How our startup got 100,000 pageviews in 3 days

It was on the 4th of April (Saturday) night and our article on Techcrunch had just gone live. It was Sunday, 7 30 AM in the morning in India, where I live.

Just as habitually I do these days, I woke up and limped into the bathroom with my android tab, hoping to catch notifications. There were about 70 email notifications. That was unusual for a Sunday morning. They were all notifactions for downloads of our mobile app development report — The one that took us a couple of months of outreach and a month of effort to produce after that.

From Sunday till the next saturday, we scrambled hard to count the downloads and reach out to all those who downloaded our report. We stopped everything we did, so that we can capitalize on the extended windfall of traffic.

When it all ended we had grabbed over a 100,000 page views and 10000+ downloads of our report (and counting).

The traffic over the weekend was about 10x our usual.

So here’s the backstory on how we nailed content marketing in this case.

There is no shortcut.

If you are going to create great content of value for the users, there is no shortcut. It’s hard to evoke emotions of shock, humor or even hate, when you are a B2B company.

Therein lies the reason why most B2B companies give up before they write content.

However if you have fresh perspectives about your domain, there is an audience that’s waiting to hear your perspectives.

We publish an annual report on ‘Mobile Development Trends’ — It’s not any report that focuses on the industry, its trajectory or any of that sort. That’s available in plenty. We chose a micro-niche. We chose to write about ‘app development prices’ in every important market in the world. We broke it down to how really good, average and rookie companies price themselves — It was the kind of information that every company that outsourced app development, needed but could not find!

We made it easy for them to consume this information in one single view!