Today Content Refined turns 2.5 years old and Maddie has recently shared a BIG post about the journey!

Read about the entire journey here – Content Marketing Company or my Content Refined business review.

Plus they just had a video produced to help people learn more about Content Refined…

In this post I want to share 3 lessons I have learned from my position (idea identification, initial system architecture and assembling/stewarding the team).

Background:

In the summer of 2016 Maddie joined my team with the mandate of systematizing the content creation process for my portfolio of sites. She killed it!

From that effort we decided to launch Content Refined as a content marketing company.

I documented that launch when I announced it in this post – https://websiteincome.com/content-marketing-strategy-launch-business/

It grew incredibly well, achieving 10% week over week growth for the first few months.

There have certainly been a fair number of challenges/opportunities and in this post I hope to share from my perspective what the 3 most significant lessons were.

Lesson 1: Systems Can’t Replace People!

For everyone that reads this site they know I LOVE systems. Systematized business processes and systematic solutions to problems are core values for the business.

However, despite the engineers desire in me to build a system that doesn’t require great people to run it never happens. Great systems allow great people to execute better.

As I significantly shifted my focus in 2017 to adbank my core businesses needed to be managed and any business where there was a manager responsible for running the business did well. However any business that was solely dependent on a system went off the rails.

Maddie grew the business, Laura managed it while Maddie was on mat leave and I have had limited ongoing involvement. No system could have been built to adapt to the changed and achieved what the team has achieved!

Lesson 2: Churn is a Moral Sapingl!

Content Refined has been a great business with significant initial success and very solid longer term performance. But as with any recurring revenue business that is non-essential, churn is the enemy!

Trying to keep growth moving while fighting churn is a never ending battle and can be very unmotivating.

Sometimes even solid months feel like this…

For anyone who ever wants to dig more into recurring revenue business models this is the best article on any subject ever and it focuses on metrics – https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

Lesson 3: Focus on your Strengths in a Congruent way!

Congruent has been my favourite business word for awhile. Ensuring the people, value proposition and systems are all aligned congruently is critically important.

Building that congruence around the set of strengths that makes you unique and focusing on it has been where our biggest successes have come from and also, when we drifted, where our biggest failures occurred.

For Content Refined, the effort around data analysis (to determine what tools/metrics give our content the best predictive ability to perform well in Google) has been very rewarding. Trying to broaden and sell other services where our set of strengths didn’t align didn’t get off the ground in a significant way (for example, an email marketing service to existing clients).

Being accountable for results and not just words, as a content marketing company that uses data (and the thousands of articles we’ve already published) to continually refine what is working now, is what has Content Refined clients loving the service.

Summary

I hope my view on the 3 key lessons while stewarding the growth of Content Refined has been useful.

If you have any content marketing needs be sure to book a free call with Maddie or Laura… they often share some pretty incredible and specific to your site insights on those calls! You can book here if there is availability.

If you are getting ready for vacation and there is going to be no opportunities to publish new posts

I am excited to share a post like this… it has been awhile since I shared a detailed data driven tip on a new strategy that drives IMPRESSIVE results!

The team at ContentRefined has been doing some very impressive work lately performing what we are calling a Pareto^2 Content Upgrade and making the articles pop in terms of rankings and traffic.

This strategy is all about taking what is already working (your 20% of articles driving 80% of your sites traffic) and applying advanced tools/strategy at the right leverage points to make them perform even better!

The Pareto Principle asserts that only a “vital few” produce the majority.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity)^[1] states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Here is the procedure ContentRefined uses to further apply this principle with content marketing and shared for you to use on your sites! As always if you want to do it yourself we show you the results and the exact steps… however, if you want to have the team at ContentRefined upgrade some of your most important articles then contact them here.

Book a call with Laura here and receive a free consultation/report to identify which of your pages are the right pages to apply the Pareto Upgrade to!

(more…)

In January of 2017, I took over a site that was on a decline. Most of the time people run away from sites that have a downwards trend because they believe the site is a goner. More times than none, the site is just lacking quality, consistent links as well as good content. This article will go in detail on the “Dead Cat Strategy” and how you could turn your site around.

I was like most other people when it came to buying sites that looked like these. I was very hesitant and in most cases refused to buy, or put too low of a price tag for the seller to sell. This site fell into my lap and so I decided to do some digging and find a system the could help turn the site around. What usually happens when sites start to do a decline is owners build it up, set up the monetization and then leave it for a while, only to go back and look to see it plummeting in the rankings.

