The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing

This article is all about content marketing. Before we get started, I love starting off with a quote, Great content is the best sales tool in the world. I've grown my businesses over the years through content. It's been one of the most effective sales tactic for me yet. Especially when you're starting off small and you don't have the budgets as the big companies. There's a lot of businesses that are successful due to content marketing. From what we research around the web, TechCrunch, over 20million Huffington Post, 146 million, those are just some examples. There are so many businesses that make millions and millions through content marketing. Another big one is NerdWallet. I believe over time they can end up becoming if they're already not yet a multi-billion-dollar company just through content marketing.  

When you're creating content, there are many different content types out there and you need to make sure that you master each and every single one because different ones can be used for different things. Some are better for selling, some are better for getting traffic, some are better for getting backlinks. And I want to go over some of the main content types of pieces that I use to generate more traffic. The first one is a list. You've seen them. Magazines are notoriously known for using them all the time. They're scannable, they're quick, they're actionable. Usually, list posts are either short or they're super long. Like seven ways to lose weight or a hundred and one ways to lose weight. Typically, the longer the list, the shorter information you're going to get for each point. The shorter the list, like let's say it's seven, typically, people go more in-depth on each list points. That's just something for you to keep in mind. Here is some proof in the pudding. 

It's that effective. You can do a list in a unique way in which when you're going through it, you can integrate it in a conversational type, and here's an example of someone doing that. So list doesn't just have to be one, two, three, four. You can do it in a conversational way, answer questions and that has been very effective as well. And it's like, the reader feels you're talking to them in a conversation versus just speaking at them on stage and it being dry and boring. Another content type, this is one of my favorites as well, infographics. My old startup, even though it did fail, Kissmetrics, we were able to build over 2.5 million visitors and 41,000 backlinks from over 3,000 unique sites through 47 infographics. Quick math for ROI on that. If we had to pay for that and use other sources to get that traffic, it would have cost us over $948,000, but we are able to get those results for less than 30,000. We spent $28,200. 

That shows you that infographics produce a huge ROI. You can do it on any subject, any topic. But the key with infographics not to abuse it. A lot of people go out there and be like, oh this infographic on computers will do really well. Let me publish it on my dentist's website. Well, if you have a dentist website that talks about teeth and cleaning teeth, what does an infographic on computers has to do with dentists and dental staff? Has to do nothing, so don't abuse it. Make sure the infographic is very relevant to your website and your content. Next type of content, social media. On social sites like YouTube, you can publish the video. On sites like Twitter, one or two quick sentences. Sites like LinkedIn, you can do paragraphs, videos, images, Facebook videos, images, sentences, paragraphs, even whole posts. Depending on the social platform, the type of content that they accept is going to vary largely and a lot of the content that you see on these social platforms that you can also use even on your own website is video. Video is the biggest booming content out there that is going to be more and more popular through the next coming years. 

You don't get as many people to attend a webinar because it takes more time commitment from them, but they're super engaged and they're much more likely to convert into a paying customer. Tools is one of the best forms of content marketing and it is my favorite, it actually produces a better ROI. It is harder to do. Within my articles, sometimes I'll have interactive tools and widgets. Like I have a blog post on how to start a blog and in there, I have a little widget/tool that teaches you, hey, how to find the right domain name. You also know about Ubersuggests, that tool drives more traffic than any singular piece of content on my website. You also have the SEO analyzer, which goes into Ubersuggest, that's the site audit report. Also, have an A/B testing calculator. Again, another really popular page. You'll see that a lot of them are tools. It's that effective. Checklist, people love having a sense of accomplishment and you can give them that with a checklist. So you can create a blogpost that has eight steps or seven steps or ten steps and people can go through them step by step. In addition, you can create a PDF file and let them download the checklist and in exchange for downloading it, you can get their name and email address, which is another amazing thing to do because it will help you grow your email list, build up your brand and of course, get a really loyal following. I use the hybrid approach more frequently than any other approach. 

What I mean by the hybrid approach is, a lot of times, I'll do how-to articles and blend a list in there with videos and images. I'm mixing everything together. Whether it's even on the social web or even on my own blog because people interact and comprehend the content in different ways. So for example, I'll write a blog post on ways to get more search traffic, but then, there are some people who prefer it in video format. So I'll do the same thing in a video format. And over the years, I've released so much content and video lessons on SEO, but a lot of people want to step by step way of learning SEO. Hence, I release SEO Unlocked. You guys are all listening in right now and this isn't me on camera, this is more some doing a voiceover over a PowerPoint presentation. And then, on top of that, I'm also including worksheets, PDFs, this is another form of content marketing. So you got to look at the hybrid approach and the reason I say that is, everyone comprehends and understands content in a different way because our brains operate differently. So by using a hybrid approach, you can make sure that no matter who the person is, they're getting value from your content. I also did a hundred K challenge to prove to anyone that you can build a business that generates a hundred K a month in less than 12 months through content marketing and I was able to do that. I did it without using my name and in a random industry that I don't know anything about. The audience picked nutrition. The only thing I know about nutrition is I'm skinny because I'm a poor eateries my mom would say. Funny enough, I will eat junk food every once in a while like ice cream and stuff. I love ice cream to death, but I don't know much about nutrition, and other than, I'm skinny because I run a lot of workout, whatever it may be. Or just good genetics. But yeah, I was still able to build a nutrition site that did really well. We cut through a lot of emails and eventually, we hit the over a hundred grand mark selling supplements. That doesn't mean I did a hundred grand a month in profit or anything like that, the challenge was to create a business that did a hundred granda month in revenue. Eventually, I stopped dealing with the nutrition site. It was called Nutrition Secrets. The reason being is I wasn't passionate about nutrition, so Legion Athletics, one of my buddies eventually, ended up taking it over and then redirecting it to his site and it caused organic traffic to go up.

