Every Article You Publish Should Be A Sales Page For Your Product
Why do you publish content on your website?
- To get traffic / views?
- To grow your email list?
- To establish “thought leadership?”
Well.. these are all wrong.
The only goal of your content should be to PROMOTE YOUR PRODUCT!
(unless of course your company is a media company, and your content is actually the product)
If an article doesn’t promote your product, it’s very unlikely that it will convert readers into customers. So all the effort you’ve put into that article is basically wasted.
“But.. but.. Tim.. What about Ahrefs’ own Blog? I see you guys publish all sorts of articles there. And in some cases there’s no product pitch in them. How do you explain that?”
That’s the EXACT problem I’m talking about!
Marketers tend to look at what successful companies are doing and mimic that for their own business. Ahrefs is a $100M+ ARR bootstrapped SaaS, known for its awesome content marketing. So just copy what we do and you’ll succeed too, right?
Wrong.
You shouldn’t copy what big successful companies are doing. You should copy what small unknown companies WERE doing before they became big and successful.
And what we were doing was publishing content, which was laser-focused on the problems that our product solves. And heavily featuring our product in that content.
Instead of developing a convoluted content marketing strategy that maps content ideas to funnel stages (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU), developing a dozen persona types of target customers and organising our content ideas into “pillars” and “clusters…”
All those frameworks are kinda moot. They’re abstract and not as actionable, as it may seem.
So instead we focused on just one simple question:
How well can we pitch our product in this article?
I learned this simple lesson back when I was just figuring out how to make money online. I was following a bunch of bloggers, who were publishing their detailed income reports. In those reports they were listing every product they were promoting and how much money they made from it in a given month. Like this:
And it wasn’t too hard to reverse-engineer what these bloggers were doing to drive sales to those products and earn affiliate commissions:
- Take a problem, that your target audience has.
- Show how hard it is to solve this problem “manually.”
- Introduce the product, and show how easily it solves this tough problem.
- Collect your affiliate commissions from people buying that product.
Buy yourself a lambo, take a photo in it and put it on your blog’s homepage.
Yes, sooner or later you’ll likely run out of content ideas that are focused on the problems that your product solves. And that is when you’ll need to start publishing “awareness” kind of content, which sits much higher in the “sales funnel.” But until then, just focus on content “that sells.”
And don’t be afraid to come out “salesy.”
If your product is actually helpful and does it’s job well, then you shouldn’t have any moral quandaries promoting it. Even the opposite - you’ll do people a dis-service, if you don’t pitch them the product that will help them.
Here at Ahrefs we’ve been super aggressive with featuring our product in our blog content for the past 10 years. And I vaguely remember just two or three times when someone has called us out for being salesy. All while we were continuously flooded with compliments about how useful and actionable our content is.
So write it on a post-it note and stick it to your monitor: “Every article you publish should be a sales page for your product.”
P.S. “But Tim, where’s the sales pitch for your product in this very article?” - Well, thanks for the reminder! Go sign up for Ahrefs if you want to figure out SEO and grow search traffic to your website. ;)