How an Independent Video Production House Makes Seven Figures with the Help of Two Insanely Useful Blog Posts

How an Independent Video Production House Makes Seven Figures with the Help of Two Insanely Useful Blog Posts

Reader Comments (41)

  1. Thanks, Beth: The TL;DR is this: you don’t need to have a ton of content, just 2-3 blog posts that people read & can get helped by. That’s less daunting than trying to win a posting war with Gawker.

    • I was curious when I read this, Chris — how many blog posts did you publish to “find” those two that were home runs for you? Or did you know from keyword research exactly what you needed to write about?

        • Shane: we have one on writing a script, and another on picking a VO. They pull and the traffic converts. We’ll be doing more now that we’re big enough to treat people correctly and deliver a reasonable experience most of the time.

      • We weren’t that sophisticated.

        Initially the posts we made were to defend our process and send a client a “hey, we do it this way” with more authority than a petulant email.

        Then the posts started getting traffic, so we tweaked and optimized.

        Then they got more traffic. But by “more traffic” realize that that only means 20-30 views a day.

        Our post “tout-vs-yesware” is our #1 post but it doesn’t convert especially well.

  2. You didn’t include the punch line! What are these two magic blog posts? What lessons can we learn from them? How can we reproduce a similar result? Inquiring minds want to know…

  3. “60% of Simplifilm’s leads come from just 2 [blog] posts.”

    This is interesting. One of the blogging practices I haven’t quite figured out is posting frequency.

    1. We have the Jon Morrow, Derek Halpern, Glen Allsopp methodology of creating a pillar post then promoting the beans out of it. This would be 2-3 posts a month.

    2. Then we have others who are all about posting often, 2-3 times a week minimum, maybe more.

    I’ve played with both, but still haven’t quite figured out what is best for me and my audience. My current site is focused on B2B services, so I’m once again leaning to the long, rich, less frequent posts. A new site I’m working on is more about lifestyle, change, etc. and I’m thinking more frequent posts would help build audience.

    Curious what you have to say about that … Chris? Sonia? Beth?

    Thanks!

    • What we did was post to control our clients. Really: the video industry is full of failed companies that are sycophantic milquetoast mediocrities. We wanted to take control of our clients for their own benefit.

      So we wrote our philosophy out, and it turns out nobody had established criteria for selecting a VO.

      We did, and a couple of the posts did well…not for everyone…but for people in buying mode.

    • As you can see from those examples, both ways can work. There are SEO advantages to posting more often, but that’s only one part of the picture.

      I’d post as often as you can produce something really valuable. Consistency is useful to your audience, though — it’s a good thing if you can work out a schedule that you can hit consistently.

      Also realize that, to some extent, the more you write, the more ideas you’ll get. There are diminishing returns on that at some point, of course.

        • My advice is this: completely document the (non proprietary) parts of your process. Make each twist a blog post. It’s good for you and it’s good for the kind of people you attract.

          “Why I do X when most people do Y” is also good content as long as it stays away from onanistic navel gazing.

  4. I’m a fan of writing posts when you have something useful and important to say, instead of trying to stick with a (possibly unworkable) posting schedule. I’m much more interested in seeing great quality posts LESS often, rather than throwaway posts with no value MORE often. Hope that helps.

  5. No one mentioned that Simplifilm made the awesome video for My Copyblogger that’s on the home page and beneath each post? These guys do great work, even if Chris is a pain in the ass. 😉

  6. Thanks for the compliments on the work Brian! It was great working with you both of the videos we’ve done for you.

    What’s interesting about one of the two heavy traffic posts is that they started out as internal memos for our team. In teaching each other our ever evolving process, we realized that the info could be equally helpful for our readers.

    Some companies might want to hold those cards close to the vest, but we felt like everyone would benefit from the lessons we were learning in real time.

    Jason Moore
    Simplifilm

  7. Really great post! Coming from someone who is currently part of a video marketing outfit, the idea that there are successful video pros killing it with a less is more approach is a great validation. I walk away inspired. Thanks!

  8. I love simplifilm. Their services are basically on my bucket list. Sometimes I watch their demo videos en masse because the stories are so interesting. And Chris has a lot to teach pretty much everyone if you get him to speak up like this. 🙂

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