How to make money with Blogs and Other Content Marketing

How Does Content Marketing Actually Get You More Sales? by Neil Patel on February 4, 2015

There is a big misconception that content marketing doesn’t drive sales. But if it didn’t work well, none of my companies would exist.

From KISSmetrics to Crazy Egg, I’ve grown each of my businesses through content marketing.

To prove to you that content marketing drives sales, I’m going to share with you stats and data points from KISSmetrics to show just how effective content marketing is.

How we generate traffic at KISSmetrics Ninety-nine percent of our marketing dollars go toward two channels: content marketing and email marketing.

Before I dive into the content side, let me first tell you what we do with email. We don’t spend any money to acquire emails… our only cost is for Pardot, which allows us to send out emails.

We spend a bit under $2,000 a month for Pardot. It allows us to send out an email blast every time we release a blog post. We also use it to announce webinars and send out email drip sequences to users who sign up for a free trial of KISSmetrics.

If you are going to leverage content marketing, you need an email solution. Without it, you won’t see a big ROI. I’ll share the numbers below, which will help you understand why you need to sign up for an email service provider…and you don’t have to pick one that is expensive either.

I use Maropost for Quick Sprout and NeilPatel.com, and it costs me a few thousand a month. But if you are strapped for money, you can use MailChimp, which is free. (April prefers MadMIMI)

From a blog perspective, we spent $5,380 for the month of January. That number usually hovers around $5,000 a month on the low end and $6,000 on the high end. It includes:

• Infographics – the cost to do the research and design of infographics. We typically use Odesk to do our research.
• Content writers – most of our writers don’t charge us as they are also gaining publicity from the blog. But there are a few writers whose posts do exceptionally well from a social sharing perspective, and we compensate those writers anywhere from $150 to $400 a post. When we started the blog, we used to pay $100 to $200 per blog post to help get things going.
• Part-time helper – our editor, Sean Work, gets backlogged every once in a while, so he has a part-time helper who may help him moderate blog comments, correct posts for grammar issues, etc.

What the number above doesn’t include is Sean’s salary as it wouldn’t be nice for me to share that number with the world. He runs our blog and is the only person at KISSmetrics who has to deal with it. That’s right… we have only one person dedicated to the blog. He rarely writes posts as managing, editing, and promoting the blog is more than a full time job.

On average, we post one to two articles a day, and we try to publish a few infographics each month.

The end result for January was 727,984 visitors and 921,577 pageviews. 



Does the blog convert? Like most B2B enterprise companies, we don’t just let people buy our product from our website. They have to talk to a sales representative.

The pricing for our product starts at $200 a month and goes up into the thousand range pretty fast. Assuming a sales rep is getting qualified leads, each one is worth a lot as companies will use our product for many years.

For the month of January, we generated 8,144 leads. Can you guess how many of the leads came from the blog?

We received 85 demo requests from the blog. Which isn’t too bad. And we also generated 1,948 webinar leads, which I count under the blog because webinars are promoted through the blog and to the blog email list.

So far, we are at 2,033 leads from the blog.

In addition to that, we let people sign up for a free trial of KISSmetrics from almost every page on the blog.