Almost nothing published on the internet is ever read. The difference is not the writing.
Content marketing South Africa businesses can actually use: four articles a month that answer a question somebody is genuinely asking, link through to what you sell, and arrive with the graphics to share them.
One piece in ten works. The other nine pay for it.
Why a blog is such a reliable way to spend money on nothing
Ahrefs indexed around fourteen billion web pages and found that 96.55% of them get no traffic from Google at all. Not a little. None. Almost every one of those pages was written by somebody who meant it, paid for, proofread and published.
The reason is not that the writing was bad. It is that nobody decided, before the writing started, which question the piece was going to answer, whether anybody was asking it, and what should happen to the reader at the end. Most content is written to fill a schedule, and a schedule is not a reader.
The other half of the picture is why it is still worth doing. Content does not perform evenly - it performs like a portfolio. HubSpot, tracking two thousand of its own posts against eighteen thousand more, found the winners were roughly one in ten and that those alone carried 38% of all traffic. Six months after publication a winning post was pulling two and a half times its opening traffic. A losing one was pulling under a fifth.
So the money is not in the writing and it is not in the volume. It is in the choosing, and then in leaving the winners alone to compound. Four pieces a month aimed at something will beat forty aimed at a calendar, and cost you a tenth as much to produce.
96.55%
Of roughly fourteen billion pages studied get no traffic from Google whatsoever. Publishing and being read are not the same purchase.
1 in 10
Roughly the share of posts that compound rather than decay - and they carry about 38% of a blog's total traffic between them.
90%
Of blog leads come from posts published in an earlier month. The piece you publish today is mostly working for you next year.
The discipline
Four decisions, and only one of them is writing
The piece itself is the part everyone thinks they are buying. It is one quarter of the work and the least likely quarter to be the reason a piece fails. Two of these four never appear on the page at all, and they are the two that decide whether it earns anything.
Chosen
Somebody is asking this
- A real search, with volume
- A question you already get asked
- Something you can honestly answer
- Nothing you have already covered
This holds it up
Written
It settles the question
- In your voice, from a written guide
- Answered fully, not teased
- Read and signed off by a person
- Images sourced, sized and alt-tagged
They see this
Placed
It has somewhere to send you
- Internal links to what you sell
- Sitting under the right part of the site
- One page per question
- A next step at the end
This holds it up
Distributed
It gets in front of people on day one
- Two share graphics per piece
- Something for your team to post
- A reason to click through
- The link where people already are
They see this
There is a fifth thing nobody sells and almost nobody does: going back. The winners are one in ten and they keep growing for years, so the highest-return hour in content is usually spent updating a piece from eighteen months ago rather than starting a new one. We look at what already worked before deciding what to write next.
What arrives
Everything on this list is yours at the end of it
Not a summary of what we will think about. The actual files, documents and decisions that land on your desk, stage by stage, and every one of them is yours to take anywhere afterwards.
01
Chosen
- A real search, with volume
- A question you already get asked
- Something you can honestly answer
- Nothing you have already covered
A month agreed against your own search data and the questions your customers already put to you, rather than a generic calendar of industry topics.
You walk away with
- A month of topics agreed against your own search data and the questions you get asked
- The search volume and competition for each, so you can see why it was chosen
- A rolling twelve-month view, so next month is never decided in a panic
02
Written
- In your voice, from a written guide
- Answered fully, not teased
- Read and signed off by a person
- Images sourced, sized and alt-tagged
Four articles a month, published on your site, each one read against a brief for your brand by the person accountable for it before it goes anywhere.
You walk away with
- Four articles a month, researched, written and published on your site
- Every piece read against a written brief for your brand by the person accountable for it
- Product and service descriptions written from the real thing, never from a template
- Website copy, landing pages and sales pages whenever you need them
03
Placed
- Internal links to what you sell
- Sitting under the right part of the site
- One page per question
- A next step at the end
Every article linked through to the products or services it is about, so a reader who is convinced has somewhere to go other than back to Google.
You walk away with
- Every article linked through to the products or services it is actually about
- Sitting under the right part of your site rather than dumped in a blog folder
- Images sourced or produced, sized, compressed and alt-tagged
- Titles and descriptions written to the search-result limits, so nothing truncates
04
Distributed
- Two share graphics per piece
- Something for your team to post
- A reason to click through
- The link where people already are
Two share graphics with every article, built from the real photography, so the piece has somewhere to go the week it lands rather than waiting six months for search to find it.
You walk away with
- Two share graphics per article, built from your real photography
- Copy for your team to post with it, so distribution is not a second job
- Older pieces revisited and updated once they are worth more than a new one
Measurement
How you will know it is working
An article is not a deliverable, it is an asset that either earns traffic or does not. Content marketing South Africa businesses can justify is measured that way, so we report on which pieces earned and which did not.
What we report on
- Traffic to each article, and which search terms brought it
- How long people stay, because a piece nobody finishes was written for the wrong reader
- Which articles send people onward to what you sell
- What to write next, taken from what already worked rather than from a calendar
Get content and copywriting scoped for your business
Tell us what is happening now and you get a written scope with a price on it, from the person who would do the work.
If we think this is not actually your problem, we will say so on the call rather than after the invoice. It costs us the job often enough to be worth saying out loud.