, mainly to help clients improve their own traffic, this is a big deal.

A potential client can land on the blog, see that they know what they’re doing, and eventually end up hiring them based on that impression.

That’s huge.

Even more than that, I think that you should always be able to demonstrate to yourself that your product performs.

When you do that, you will never turn to cheap sales tricks to sell products; you will truly believe (and have the data to back it up) that your product or service is valuable.

It’s easy for this team of writers to sell their content and assert that it’s some of the best out there because it actually gets the results they claim it does.

If you’re advising leads or customers to do or buy something, make sure you’re the one to do it first. It will add an element of power and persuasiveness to your message.

Case Study #5: Image based content marketing tactic to increase overall organic traffic by 175%

(Original case study)

This fifth case study is one shared by Brian Dean again, but it’s his own results.

He used a technique for which he coined a term, guestographics, in order to get more backlinks for a page and improve its search engine rankings.

Originally, he wrote a post about on-page SEO.

As any other article he posts, this was a high-quality article.

It was getting a bit of search traffic, but not as much as Brian had hoped. So, he used this technique and was able to increase organic search traffic by 175.59%.

Not too shabby. And it also would have improved his rankings for other related posts on his site.

The tactic itself is pretty simple:

1. Create a great infographic.
2. Create a list of sites that write about whatever topic you covered.
3. Send them a link to your infographic.
4. Offer to write a custom intro if they agree to post it on their site.

Lesson #10 – Different types of content lets you expand your reach: So far, we’ve mainly looked at standard blog posts being used in content marketing.

Yes, those may make up a larger percentage of the content you end up producing, but there are many other types of content that you can produce.

For some messages, there are better forms of content than just standard blog posts.

In this case, Brian created an infographic.

And then, he combined it with his original article.

By doing this, he was able to promote his post again and further improve its rankings. He was able to take the original message of the article and reproduce it in an easier to digest format, which benefits his readers.

The takeaway from this case study is that whenever you create content, you should be thinking of 2 things:

• What is the best way to cover this topic? (to your readers)
• Would creating this content in multiple forms enhance the reading experience?

If you said yes to the second, you can get creative with your repurposing to create extra promotional opportunities.

Also, by creating different forms of content, you can expose your content to a new audience that you may not normally reach.

Lesson #11 – Great content is nothing without promotion: One of the biggest aspects of successful content marketing that you need to have drilled into your head until it’s habit is that all content needs promotion.

The only exception is when you have a large audience, because your audience will essentially promote your content for you by sharing it.

Other than that, there’s no point creating content if it isn’t getting in front of new readers.

When Brian created the infographic, he was able to email new sites who didn’t already link to him, and get them to link to his article. Check out what his referring domains graph looked like shortly after:

 

That’s a lot of new backlinks and the reason why his organic traffic increased.

Lesson #12 – Good marketing can be simple: You see popular blogs all the time and may think that they must be using some secret marketing techniques.

But the truth is that marketing comes down to building connections with the right people.

In most cases, there’s nothing secret or advanced going on.

In his case study, Brian shared the simple email template that he sent to various website owners to get them to post his infographic on their sites and link to him: 

You could write something like that, couldn’t you?

The difference between someone like Brian and a mediocre marketer is one of the lessons we have already studied—consistency.

He doesn’t just send these types of articles out to 10 or 20 website owners; he sends it out to hundreds.

He doesn’t just do it for one of his posts; he does it for every single post he creates.

This kind of consistent promotion is how you get the backlinks and the search traffic that comes with them.

Don’t stop yourself from taking action just because the content marketing strategy seems too simple or because you think there must be more to it.

Simple strategies are good. Execute them consistently and improve them when you can, and you will get the results you’re looking for.

Conclusion

If you ever get overwhelmed or confused during your content marketing journey, take a step back.

No matter what niche you’re in and no matter what type of business you run, someone has done it before.

This means that you can study them, learn from them, and use this information to overcome any obstacles that stand in your way.

In this post, I went over 12 lessons from 5 awesome content marketing case studies. These are lessons that apply to just about any content marketing strategy.

I strongly encourage you to implement these lessons as soon as you can. You’ll reach your goals faster because of it.

If you have any cool case studies (personal or otherwise), it’d be great if you could share them in a comment below.

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