9 Lessons Learned From Building Three SaaS Blogs To 100k+ Visitors Per Month

When I Work gets about 500,000. Mailshake gets more than 300,000, Voila Norbert is at 100,000 and Right Inbox brings in over 150,000 per month.

So I’d say I have a lot of experience in building blogs. But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten everything right along the way – in fact, I’ve made a lot of mistakes too.

In this article, I’m not going to talk about the practicalities of building a blog, because a lot of other content covers that.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about the good, the bad, and the ugly of building and running a high-traffic blog. It should help you understand your next steps once you’ve got your blog off the ground. What are you going to do with it? And how’s it going to help you?

The Good

Building Your Brand & Strengthening Relationships

Let me be clear about one thing: there’s definitely more indirect than direct benefit to building a blog that brings in tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Your sales team can utilize it. You can use it to help educate your customers, which ultimately will reduce churn and help expansion revenue. Some people have even given us low NPS scores on the product, but in their review they’ve still said, “I love the blog.”

Think about the value from a business perspective to have somebody say, “I love your content,” and be impressed with or get value from it. That’s an experience they have with your brand, whether they have to pay for it or not.

SEO Gets Easier & Easier

Over the years, we’ve built up this SEO powerhouse just by doing good content marketing.

Now, anything we publish on almost any topic just ranks well in three to six months, without us doing anything.

By putting in all this hard work over the course of three to five years – and we’ve spent more than $1 million on Mailshake alone in that time – we can now pretty much create content and reap the benefits.

So our job gets easier and easier. All we have to do is create the right content that maybe has decent search volumes and we’ll see results from it.

Now think about a bigger brand like HubSpot. They rank for almost every single term they target. They could write an article and it will rank because they’ve put in the effort upfront, and Google and customers reward people who have done something for a consistent amount of time.

Building a Blog Helps You Build an Audience

Before I built any of my companies, I built my blog and I built an email list.

Regardless of whether or not it helps me directly sell, that email list has huge value, because it’s helped me move mountains since those early days.

Let me give you a concrete example of how that audience has benefited me. 

SujanPatel.com generates 30,000 visitors a month. I’ve been publishing on it for years and I used my blog and the audience I’ve built to start Mailshake, to grow Right Inbox, and to promote When I Work. I also used my blog to sell over 50,000 copies of my ebook, 100 Days of Growth.

If it wasn’t for my blog, none of these blogs or companies would have had the kickstart that they had. So the value of a blog and an audience is huge. And it shouldn’t be measured by revenue.

You Can See Big Value Without Huge Traffic

Having put in a ton of work, my blogs are now generating hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors.

But the thing is, you don’t actually need to build up massive amounts of traffic to generate massive amounts of revenue.

I’ve already told you how SujanPatel.com brings in 30,000 visitors a month. It’s been doing that for the last five years, even though I’m pretty much half-assing the keyword research, and I mostly just write about stuff that I get asked a lot about or that I care about.

I don’t do as much of the keyword research as I should, partly because I’m doing this on the side of running a bazillion other companies and doing a bunch of other things.

But my website still generates over $1 million in revenue a year. That comes from the 20 to 30 leads I get per month for consulting engagements.

So on one hand, my blog kind of sucks. If I was just looking at traffic, I’d count it as a failure.

But over five years, I built $5 million in revenue from it, so actually I’d say it’s a huge success and that’s likely to be the outcome I was going for anyways.

Even though it only gets 30,000 visitors, it actually generates more revenue for me than all the other – much bigger – blogs combined.

Doing More of the Stuff That Works

Right Inbox is a Gmail extension.

If you check out the blog, you might notice that we write a lot of informational stuff around Gmail, like how to create labels, or how to archive an email. It’s very basic stuff – more like customer support articles than blog posts.

But those articles actually generate a ton of traffic, and we have hundreds of them.

Between them, they generate thousands of new installs a month/year.

Part of building a successful blog and validating the intent of your buyers is about testing different things to see if they work.

If I’d read something telling me that a bunch of informational articles would lead to installs and conversions, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But even though the conversion rates are super low, the volume is very high, so it actually works really well for us.

The Bad

Ignoring Buyer Intent

Do it right and a blog can drive signups, sales, installs and free trials.

But if you get it wrong, it won’t do any of that. I know that for a fact, because I’ve done it wrong a lot.

The mistake I’ve made with every single one of my blogs is focusing on creating the brand and top-of-the-funnel education.

As soon as we stopped thinking about bottom-of-the-funnel or middle-of-the-funnel or top-of-the-funnel content, and started thinking about buyer intent, we noticed free trials or installs or sign ups go through the roof.

It’s a silly mistake to have made, but because all of these companies are growing, it was easy for me to ignore that one key point: does this content, this keyword that I’m going after, have any buyer intent?

And if I’m being honest, I’d say 70-80% of our content has no buyer intent. It’s just general informational keywords that do a good job of tackling the persona, but have not historically delivered results.

Fixating On Influencers

I’m not here to tell you that influencers are bad.

Crazy Egg and a lot of other companies have leveraged influencers and subject matter experts to build up a large brand by getting these people to publish guest posts on their site.

So we tried to do the same. But a lot of the people we worked with ended up not doing anything for the actual growth of our blog.

The performance would be the same, if not worse than, the content we publish ourselves. And the audience reception was almost the same as well.

Of the content we publish ourselves, we can clearly see that the stuff we created where we got the intent right works ten times better than that influencer stuff. And when I say ten times better, I mean the content ended up generating way more traffic in the long term.

It wasn’t always like that. When we were just starting out, the value from influencers was high. But after you’ve got 100,000-200,000 visitors a month, the value diminishes a lot.

Part of this is that 5-10 years ago, when Kissmetrics and Crazy Egg built up their mega content sites, the industry was a lot less mature and a lot of people were actually using influencers to build their brands.

Now, a lot more folks use guest posts solely (or almost entirely) from a link-building perspective to improve their SaaS metrics.

Also, many content creation companies like Fresh Essays have the opinion there’s so much content out there that the consumer of that content cares less about who wrote it. They care a lot more about the value from it.

The Ugly

The Value is at the Tail End

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.

Building a blog that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a month requires consistency. You gotta do it day in, day out.

The value of creating all that content and building all those funnels lies at the tail end, meaning if you do it for two years, you should expect to see pretty much no value. 

But at the end of year three, you’ll get enormous value.

So you have to decide if you’ve got the patience and resource to stick with it.

Direct Value Isn’t Guaranteed

As I said at the start of this article, even if you do build a massive blog, you may not get any direct value out of it.

So you have to think whether the indirect value is worth the investment in time.

For me, the indirect value has definitely been worth it. For instance, our content now generates more links – just by being out there – than our link-building team can generate themselves.

So if we measure our content on how much it helps us do SEO, it’s more work than two full-time people on our team can do.

So What Does That Mean?

I’ve covered a lot of points here, but there are four big takeaways that cut through all of them:

1. Be aware that you might never see a direct ROI from your blog
2. Don’t forget about the massive indirect value that an amazing blog can bring
3. Always have buyer intent in mind
4. Validate your approach through testing

Looking to build or scale your own blog? Which of these points did you find most valuable? Or maybe you have a tip of your own? Let me know in the comments below: