Transcript:
Today, I’m gonna show you exactly how to use content marketing to get more traffic, more social shares, more backlinks. And most important of all, more customers. In fact, these are the same strategies and techniques that I used to get two million people to visit my site last year. So if you wanna get better results from your content, you’ll love this step by step guide, let’s dive right in. When I launched my first blog way back in 2009, I read the same advice again and again. You know the stuff I’m talking about. Publish short 500-word blog posts. Make sure to keep your blog updated with fresh content and you need to publish a new post at least once a week. That stuff might’ve worked back in 2018, but it doesn’t work today. In fact, I grew my blog into one of the most popular marketing blogs on the planet by doing the exact opposite of what these so-called experts recommend. Instead of short blog posts, I only publish long-form, comprehensive guides. Instead of keeping my site updated with fresh content, I only publish a new post every four to six weeks. And instead of publishing something because it’s Tuesday, I only release content if it’s world class stuff. With that, let’s get into the specific steps starting with step number one, find a proven topic. Your first step is to find a topic, but not just any topic, a topic with a proven track record. Here’s exactly how to do it. First check out content from one of your competitors that’s done really well. In other words, go to a competing blog and keep an eye out for posts that have lots of social shares, comments or both. For example, I’m in the SEO niche and one of my main competitors is Moz.com. And a while back, I was looking through some of their latest content and I noticed that blog posts about site audits tended to do really well. So, I created a post called the ultimate SEO site audit. And because this post was based on a proven topic, it quickly racked up social shares and backlinks. Plus, my new post ranks on the first page from my target keyword. Next, look at podcasts in your industry. This is just like the approach we just talked about, but instead of looking at your competitor’s blogs, you look at other podcasts. So, if one of your competitors has a podcast and let’s face it, who doesn’t these days, check out their episode list on iTunes. This can reveal some amazing topics that you’d be hard-pressed to find any other way. Finally, get topic ideas from online communities. For example, let’s say that you run a blog about the paleo diet. Well, when I look at paleo threads on Reddit, I notice lots of questions focused on dessert, which shows me that there’s a lot of demand for dessert-related content in the paleo space. You can use this exact process on Quora or on forums where your target audience hangs out. And if you wanna scale this technique, I recommend trying out a tool called AnswerThePublic. It’s a free tool that hands you popular questions that people have around your topic which leads us to our second step, find a keyword for SEO. So, you found a topic that your target customer is interested in and now it’s time to find the exact keyword that they use to search in Google, here’s how. First, use YouTube and Google Suggest. This is an old school keyword research strategy that I still use all the time. To use it, start to type in one of the topics you found in step number one and then write down keywords that Google suggests. And you can repeat the same process in YouTube, Bing, Amazon and more. Next, use searches related to to find long-tail keywords. Do you ever notice that there is this searches related to area at the bottom of Google Search results? Well, I didn’t either until recently. And I quickly realized that it’s a gold mine of keyword ideas. For example, if you search for a paleo diet and scroll to the bottom of the results, you get a list of these awesome keywords. The best part, these keywords aren’t from some third party tool, they come straight from Google. Moving right along to step number three, choose a content format. Personally, when I hear the word content, I automatically think blog post. But blog posts are just one of many types of content formats that are out there. Besides blog posts, there are YouTube videos, native videos, lead magnets, eBooks, infographics, podcasts, quizzes and more. Of all those is there one format that works best? Not really, the key here is to choose a format that works best for you. Are you an awesome writer? Focus on blog posts. Do you love getting in front of the camera? Then make a video. Or maybe you’re an amazing designer, in that case, you wanna create a piece of visual content. In fact, you don’t even need to stick to one format. You could take the same topic and cover it using several different formats. For example, a few years ago, I published this link building guide and that post did really well, so I decided to make a YouTube video on that same exact topic and that video brings in 8,000 views every month. The big takeaway, there’s no perfect content format for any topic. So, choose a concept format that you can crush and move on to step number four which is publish an amazing piece of content. Let’s face it, it’s harder than ever to get your content to stand out. In fact, according to WordPress, there are 2.5 million blog posts published every single day and they also report that page views are down for the first time in 12 years, that’s the bad news. The good news is is that it’s still totally possible to create awesome content that stands out. But for your content to stand out among the millions of blog posts that come out every day, it needs to be amazing. Here’s how to do it. First, publish insanely actionable content. It doesn’t matter if your site is about cars or cats, people want content that they can use right away. For example, when I was doing research for this video, I watched a bunch of other videos about content marketing and they were mostly full of fluff and filler advice. For example, they tell you to create a process for creating content, but they never showed how to create that process. That’s why I worked really hard to make every technique in this video super actionable. Next, use lots of examples in your content. When it comes to content, there’s one I found to be true, people love examples. In fact, research shows that examples make learning significantly easier which is why include lots of examples in every post. Now, do examples take a little bit more work than just saying do this? Yep, is it worth it? Absolutely, finally, I recommend focusing on your content UX. When most people think about user experience, they think about things like software, but as it turns out, content has a user experience too. For example, look at this post, the text is all squished together which makes it really hard to read. That’s bad content UX. On the other hand, look at this blog post, it has big font and lots of white space which makes the post easy to read and skin, that’s good content UX. To be clear, content UX isn’t just for blog content, if you have a podcast, content UX is the quality of your audio. And if you’re making a video, content UX is that video’s production value. In other words, when you make it easy for people to consume your content, it has a much better chance of driving targeted traffic to your website. And now it’s time for step number five, optimize your content for SEO. There are literally dozens of ways to optimize your