Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with J.P. Medved, who helped build Captera’s blog to 1m+ visits per month.

He was nice enough to take a look at the early work we’d done in our first month publishing on the Hampton blog, and offer some notes. Here are some of the things we talked about…

Traffic: First, he was impressed by the amount of traffic we’d gotten so far. Our first 30-days (post-launch) saw ~39k visits. Much more than a new blog would typically get without a lucky viral hit. But we attribute that to two things:

  • Famous Founder: One of our founders runs a well-known podcast and has a pretty big social following. He currently drives most our traffic by sharing our articles to his audience.
  • Media Background: About half our team has spent years growing big newsletters (The Hustle, Trends, and Motley Fool). So we’re not starting from scratch on the storytelling side.

We’ve also gotten a little lucky. For example, our first-ever company Twitter thread popped, driving ~260k+ impressions and hundreds of visits back to our site.

So the traffic is looking good, but there were definitely some things that needed improvement…

SEO URLs: His first piece of constructive feedback was that our URLs are not very SEO-friendly. As soon as he said it, it seemed obvious. But we hadn’t thought of SEO at all when picking them.

I’m still not quite sure what it takes to choose a URL that is SEO-friendly, but it’s good to have something specific to focus on. I’ll learn that, create a playbook for how we pick URLs, then update all the old ones sooner rather than later.

Calls To Action: By the time he saw our site, we had two main C2A’s – one that was a pop-up, and another sitting at the bottom of the page. We need more. He gave me a few good tips which I’m going to incorporate into our content…

  • In-Line C2A’s: I’m going to add email collection boxes directly to our content. I haven’t checked yet, but I think HubSpot makes this easy.
  • Pop-Ups: We have one, but it only triggers if you either scroll half way down the page, or try to leave. The exit-intent is good, but I wish I could control it by time spent on-page. HubSpot seems like it should be able to do this, but if it is, the settings aren’t very easy to find.

Publishing: By the time Captera hit 1m+ visits per month, they had a writing team of 10 full-time writers producing 2-3 pieces per week. I have heard of other publications doing more with less, but it’s nice to know that we should factor this into our expectations.

Currently, I’m the only one working on content. BUT we get help, since our members write the first draft of most our pieces. So really, my job is more editor/curator than anything else, and while our current system couldn’t scale to 20-30 articles per week, I think it allows us to punch above our weight class while we let the business grow big enough to support a larger content team.

Consistency Was Key: JP gave me some tips on how writers selected and scheduled content too. Each quarter, they planned which articles they’d publish based on…

  • Keyword Research
  • Conversations going on in the community
  • News

They made a point to have each writer focus on one topic, and they published on the same days/times each week (unless there was a major holiday that would decrease readership).

Writers were focused on a mix of SEO and social pieces, where the SEO pieces were quite targeted, and the social pieces were designed to cause a stir in the community and get shared a lot.

They also had a quote for updating articles each quarter, since Google loves when articles are kept up to date.

Distribution: A major part of their strategy was sharing the articles in LinkedIn / Facebook Groups full of people in their target audience.

We had planned to do organic sharing on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus some organic stuff on Hacker News and Reddit.

But the idea of finding dedicated groups on LinkedIn or Facebook had completely escaped me. I think Discords or Slack communities would be good too.

Overall, it was a super helpful meeting, and JP was really generous with his time. I pulled a few key ideas that I think will help us get more reach, and tighten up our funnels a bit. Both of which will definitely save us time in our goal to grow the site.