Just creating lists based content or creating infographics. It doesn't always produce the results that you're looking for. And I wanted to go over my secret sauce. It's not that complex. It's really simple to follow. It really comes down to these 10 commandments of content outlines. 

And that's what my secret sauce is. If you follow these ten steps, you're much more likely to produce content that hits and gets traffic because no matter what people tell you about content marketing, there is no guarantee that if someone or you publish a blog post and write one, that it's going to hit. A lot of times, even me, my blog posts don't hit, but sometimes, actually a large portion of the time, they hit and the reason they hit in many cases because I follow this formula right here. So the first one is word count. I look at my competition. And is my competition writing blog posts that are 1,000 words,2000 words, 5,000 words? If you're not sure just copy and paste their webpage or their blog post and put it into Microsoft Word or Google Docs and it'll tell you what the word count is. I look at it, word count and I'm like, all right, can I make my content better more thorough, more valuable than theirs? Or do their article, does it contain a ton of fluff? Because if it does, I can makes mine shorter, more condensed, and give people the actions that they need quicker and better, so that way they're happy and have a better user experience. And I also try to write content on a consistent basis. So that helps me crank up the word count that I need on a regular basis. The second thing is the tone. I love being positive. A lot of people are negative. If you're negative, people just hate that. There's no reason to be. Try to be positive and also use your musketeer persona to become their hero. 

Then it comes down to the introduction. The introduction is super important. There's a lot of aspects of the introduction. The first sentence has to have a purpose to entice the reader to continually read. If your first sentence is a hook them and entice them, they're going to drop off and just click the back button. I also love asking readers questions in my introductions because it creates an engagement and it creates a bond between me and the reader. I also use words to create that story in their head, that imagination. So by using words that are very descriptive, it allows me to help paint that picture for the individual. And when you're thinking about your introduction, there are many ways of doing it. Another way and this generates a lot of sales is through pre-selling. So Apple introduces their products through launches. And what they'll do is they'll pre-sell before their launch and get you a hot and ready for you know, one of their phones and this is old now. But Apple's had many different versions of a watch. Like, a watch just came iPhone 11 or iPhone 10 or 12 or 15 or whatever number that they're going towards. And when they're doing it, it's not as simple as, hey we're Apple and we have this idea and then we're going to have an event. 

There are all these things that happen in between and usually what those things in between are is announcements. Those announcements, when they're slowly releasing what features are giving out what's going to happen or how it can help you, that when you start seeing huge, massive lifts in sales and traffic. Then you get into the trigger section. This is all about the stuff in the body from things like, showing your rags to riches story or covering the main problem and diving really deep and even discussing the solution. And I love doing problem-solution based stuff, especially in the trigger section. I use a lot of data. I really break down how the problem can be solved, why it really matters because these are the trigger points that really appeal to people. And get them going so then that way, they're like, all right, I can relate to this. I have this problem. I need this solution. It keeps them going and going. Then, of course, you really dive into the solution and the solution solves their problems. Because once you know their trigger points and you pushing them, you also want to give them the solution as well because if you don't give them the solution, they're going to be like wait, you're telling me about the problem. Yes, I know the problem. I'm feeling this pain, but you didn't tell me how I can solve it. And if you don't back this up with data or give them a product ora service or teach them how they can solve it, then they're going to be really upset with you. You also want to cover the subtle musketeer intent. This is super important. What I mean by this is you got your musketeer intent. You don't have to address it head-on, you can blend it in with your content. Offers suggestions, offer your expertise through product, brand imaginary. This has to blend in so that way it's really subtle. You don't want to be really aggressive.

This is a huge part of my outline process because when there are wins, not only does it build hope for other people, but if you give them step-by-step instructions on how they can also get the wins when it comes to solving their problems and do it with ease or do it in a speedy way, that really helps. And I can't emphasize that enough, so I'm going to repeat it. Ease of speed. So if your business wins and you can show people how to do it in an easy way or in a quick way, they'll love you to death, or if you can show them how to do both of them in a fast way and it's easy, even better. Then we get into internal linking. 

And that not only lets them continually go through my sight, read more and more and build a better connection with me, it also allows Google to see that I have so many pages and allows them to start ranking them higher and higher versus Google struggling to find my content because if I wasn't using interlinking, well, after they're done cloning that page, where they go next? By interlinking, it keeps theGoogle ball on my site longer, keeps them crawling more and of course, there are also sitemaps for this as well, which we discussed in earlier lessons, but you still want to interlink. Then number nine, we get into personalization. You need to add in your own opinion, your own voice, your own flavor, you're on a slant, your stories. Personalize it, when you personalize your content, that's how you stand out from the competition because with over a billion blogs, how do you stand out compared to the competition? 

Well, you intertwined your own personal experiences and stories. Then of course, last, but not least, there is a source material. This is where you cite all the references, all the data that you're using. That way people can see you as an expert. If you're using stats and data, don't just make them up. If you're getting them from other places, don't steal them either, cite them. And if you don't know how to find the source data, we covered this last week. Where you just Google for any term that you're looking for information on and then you type in data at the end of statistics. So I'm a type in, SEO space statistics or SEO data and you'll end up finding a lot of sites that have stats and data that you can end up citing, assuming it's relevant to the article that you're publishing. So last action steps, I want you to download the ten commandments of the count outlines.