When I bought the site, I wanted to do small tests to see if there was any possibility of turning the site around before I put more of an investment into it. At the time of buying it, the site was only ranking for 461 keywords and according to SEMRush, only had 3 as its traffic. So, I went through the rankings and picked out the landing pages for some keywords that the site was already ranking well for (10-40 ranking).

[thrive_link color=’green’ link=’https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gyTHSaLyotcNZtwWeOn20PvXdHKYduNEjjKIWaiNPHw/edit#gid=0′ target=’_blank’ size=’medium’ align=’aligncenter’]FREE Upgrade Content Template[/thrive_link]

I then asked my team to go to those landing pages and check out the content and run it through MarketMuse. Through MarketMuse I ran each article to see how they compared to other articles going after the same keyword. I found a lot of the content was very thin, and needed more words added to it. Once I did this within a few weeks I was able to see a few good bumps in the rankings. If you haven’t read my guide on how to do content upgrades, you can view that tutorial here.

After we saw the rankings increasing, I knew this site wasn’t a goner and just needed a bit hand holding to get it back on track. My team then did a bunch of keyword research and competitor analysis to find other keywords that my team could go after. Once this was completed, we put a good solid 10 additional articles on the site and have been rolling out 4-5 articles per month since then.

In conjunction to the articles being published on the site, I also had my team creating Done For You PBN sites as well as getting Use My PBN links pointed to keywords that were seeing a good increase in the rankings. After a few months (June 2017), we were seeing some great increase in both rankings and traffic.

1 Year into Having the site

After seeing the great results for this site, I bumped up the article creation to twice a week so 8 articles per month. I also continued to get the PBN links pointed to the articles but on top of that, I also did some genuine outreach and got a few good backlinks from other quality sites. Over the next 6 months, we continued with the links and the articles and almost tripled in traffic.

Overall, the site that I thought was doomed, has turned out to be a great test. Within 1 year, the site went from having traffic of 3 to over 20,000  as well as only ranking for 461 keywords to well over 6,000 keywords, a lot, which are in the top 1-3 position.

Now when I come across sites that are for sale that have a downwards trend I look at it more as an opportunity as in more times than none, the sites just been left alone for too long. There are still going to be the sites that are banned, deindexed or have spammy backlinks so make sure you check all of those before you buy but if everything looks clean, it may make a great investment.

Note – buying a site on a decline often stays on a decline so definitely a risk that needs to be sufficiently priced in if you are looking to buy. Sometimes I call this my “dead cat” strategy… if you can buy a site for cheap enough… kick it and see if it moves and if it moves give it some TLC… if it doesn’t move you can put it in the dumpster.

Just about a year ago I sent you the first email about Content Refined, the content marketing company Maddie Taylor and I founded off of the back of my own content creation process for my money site portfolio. Happy Birthday Content Refined!

The company started with a tiny production team; a manager, two writers and a publisher. Our goals were to hit $10k monthly recurring revenue within 6 months. We quickly realized that this was a really cute goal. In January 2017, we started growing at a rate of 10% per week! This didn’t stop until we hit a bit of a plateau in July and August, but it has picked back up since, due to a few different marketing efforts, finding our ideal clients and word of mouth sales.

What makes Content Refined different from any other content marketing company is that we are very Data Driven!

Our mission at Content Refined is to push the science of Content Marketing forward by creating online content that is optimized to rank on search engines. We do extensive data analysis tests on the effect of different metrics on the performance of our articles in Google. This includes analyzing keyword metrics, word length and the use of various Content Marketing tools. Our tests continue to refine our Content Marketing strategies that will help you – and your business – succeed online.

Content Refined has grown into an agency of 4 full time Project Managers, and about 60 contractors! We’re publishing about 170 quality articles on a weekly basis!

With this being said, we have added a lot of value to Content Refined over the last year…. we’ve improved our systems,

• Built a team of reliable, professional, experienced writers,
• Manipulated and crunched data to help your content rank,
• Hired dedicated management teams to personalize your experience,
• Invested in a ton of content marketing tools
• Just completed our first technology focused acquisition ferzy.com

We have done all this, having only raised our prices once over the last year, keeping it budget friendly for our clients.

In addition over the next months we will be rolling out a custom backend client dashboard that will allow allow all our customers to know exactly the status of all their orders at any point.

Well… we’ve made the business decision that we are at the point where we need to raise our prices in order to keep up this level of intensity across the board.

On Tuesday, we will be officially raising our prices, so if you would like to be grandfathered in to our current pricing structure, check out the prices and order before Tuesday!