content for SEO, but in my experience, these three strategies are working best right now. First, optimize your title tag for click-through rate. As you may have heard, Google uses your site’s click-through rate as a ranking signal. In other words, the more people click on your site in the search results, the better it’ll generally rank. That’s why you wanna make your title tag super enticing to click on. For example, my original title for this post didn’t have any brackets or parenthesis, but I realized that I can make this title even more compelling by adding step by step case study in parenthesis, so that’s what I did. Next, use your keyboard a few times in your content, especially in the first 150 words. For example, you can see that I use target keyword, SEO audit, a handful of times in posts including the first 150 words. I’m not keyword stuffing, instead I’m just including my target keyword where it makes sense. That way, Google can see that my page is about how to do an SEO audit. Finally, link out to other websites. This industry found a clear correlation between external links and Google rankings. So, whenever it makes sense, link out to resources that’ll help your readers learn more about the topics that you cover in your article. For example, in this post, I link out to a handful of authority sites in case someone wants to dig deeper into that topic. Which leads us to a key step that a lot of people skip over, step number six, content promotion. There’s no other way for me to say this, if you’re serious about content marketing, you need to learn about content promotion. And when I say promote your content, I don’t mean share your content on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, even though that can help, I’m talking about strategically promoting your content so it gets lots of shares, links and traffic. The question is, how do you do it? Here are three strategies that are working great for me right now. First up, we have content roundups. Roundups are blog posts that curate the best content from that week. And if you can get your link in front someone that runs a roundup, you have a good chance of getting a link. The best part, there are roundups in pretty much every niche under the sun. For example, here’s a roundup in the wine niche. And because your content actually makes their roundup better, you don’t need to beg for a link. Our next promotional strategy is to promote your content in your email newsletter. When it comes to content promotion, I’ve tried it all. And in my experience, nothing beats email. For example, I published this post on my blog late last year and to promote it, I sent out an email to my email subscribers. I also shared it on Twitter. My tweet got 1,710 clicks and my newsletter 14,113 clicks. So, yeah, if you wanna get lots of eyeballs on every piece of content that you publish, you definitely wanna let your email subscribers know you just published something. Last up, we have boosted Facebook posts. Over the last few months, I’ve spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads and the number one lesson I learned from that experience is this, retargeting is legit. For example, I recently boosted this Facebook post and because I used retargeting to reach people that already visited my website, I only paid 67 cents per click which in my niche, digital marketing is three to five times less than you’d normally pay, nice. And now it’s time for our second to last step, step number seven, track your performance. So, you just published an amazing piece of content, it’s based on a proven topic, has great content UX, and you promoted it using the strategies that I just shared with you, the question is, how do you know if all that stuff actually worked? Here are two metrics that I recommend focusing on. The first thing I recommend looking at is traffic. At the end of the day, the whole point of this content marketing thing is to get more traffic. So, if your content isn’t bringing in more traffic, it’s probably time to switch things up. That said, content marketing and SEO can take time to kick in, sometimes months. For example, look at the traffic numbers from the early days at Backlinko. As you can see, it took about six months for things to really take off. And if I gave up early on because content wasn’t working, I wouldn’t have seen this huge traffic spike that got me going. Next up we have conversions. ROI, business goals, KPIs, whatever you wanna call it. Basically, with this metric, you’re answering the question is content actually helping us sell more stuff? As you may already know, you can measure conversions in Google Analytics and if you see conversions moving up along with traffic, that’s a sign that your content marketing is really working. That said, sometimes it’s hard to measure those indirect sales that come from content marketing. For example, the number of conversions that I get that come directly from YouTube are really low and if I only looked at Google Analytics, I’d probably say you know what? YouTube is a waste of time. But when I dug a little bit deeper, I discovered that my YouTube channel is huge source of subscribers and sales. In fact, lots of new customers specifically site my YouTube channel as a main reason that they decide to enroll in one of my courses which tells me that my YouTube videos are paying off. Which leads us to our eighth and final step, scale your content marketing. So at this stage, your content marketing is working. You’re getting more traffic, leads and sales than ever before which is great, but at this point, you’re probably wondering, how do I scale this stuff? Before I answer that question, a quick word of warning. I don’t recommend scaling by pumping out a bunch of blog posts, that’s what most people do at this stage and it hurts them. Instead of continually putting out awesome stuff, they start to focus on quantity and because their content isn’t as good as it used to be, people stop reading it. I’m sure you can think of a blog that you used to follow that fell into this trap. So, yeah, you definitely wanna scale, but you don’t want your quality to suffer because of it. For example, I’ve only published 63 total posts on the Backlinko blog and those 63 posts bring in 392,441 visits every month. My secret, I focus on scaling quality, not quantity. I’ll explain, a few years ago, I published this Google ranking factor study. This post was totally different than the type of stuff I was putting out. Not only that, unlike a list post or a case study, I couldn’t do it myself, I had to assemble a team. In the end, that study did really well. It generated a huge traffic spike in its first week plus that single post has been linked to from over 2,000 different domains. There you have it, my eight-step content strategy. If you liked this video, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel right now. Just click on the Subscribe button below this video. And if you want exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with subscribers, head over to banklinko.com and hop on the newsletter, it’s free. Now I wanna hear from you. Which strategy from today’s video are you gonna try first? Are you gonna try to increase your click-through rate or start scaling quality? Let me know by leaving a comment below right now. Is it okay? Okay. An, an industry, this industry. Can you hear that? And, you sure, yeah. First, for, just in case, now, do. (sighs)
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