Martech Zone is a project of passion for me that’s been publishing articles on how to research, learn, and discover sales and marketing technology for over 18 years! A decade ago, we dominated search and honestly didn’t have a lot of competition. Now, we have thousands of sites across the web where both companies and publishers are working to assist businesses with the exploding landscape of MarTech.
Running a publication aggregating information freely available across the web isn’t a lucrative business, I assure you. But it’s been a passion, hobby, and maybe a slight addiction for me for several reasons:
Learning – If I want this publication to remain relevant, I must keep up with the latest technologies and platforms. I have an excellent reputation online and don’t want to tarnish it by putting information out that leads my readers to make mistakes, especially those I’ve made. Publishing almost daily keeps me knowledgeable about my industry.
Recording – Many of the articles I share aren’t simply those I am sharing with others; they are also articles I often reference for myself and my clients. I can’t tell you how often I’ve done a similar task for a company and remember that I’d found a solution before… so I check my site!
Practice – It’s my opinion, but speaking and writing well are the most significant skills that lead to success that I believe you’ll ever have in business. You’d be aghast at my grammar and spelling mistakes if you read one of my articles over a decade ago. While I still utilize Grammarly, I make far fewer mistakes than I ever have in the past. Writing articles requires me to organize my thoughts and succinctly communicate them. This is core to every conversation you’ll ever have with an audience, a client, a boss, a team member, or even a significant other.
Accomplishment – Sales and marketing are grueling and usually lack immediate gratification. Even on the worst day of my job, I can breathe a sigh of relief when I finish work that day and publish a new article on the site.
During the pandemic, my clients were truly decimated with cashflow issues with the subsequent lockdowns. My overall revenue dropped more than 70% in that time and I was forced to make significant cuts to my lifestyle, leaned on credit for relief, and had to look for any means of making a living. I was also financially supporting two other households… so I had to dig deep.
Site Issues With Martech Zone
Martech Zone revenue barely covered WordPress hosting and maintenance costs since I never had an outbound sales team or formal sponsorship program. I knew there was an opportunity to grow my advertising revenue and reach with the site, but it was going to take a ton of work. With my business down the tubes, I definitely had time on my hands!
The site had a number of issues:
Speed – the site was extremely slow and needed many infrastructure, theme, and plugin changes to operate well within Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV). It wasn’t about SEO; it was really about the user experience (UX). My readers would always complain that the site was slow.
Broken HTML – I had many issues with poorly formatted articles, missing images, and other HTML issues through multiple iterations and site migrations.
Broken Links – Many articles I had written pointed to sites and platforms that no longer existed. When I crawled my site, I found thousands of articles with bad links that I needed to update or remove.
Old Content – Having an article on the State of {insert industry} from a decade ago was irrelevant to the site’s readers and often clogged internal search results or related articles. New users would often land on an irrelevant page and abandon the site. I don’t blame them!
Consistency – When I started blogging, writing an article with a single paragraph wasn’t uncommon. Today, however, readers are looking for more comprehensive, well-organized articles broken up with sub-headings, bullet points, and well-illustrated articles.
There are about 5,000 articles on Martech Zone… and the majority of them had problems. Eighteen years of content is quite an undertaking to fix and I had to set some productivity goals for myself. Each weekday I would either publish 1-3 articles or correct or remove 1-3 old articles that needed assistance. I was careful not to remove articles that had backlinks that were driving search results so that I didn’t destroy any search engine visibility I had.
How I Fixed (And Am Fixing) Martech Zone
Speed Issues
None of the content corrections would help the site if the foundational speed issues weren’t corrected. I signed up for Ezoic. The platform had dual functionality… tools to diagnose and correct speed issues and to improve monetization. I used their platform for several months to diagnose and correct issues with my theme and plugins.
Monetization grew, but there were downsides. My repeat visitors were buried in more than more ads, so my overall return visits languished as my search visibility increased. Simultaneously, they kept accusing me of padding my traffic to game revenue. While the money was good, I eventually shut down the account because I was irritated with the accusations without any evidence of wrongdoing. I never did anything to try to game revenue… ever.
Once I fixed core theme issues and removed plugins or swapped out problematic WordPress plugins, the site speed improved significantly… but it still couldn’t pass the basic thresholds of Google’s site speed testing. I started to wonder if I needed to migrate the site altogether and found that Rocket had one of the fastest hosting and CDN infrastructures… and even cost less. Even better, the team there migrated my site for free. When I migrated the site, it was like a breath of fresh air!
Content Issues
I had so many content issues that I had to prioritize how to handle them. Here’s what my priority was:
Google Search Console – Find and correct as many issues as possible that Search Console was reporting, including performance:
Image compression and Webp support
Reducing unnecessary CSS and JavaScript (still working on this)
Removing unnecessary calls to other services or replacing them with faster services. Ironically, Google Ads, Google Analytics, YouTube, and Google Tag Manager are some of the slowest!
Backlink Reports – I had to review every page I had a relevant backlink to using SEMrush. Some of these articles were gone altogether, or the page was broken. I tried to fix all of them without inserting redirects.
Technical SEO issues with the site
Issues with our AMP page
Crawl Reports – Online crawlers were too expensive, so I used ScreamingFrog’s crawler to crawl my site and report errors. My order:
Missing images
Bad internal links
Bad external links
Other reported issues with their analysis tools
Content Optimization – Improved tagging, categorization, featured image, titles, page slugs, statistics updates, etc. on articles. This is still underway!
I should add that I never paid a dime in advertising to boost or promote any article on my site! This is organic traffic on my site via email, search engines, and social media.
Results: Over 1 Million Page Views This Year
The results are clear. For the first time in 7 years, my site has surpassed 1,000,000 views. That was a nice present that I received yesterday! More importantly, my page views per visit are way up – from 1.44 to 1.83 page views per visit. This means readers like you appreciate the content so much that you’re returning.
Source: Jetpack
It’s important to note that I’m not nearly done with this work. I still have a couple thousand more articles I need to improve, optimize, remove, or redirect so that my readers don’t get frustrated and leave.
I’m incredibly proud of these statistics, given that thousands more online publications share content like mine today than seven years ago. Onward and upward!
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Originally Published on Martech Zone: How I Reached 1 Million Page Views (Without Spending More Money)