My Content Marketing Experiment (That Failed Miserably)

This article also appeared in Social Media Today.

I did a content marketing experiment — and failed.

With a little twist, I wanted to demonstrate a content marketing experiment — particularly for smaller companies. And how it could work for your business, too.

The experiment yielded some interesting results, and I thought I would share them with you.

The content theme: Blogger outreach

About six months ago, I decided to practice some focus here on the blog. I’m passionate about most things related to digital marketing, but I decided to create some content around blogger outreach.

Why not? I hadn’t written extensively about the topic in the past, but I had published at least a few relevant posts. So here’s what I did:

So, what happened?

The Remarkable Results

I did get a little more organic search engine traffic on blogger outreach-related queries, but nothing extravagant. But despite how small-scale this experiment was, I still got some pretty remarkable results (yes, I kept track of them).

This is the outcome from six months:

I got three invitations to do unpaid talks on blogger outreach. Compared to none before on this particular subject. I did a few and got a chance to get my message out there.

I got four invitations to paid talks on blogger outreach. Compared to none before on this particular subject. I did three of them and managed to get my message across to some more companies.

I got 11 hot sales leads to execute blogger outreach — or help with a strategy. I tripled the leads I’d normally get for this particular service.

I got, to my knowledge, five great endorsements. “Who knows blogger outreach?” It’s impossible to know how often my name came up in these discussions, but some of them got through to me. Good stuff.

National television wanted to use me as an expert source in a news story related to blogger outreach. I declined because I didn’t like the story’s premise, but still. My name came up.

And two agencies got in touch with me to help fine-tune their blogger outreach capabilities. Establishing partner relationships within the same industry is always tricky, but I was still euphoric about this.

Countless offers to host paid guest blog posts on the subject. No real good ones, unfortunately.

Also, two blogger outreach software companies contacted me to establish a relationship. Since I’m in the business, I value direct contact with marketing software. It might just prove useful for clients down the line.

So, how did I fail miserably?

My professional network quickly forgot I’m a PR generalist. Suddenly, everyone thought of me as the blogger outreach specialist!

It took almost 12 months to re-establish my position as a PR generalist.