How to Succeed at Content Marketing When You Have Nothing Interesting to Write About

This is a guest post by Josh Haynam, co-founder of Interact.

Last night I went for a walk and thought about how to explain the way in which content marketing has worked for Interact. I knew I was slated to go on ConversionAid and discuss how content has helped us grow from nothing to $15k/mo in revenue, and I wanted to collect my thoughts.

Part 1: The “Spaghetti on the Wall Approach”

In late 2013/early 2014, I was just getting started with content marketing for Interact. My only prior experience with producing content had been with a site called Entrepreneur Stories.

When I first began doing posts for Interact I just kind of tried anything and everything. I inadvertently discovered the Skyscraper technique and got lucky enough to write a few posts that got thousands of visits. However, none of that moved the needle for Interact, and in February 2014 we were getting 1-2 free signups per week.

Part 2: Answering Questions

In February/March 2014, even with just a couple of signups per week, people started asking questions. Interact is a quiz building tool, so the questions mainly revolved around “how do I make a quiz?”

In May 2014 I finally decided to answer the biggest question “How do I make a personality quiz?” with a blog post. I sat down and pounded out a guide, it was pretty crappy, only about 800 words, but it answered the question.

The next morning, zero hits. Sunday, still nothing.

Monday morning I woke up to see the very first paying subscriber to Interact. My personality quiz article had gotten ten hits, and one of the people who found it clicked through and signed up! By the end of the week four people had signed up.

Part 3: Expanding on the One Question

Once I realized that the signups were a direct result of the personality quiz article, which was a direct result of answering a customer question, I started to pay a lot more attention to what people were asking about. “How do I share my quiz?” “How do I make a multiple choice quiz?” and many more questions turned into articles that are still driving signups today.

Part 4: Running out of Questions

Eventually I ran out of questions to answer. However, this time I decided to take a smarter approach. I took the one post “How to make a personality quiz” and turned it into “How to make a health quiz” “How to make a travel quiz” and so on. In total I created nearly 25 specific guides for various industries.

The Travel article brought us Hilton Hotels as a customer, the Health article brought us the World Health Organization, and the other specific articles began to bring us a whole slew of high profile clients.

So that's how I used content to bring in $15k worth of monthly revenue. You don't have to be an expert storyteller or some sort of marketing genius. All you have to do is listen to what people are asking about and create articles answering the questions.

Related Podcast Episodes

• How 3 College Friends Bootstrapped Their Startup from $0 to $15k a Month in 10 Months
• How a Bootstrapped Startup Made Content Marketing Work After Months of Failure